Netherlands Institute for Art History

The Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD (Dutch: RKD-Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis), previously Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), is located in The Hague and is home to the largest art history center in the world.

The center specializes in documentation, archives, and books on Western art from the late Middle Ages until modern times.

The main goal of the bureau is to collect, categorize, and make art research available, most notably in the field of Dutch Masters.

Via the available databases, the visitor can gain insight into archival evidence on the lives of many artists of past centuries.

[3] The thesaurus is a set of general terms, but the RKD also contains a database for an alternate form of describing artworks, that today is mostly filled with biblical references.

As the logos on the window show, the RKD shares the same building (located near Den Haag Centraal ) with the Nederlands Letterkundig Museum [ nl ] (LM), the Huygens ING , the Netherlands Music Institute (NMI) and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek .