This story is a rant and a rave.

The rave is for the book in general, which is an introduction to five art museums across the country. I’ve been lucky enough to visit two of them, the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. And I’m glad to also find a web site connected to the book and its corresponding tv series, and especially glad to find images of one of my personal favorites included on the web site, namely, The Hours of Queen Isabella. I especially love the wonderful flowers and butterflies that decorate the margins of the pages.

The rant is for the Cleveland Museum of Art, which has copyrighted the images from “The Hours of Queen Isabella”, and apparently all its other art images as well. What’s with that? Queen Isabella’s Book of Hours, dating back to at least the early 1500’s, is not on display. In fact, I stumbled across some beautiful large images from this book awhile ago on-line, and now I can’t find them anywhere. I guess I have to be grateful that the museum makes at least some images available on its website here, and allows one to send for “study photographs”, and has consented to allow Sister Wendy to include some of these images in her book.

Sigh. Next they’ll be copyrighting genes. Oh, wait, they already are doing that.