Beazley Archives

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The Classical Art Research Center - Beazley Archive is a research facility in the field of Classical Archeology . It belongs to Oxford University and is located in the Ashmolean Museum building complex .

The Beazley Archive , named after John D. Beazley , is one of the most important research institutions on the material legacies of Classical Antiquity . A large part of the archive's holdings is now also available online.

history

The basis of the archive is formed by the working materials (photos, sketches, notes) of John D. Beazley, the founder of modern scientific research on painted antique ceramics, which were acquired by Oxford University in 1964 while he was still alive. After his death in 1970, this material was moved to the Cast Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum, where the Beazley Archive was established under the Lincoln Professor of Classical Archeology and Art . An electronic database for vase painting (Beazley Archive Pottery Database) began in 1979 and was made freely accessible on the Internet in 1989. In 2007 the Beazley Archive moved to the premises of the Ioannou Center of the Faculty of Classics in the immediate vicinity of the Ashmolean Museum in the immediate vicinity of the largest library of classical literature in Oxford, the Sackler Library .

The long-time director of the archive was John Boardman , followed by Donna C. Kurtz , and Peter Stewart has directed it since 2011 . The staff includes Thomas Mannack , who runs the ceramics database, and Claudia Wagner , who looks after the gem archive.

Research priorities

Today the archive has several main research areas:

The archive houses the largest collection of photographs of painted Greek and Etruscan ceramics in the world. There is also a library with relevant literature and offprints. The comprehensive database on Greek ceramics, at the heart of the Beazley Archive , contains photos, drawings, including John D. Beazley's notebooks, and references on hundreds of thousands of objects and is constantly updated.
Based on the preliminary work of Henry Rudolph Immerwahrs , the archive also has a comprehensive collection of inscriptions on Attic vases from around 625 to 300 BC thanks to a research project started in 1999 . Between 2002 and 2004 the archive digitized around 300 volumes of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum . All of these materials are accessible through the database.
The archive has a collection of around 47,000 impressions of antique gems . The focus of research on ancient glyptics is the history of gem collecting, such as the collection of Stanislaus Poniatowsky or the collection of George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough , and the dactyliotheques ( Tommaso Cades , Philipp Daniel Lippert , James Tassie ). These materials are available in databases.
  • Ancient sculpture
There is a database of the 900 plaster casts in the Ashmolean Museum, and the archive also has a collection of sculptor's signatures. There is also a photo archive of approx. 10,000 photos of ancient plastic.

In addition, the archive holds further material and further literature from the field of classical archeology. Thanks to a donation from Nancy A. Winter , the Beazley Archive has a digital archive for the study of Etruscan and Central Italian building ceramics. It also has several collections of historical photographs of ancient monuments, particularly from the second half of the 19th century.

The archive website also provides a detailed introduction to Greek vase painting and an extensive dictionary of characters from Greek mythology .

The archive publishes the series Studies in the History of Collections , Studies in Classical Archeology and Studies in Gems and Jewelery .

literature

  • Donna C. Kurtz : The Beazley Archive . In: Vase research after Beazley . In: Report from the symposium of the German Archaeological Association, Tübingen November 24-26, 1978 . Mainz 1979, pp. 24-28.
  • Donna C. Kurtz: www.beazley.ox.ac.uk. From apparatus of scholarship to web resource. The Beazley Archive 1970-2008 . In: Archeologia e Calcolatori 20, 2009, pp. 37-46 ( PDF ).

Web links