prometheus is a distributed digital image archive that currently makes more than 3.924.000 images of 135 databases from institutes, research facilities and museums researchable on a common user interface.

Situated at the Institute of Art History of the University of Cologne, prometheus is supported by the non-profit association prometheus e.V. which promotes the ongoing developments of the digital media for science and research.



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Gladiator Fights
Man Against Man – In ancient Rome, gladiators were specialised professional fighters who usually fought against other gladiators in front of an audience in arenas. | more...


News

Searching the image archive. Simple and more

9 March 2026 | By: Corinna

prometheus offers two different search options. With the simple search you can quickly and easily search for your search terms across all fields. The advanced search allows you to search specific fields such as artist and title. In addition, there are various options in both searches for searching for images more specifically. If you search across all fields using the simple search, you can further refine your search using the search syntax. Use wildcards to find images for imprecise terms. These wildcards include * (*wurm), ? (pi?asso), and ~ (Gaugun~).
The advanced search allows you to combine different fields. For example, you can search for artist and genre:

A link is created here using the Boolean operators “and” and “or”:

Why not give it a try with “and not”.

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