Free Art Books from Met

[xoxoxoBruce]

You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.” If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications’ collection of free art books and catalogs.

They give you a choice of reading online or downloading the pdf. I chose four titles to download and they were very slow, about a half hour, but I downloaded four simultaneously and went off to surf the net. At one point something I was doing interrupted the downloads. It asked if I wanted to resume, clicked resume, bada bing bada boom, all four finished.

One of the titles I downloaded was a 1945 study of the J.H. Grenville Gilbert Collection of Engraved Powder Horns. 152 pages of descriptions, measurements, histories, illustrations, and engraved wording.
Here's some samples of what written on the horns.