It has earmarked the money subject to the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) successfully developing the project plans with the help of an upfront grant.
The PCF currently runs the Your Paintings site jointly with the BBC, which established an online resource with over 210,000 images of oil paintings owned by public institutions across the UK, many of them normally in storage. Your Sculpture would form part of a wider national website encompassing the existing oil painting records, provisionally called Your Art.
The PCF say Your Sculpture would cover sculptures of the last 1000 years held within museums and public buildings and (by working with the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association) seen in outside spaces. They add that "initial estimates suggest around 85,000 objects from collections and 15,000 outdoor sculptures will appear online".
If the development phase is successful and the full grant secured, the sculpture project will start in 2016 and take four years to complete.
