he Reckoning of Time: The Middle Ages on the Metropolitan Museum's Timeline of Art History

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently in its third year of developing the Timeline of Art History, a website designed to highlight the encyclopedic nature of the Met's collection (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/splash.htm). The site, organized geographically and chronologically, offers maps, chronologies of important historical events, as well as photographs and commentary on individual objects from the Met's collection. Met objects are deployed as significant markers within a broader cultural and political history.

This paper will examine the recently launched Medieval portion of the Timeline. A collaboration among curators of Islamic, Byzantine, and western Medieval art along with members of the Education Department, the Medieval phase of the Timeline presents some 350 objects and 1200 pages of text. This paper aims not only to introduce the site in a general way, but also to elucidate the constraints and possibilities for presenting the art of the Middle Ages in an electronic format. The paper will look specifically at the ways in which the Middle Ages as an art historical concept was made to conform to the site's predetermined organizational grid and will discuss in turn the new features that were developed to accommodate the peculiarities of the Medieval period. Using the Medieval phase as a case study, this paper ultimately seeks to explore the web's potential as an art historical resource and the degree to which it can serve as more than a database of images. Can the web generate histories of art distinct from those presented by museums or textbooks? How can a web resource work with and against traditional art historical categories, periods, and geographical divides?