Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus

Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus
Name	Art & Architecture Thesaurus
Abbreviation	AAT
Type	controlled vocabulary
Owner	J. Paul Getty Trust
Country	United States
Established	1983

Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus is a structured vocabulary designed to provide consistent terminology for describing works of art, architecture, material culture, and related activities. It serves curators, catalogers, conservators, and researchers by linking terms across collections and institutions to support discovery, interoperability, and scholarship. The resource is maintained by an institution with ties to major museums, libraries, and cultural heritage organizations worldwide.

Overview

The AAT provides hierarchical, associative, and equivalence relationships among terms covering Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Johannes Vermeer, Diego Velázquez, Sandro Botticelli, Albrecht Dürer, Gustav Klimt, Jackson Pollock, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Paul Cézanne, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Georges Seurat, Francisco Goya, Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian, Masaccio, Jan van Eyck, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Andrea Palladio, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Zaha Hadid, I. M. Pei, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Santiago Calatrava, Antoni Gaudí, Philip Johnson, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, Andrea Palladio, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hieronymus Bosch, Giorgio Vasari, John Ruskin, Walter Gropius, Marcel Duchamp, Gustave Eiffel, Isamu Noguchi, Barbara Hepworth, Brâncuși, Paul Klee, Auguste Rodin, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, Hokusai Manga, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, Kara Walker, and Olafur Eliasson among many subjects it indexes for collection management and research.

History and Development

Development began in the early 1980s within the same institutional context that supports the J. Paul Getty Trust and its initiatives with partners such as the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Victoria and Albert Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, British Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rijksmuseum, Uffizi Gallery, Louvre, Museo del Prado, National Gallery, Tate Modern, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Hermitage Museum, State Tretyakov Gallery, National Palace Museum, Tokyo National Museum, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Prado Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and Getty Research Institute. Early contributors included catalogers, curators, and scholars associated with ICOM, CIDOC, Dublin Core, International Council on Archives, and national libraries. Over successive editions it incorporated standards from organizations such as ISO, Library of Congress, OCLC, and Getty Conservation Institute practices to expand scope and interoperability.

Structure and Content

The AAT is organized into facets and terms that cover administrative units, activities, materials, styles, periods, techniques, and objects, with linked hierarchical and associative relationships connecting entries for artists, architects, movements, and sites. Its content references specific figures and places like Florence Cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris, St Peter's Basilica, Palazzo Pitti, Buckingham Palace, Versailles, Alhambra, Acropolis of Athens, Parthenon, Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu, Chichén Itzá, Taj Mahal, Forbidden City, Palace of Versailles, Hagia Sophia, Sagrada Família, Fallingwater, Guggenheim Bilbao, Sydney Opera House, Louvre Pyramid, Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, British Library, Vatican Museums, Prado Museum, National Gallery of Art and many named works such as The Starry Night, Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Persistence of Memory, Guernica, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, The Night Watch, Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Birth of Venus, The Arnolfini Portrait, Liberty Leading the People, The Scream, The Kiss (Rodin), Bathsheba at Her Bath, and The Hay Wain. Lesser-known entries include practitioners and sites like Nicholas Hawksmoor, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, John Soane, Mary Shelley, Eadweard Muybridge, William Morris, Aino Aalto, Suzanne Valadon, Émile Gallé, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Félix Vallotton, Hiroshige, Ogata Kōrin, Kitagawa Utamaro, Kobayashi Kiyochika, Clodia, Piero della Francesca, Luca della Robbia, Benvenuto Cellini, Nicola Pisano, and Leon Battista Alberti.

Standards and Editorial Policies

Editorial practice aligns with international vocabulary and metadata standards developed by organizations such as ISO, Dublin Core, CIDOC CRM, Library of Congress, OCLC, RDA, and professional bodies including ICOM and AIC (American Institute for Conservation). Governance involves editorial review by specialists affiliated with institutions like the Getty Conservation Institute, Getty Research Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery, Tate Britain, British Museum, Rijksmuseum, and university departments at Harvard University, Yale University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, New York University, and The Courtauld Institute of Art. Policies cover term creation, scope notes, hierarchies, language variants, and editorial provenance to support cataloging practices used by Smithsonian Institution Libraries, National Library of Australia, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and regional consortia.

Applications and Use Cases

Institutions employ the AAT for collection cataloging, digital asset management, linked data projects, research portals, exhibition labels, and conservation documentation across museums and libraries including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, National Gallery of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum, Rijksmuseum, Uffizi Gallery, Louvre, Prado, Guggenheim Museum, Hermitage Museum, Getty Research Institute, Smithsonian Institution, Bibliothèque nationale de France, National Portrait Gallery, Ashmolean Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Sotheby's, Christie's, Bonhams, and digital platforms linked to Europeana and Digital Public Library of America. It supports interoperability with linked data vocabularies such as BIBFRAME, Schema.org, FOAF, and Wikidata in projects involving museums, archives, and heritage agencies.

Access, Licensing, and Distribution

Distribution follows policies by the owning institution and partners, with access provided through online services, downloadable datasets, APIs, and integration via content management systems used by organizations like OCLC, Ex Libris, Blackbaud, Axiell, TMS (The Museum System), CollectionSpace, and Omeka. Licensing and reuse model decisions have parallels with open data initiatives pursued by Europeana, Digital Public Library of America, Creative Commons, and national cultural heritage programs, while professional training and implementation guides are offered in collaboration with academic programs at Courtauld Institute of Art, Columbia University, University College London, and professional conferences hosted by ICOM, AIC, and Society of American Archivists.

Category:Controlled vocabularies