When you are starting art research it is helpful to read overviews of your topic. Booth Library owns several excellent art encyclopedias.
Dictionary of subjects and symbols in art by James Hall
Call Number: N 7560 .H34 (First floor)
Perhaps the most comprehensive and authoritative reference book on the iconography of European art.
Encyclopedia of World Art by Bernard S. Myers
Call Number: Ref N 31 .E4833 (In front of Information Desk)
Publication Date: 1959-1987
Written and compiled by art scholars the purpose of the encyclopedia "is to encompass our present knowledge of the arts within a single work." The essays are signed.
In this provocative book, Patricia Emison invites the reader to consider and reconsider how past thinkers-from Pliny and Alberti to Freud and Fried-have conceptualized the history of Western art... It is a defense of art history for those outside the field who question its reliability or even its importance; it is a critique of art history for those in the field who may have been preoccupied with looking at trees but who might be interested in trying to see the forest.
Artwriting is concerned with texts of recent art critics. The analysis draws on Arthur Danto's theory of interpretation and upon three connected conceptual points: the need to properly identify an artwork; the possibility of conflicting interpretations; and the use of rhetoric in interpretation.
The Shaping of Art History by 
Artwriting by 