In December 2024, I wrote about my newfound love for the DailyArt app. Through images, short stories, and text descriptions, I was able to dive deep into over 4,000 masterpieces, 1,200 artist biographies, and 600 museum collections. My interactions with the app provided quite an education.
Since then, a new art history app has captured my attention. It’s called Joconde, and despite serving up much of the same interesting information, it does so using a 30-second video reel featuring dynamic motion and a classical soundtrack. At the time of writing, there are over 90 different reels, with a much larger gallery of another 12,000 still images.
So, if you’re an art fanatic but find it challenging to visit as many galleries as you’d like, or if you like exploring art from different countries, the Joconde app could be your new favorite.
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This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps that we couldn’t live without. Read them all here.
To gain access to the entire collection, including exclusive content, you’ll need to pay for a premium subscription. This costs just $4.99 / £4.49 monthly or $49.99 / £42.95 annually. The subscription also removes ads and allows users to save an unlimited number of favorite artworks.
A new way to engage with art
The 30-second art reels are incredibly brief, but they cover all the salient points about the art on display. You can also view the piece of art afterwards and zoom into parts you’re interested in, should the art reel have been too quick for you to properly enjoy it. I found myself consuming a bit of both, especially on the pieces of art that interested me most.
If you’d like to get into a regular routine of engaging with art and don’t think you’ll remember to open the app often enough, you can receive a daily notification that takes you straight to that day’s video. Just make sure you’ve enabled the receiving of notifications for this particular app.
Given that each video is only 30 seconds long, I found I was able to give it a quick watch before carrying on with whatever I was engaged with previously.
Each art reel is also accompanied by a text description that delves deeper into some of the history behind the piece. These descriptions help put the masterpieces into context and provide connections with other artists and artistic periods.
Finding art you never knew existed
One of the other major benefits of using the Joconde app is its cultural connections feature, which is made possible because of the 12,000+ masterpieces being organized by themes like Ancient Civilizations, European history, and Greek mythology.
As a result, each artwork points you in the direction of other related pieces. This allows you to delve deep into the High Renaissance or view all the artworks connected to Dutch history.
I found myself pleasantly getting lost in elements of history and art that I was never previously interested in. The extensive knowledge graph created by Joconde lets you take advantage of over 58,000 connections linked by 350 cultural themes. To put it bluntly, I’ve not come across a better linked art app.
An app for education and enjoyment
Alongside all the art, you can favorite the pieces you like best and find them in a handy ‘Favorites’ tab. Go back to them as many times as you want. It’s also possible to search for pieces of art with results appearing in real time. This is a perfect feature if you’re in a foreign art gallery and don’t have access to translation facilities.
Also, if your native language isn’t English, you can change the in-app language to a range of other options, including Spanish, French, and Italian. All parts of the app, including the art text, the links, and the tab buttons, are translated, making it feel native in whichever language you choose.
If you’d like to explore the art you know and love as well as have your eyes opened to what else is out there, I recommend downloading Joconde on iOS or Android right now.
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paulo.n.hatton@gmail.com (Paul Hatton)
