Getty Provenance Index Update (ctd.)

March 26 2026

Video: Getty

Posted by Bendor Grosvenor

Regular readers will remember AHN's concern and bafflement at the new Getty Provenance Index, launched last year. The Index has been for many years an indespensible art historical tool, and those of us who use it are indebted to all the hard work of the Getty and its staff for making so much evidence available online. But the new Index site, called Arches, just didn't work as well as the old one, and happily Getty agreed to keep the old, Legacy Index, online.

The video above is intended to show you how to perform searches on the new site, Arches. I have tried hard to understand how it works, and have watched the video more than once. But it still seems to me that the Arches is bewilderingly bad, and compared to the Legacy index makes searching for information much more difficult, even impossible. But is just me? I'd be interested to know what other readers think!

In the meantime, we continue to implore the Getty to keep the Legacy Index online.

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