Princeton University has contributed nearly 4500 images of architecture from the archives of William L. MacDonald to the Artstor Digital Library. The selection highlights the city of Rome in great depth and also includes the architecture of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Byzantium, Baroque Europe, and the United States.

The photographs were taken by MacDonald, a specialist in the architecture of Classical Rome, over a period of more than 40 years and include sites that are now largely inaccessible and monuments that have been permanently altered. His personal collection of slides is held in the Visual Resources Collection, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

William L. MacDonald (1921-2010) taught at Wheaton College and Yale University before joining Smith College in 1965, where he remained. In 1974, he was appointed Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art. His publications include: Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 1962; The Architecture of the Roman Empire, 1965; The Pantheon: Design, Meaning, and Progeny, 1976; and Hadrian’s Villa and its Legacy (with John Pinto), 1995. In 1986, The Architecture of the Roman Empire was re-issued by Yale University Press. That same year, it was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award by the Society of Architectural Historians, as “the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture published by a North American scholar.”