FRANKFURT.- The Städel Museum has now made more than 22,000 works in its Digital Collection available for free downloading under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-SA 4.0. This licence enables anyone interested in art to reproduce and share the images of artworks in the public domain, as well as to use and process them for any purpose, provided the Städel Museum is identified in a credit line. Popular works in the Städel collection, for example Sandro Botticelli’s Idealized Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as a Nymph) (ca. 1480), Franz Marc’s Dog Lying in the Snow (ca. 1911), Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Man Lying beneath a Blossoming Tree (1903), Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Wall (1639), Johannes Vermeer’s Geographer (1669) and many more are thus available for free downloading by way of the Digital Collection. Entirely in keeping with the wishes of the museum’s founder, the aim of this new service is to make the Städel collection available to the public and further the public enjoyment of common cultural assets.




“A substantial proportion of the Städel Museum collection is now freely accessible through the Creative Commons licence and the OAI interface. This represents an important step towards the broader enjoyment of common cultural assets and the active international exchange of knowledge. By making the Städel’s artworks downloadable through our Digital Collection, we have paved the way for a far-reaching and in-depth exploration of 700 years of art”, Städel director Philipp Demandt commented.

Through Creative Commons, scholars gain access to a rich fund of artworks in the public domain, enabling them to shed light on the workings of society with the aid of pictorial material, for example in research and university instruction. Artists and designers can arrive at new designs and forms of expression through the individual acquisition and creative use of art. Teachers have recourse to the artworks in the public domain not only as an aid in imparting aesthetic, cultural and historical knowledge, but also as an orientation in working with their pupils to develop creative projects of their own. The artworks can be placed in new contexts and used for individual purposes; museum visitors can download their favourite works for use in any way they like.

Both the basic metadata of the works in the public domain, for example their titles and techniques, and more in-depth information such as tags and iconographic sources are available to the public by way of an OAI (Open Archives Initiative) interface and licenced under CC0 1.0. This enables cross-linkage with other image databases and research platforms.