ARTstor Update

* Collaborative Agreement Reached Between Art Resource, Scala Archives
and ARTstor *

Art Resource, Scala Group, and ARTstor announced today that they had
reached an agreement to collaborate on the digitization and
distribution through ARTstor of approximately 12,000 high quality
digital images of Italian art and architecture. Scala Archives'
photographic holdings uniquely document the artistic heritage of Italy
and Europe from antiquity to the 20th Century, with particular
strengths in the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance. The
scholarly literature on these subjects has long been fundamentally
dependent upon the Scala Archives, whose color photographs richly
illustrate virtually every important monograph on Italian architects,
artists, and monuments, as well as textbooks and historical surveys of
the art of Italy. Among the monuments, sites, and museums that are
expected to be included in this collaboration are the Uffizi Gallery,
the Galleria Borghese, the Vatican Museums, the Roman Forum, the
Palazzo Pitti, the Brera Museum, the Churches of Ravenna, the
Catacombs, Pompeii and very many others.

In reaching this agreement, Dr. Theodore Feder, President of Art
Resource, Alvise Passigli, Vice President and CEO of the Scala Group,
and James Shulman, ARTstor's Executive Director, expressed their
enthusiasm in collaborating to use digital technologies to make these
high quality images of the art and architecture of Italy more broadly
available for noncommercial educational and scholarly purposes. "We
are delighted to be able to augment ARTstor's offerings to its many
subscribers in a field so essential to the study of art history and
archaeology," comments Dr. Feder. "Our new partnership with Scala
Archives and Art Resource represents an important milestone in
ARTstor's ongoing effort to provide teachers, scholars and students
with high-quality digital images of key works and monuments of world
art," affirms Shulman. "We are excited at the prospect of working with
Scala in an ongoing way to further develop their extraordinarily rich
archives and ARTstor's library of images."

We hope this announcement will be of interest to scholars and teachers
in the field of Italian art, architecture and archeology. We
anticipate that the materials discussed will begin to appear in
ARTstor within the next few months, followed by periodic additions
of further materials.

Scala Archives (http://www.scalaarchives.it) was founded in Florence, Italy, in 1953 when color
photography was coming to be the medium of preference for recording
works of art. The firm soon established working relationships with
most of Italy's museums as well as a number of other institutions
outside of Italy. It has at one time or another served as the official
archive for many of these collections, including the Vatican Museums.
The archive now numbers some 80,000 large format (5 x 7" and 8 x 10")
transparencies covering all periods of Western art from antiquity to
the present. Scala transparencies are offered for use in books,
magazines, prints, CD-ROM, television, film, and publicity.

Established in 1968, Art Resource (http://www.artres.com) is the principal source of fine
art images for commercial and scholarly publications and other
contexts in the United States. Art Resource functions as the official
rights and permissions representative for a wide range of museums and
visual arts archives around the world.