prometheus is a distributed digital image archive that currently makes more than 4.150.000 images of 136 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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Heinrich Pieroth Collection

20 April 2026 | By: Corinna

Another research database from the Rheinish Image Archive has been added to the site in the past few days.

With 5.16 million photographs, the Rheinish Image Archive, founded in 1926, ranks among the largest public art-historical image archives in Germany. This collection includes the estate of photographer Heinrich Pieroth, who was born in Mayen in the Eifel region in 1893. For more than five decades, he ran a photography studio in his hometown and dedicated his entire photographic oeuvre to the Vulkaneifel. From 1920 through the 1950s, he explored the cultural landscape and its buildings with his camera. He found his subjects in the villages, as well as in the fields and quarries: people going about their daily work and enjoying their cultural pastimes. Pieroth’s photographs are visual records of life in the Vulkaneifel during the last century.

“Rhenish Image Archive – Heinrich Pieroth Collection”

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