Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance

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The Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance ( Census for short ) is an interdisciplinary research project dedicated to the research field of the reception of antiquities in the Renaissance . The central component of the project is the database in which the ancient images and buildings known from the Renaissance and the associated early modern documents are recorded and linked with one another. The project is based at the Institute for Art and Visual History at the Humboldt University in Berlin .

task

The census arose from the idea of ​​creating more clarity about the actual knowledge of antiquity of the artists of the Renaissance. Since its inception, the project has therefore aimed to record all of the ancient monuments known in the Renaissance and the early modern documents that received them. In 2015, the Census database contained around 15,000 records of ancient images and buildings as well as around 36,000 image and written sources from the Renaissance and is constantly being expanded to this day. The ancient monuments include sculpture and plastic, architecture, inscriptions, coins, paintings and mosaics. The renaissance documents include drawings, prints, sculptures, paintings and medals as well as collection inventories, travel reports, artist's servants and archival documents.

Except for the extension of the period under review and the expansion of the database to include ancient architecture and coins, the content of the Census has not changed to this day. Thanks to the cooperation of the project with the Corpus Winckelmann and the Corpus Medii Aevi , the time span of the Census database extends from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the 18th century.

history

The Census was created in 1946 at the Warburg Institute in London as a collaborative project with the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University . The project was initiated by the art historians Fritz Saxl and Richard Krautheimer and the archaeologist Karl Lehmann , with the aim of developing a documentary research tool for a better understanding of the afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance. To implement their idea, they were able to win over the archaeologist Phyllis Pray Bober , who from 1947 worked on the development of an index card system. The ancient monuments were listed on the index cards in alphabetical order and according to genre and, in addition to information on dating, authorship, iconography, etc., the associated image and written sources from the Renaissance were recorded. In the early days, the focus was initially on ancient sculpture and its early modern documentation in texts and drawings. From 1954, the handwritten map entries were supplemented by photographs of the monuments and reproductions of the Renaissance documents from the Warburg Institute's photo library .

In addition to Bober, who had always worked for the project in New York, the Census received another long-standing protagonist in 1957 through Ruth Rubinstein at the Warburg Institute in London. From then on, two parallel files and photo collections were continued in New York and London. Research in the context of the Census resulted in numerous editions of Renaissance sketchbooks. The “Handbuch” (Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources) , which was jointly developed by Bober and Rubinstein and published in 1986, is one of the most important publications that emerged as part of the Census project .

As part of the cooperation between the Census and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome from the beginning of the 1980s, the research project has now been extended to include ancient buildings and buildings known from the Renaissance. At the same time, the idea of ​​converting the analog index card system into a computer-aided database, which had arisen shortly before, was taken up again. With the help of the newly launched Art History Information Program of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (now the Getty Research Institute ), the first Census database was developed and programmed in 1981 . Under the direction of Arnold Nesselrath in Rome and in collaboration with the American computer scientist Rick Holt, an object-relational data model was developed and software for UNIX systems was programmed, which made it possible to access data from all sides, not just via the monuments.

When the funding from the Bibliotheca Hertziana ended, the census moved to the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1995 , where Horst Bredekamp successfully campaigned for the project to be incorporated into the art history seminar (now the Institute for Art and Visual History). In addition, the Census project received funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) . In the following years, the database was converted to the MS-DOS- based database system Dyabola and the entry of several PC workstations was made possible. In 1998 the database was first published on CD-ROM (later on DVD), which was supplemented by annual updates. The first Internet version of the Census database was available to subscribers from 2000 onwards.

In 1999 the documentary “Das Census-Projekt” was released, produced by Ingo Langner and Deutsche Welle , which shows the time of the innovations and changes in the project.

After the BMBF funding expired, the census was included in the academy program of the Union of German Academies of Sciences in 2003 and was a project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , whose office was located at the HU Berlin, until the end of 2017 . During this time, the database was transferred to web-based software ( easydb ); it has been consultable in Open Access on the Internet since 2007 .

Publications

Since 1999 the Census has published the multilingual periodical Pegasus - Berlin Contributions to the Afterlife of Antiquity . It mainly serves as a discussion forum for various disciplines dealing with the reception of antiquities and expands the view to all post-antiquity epochs. In addition, research results are presented here that have emerged from the work with the Census database.

In addition, the series Cyriacus - Studies on the Reception of Antiquity , which the Census publishes together with the Winckelmann Society , Stendal, and the Winckelmann Institute for Classical Archeology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, appears at irregular intervals . The series serves as a publication platform for conference files and monographic studies.

Cooperations

The Census is in cooperation with the projects Corpus Winkelmann and Corpus Medii Aevi , which document the reception and transformation of antiquities from other epochs within the same database.

The Corpus Winckelmann or corpus of ancient monuments that Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his time knew is a database of the Winckelmann Society and gathers the image and written documents of the 17th and 18th centuries, in particular the text quotations by Johann Joachim Winckelmann , which refer to refer to ancient monuments. The Corpus Medii Aevi is a project of the Adolph Goldschmidt Center to research Romanesque sculpture . This is where the images of the Middle Ages are brought together, showing the reception and transformation of antiquity in medieval art.

literature

  • Tatjana Bartsch: "distinctae per locos schedulae non agglutinatae" - The Census data model and its predecessors. In: Pegasus. Berlin contributions to the afterlife of antiquity , No. 10, Berlin 2008, pp. 223–260. PDF
  • Arnold Nesselrath: Ruth Rubinstein. June 30, 1924 - August 29, 2002. In: Pegasus. Berlin contributions to the afterlife of antiquity , No. 4, Berlin 2003, pp. 179–191. PDF
  • JB Trapp: The Census: its Past, its Present and its Future. In: Pegasus. Berlin contributions to the afterlife of antiquity , issue 1, Berlin 1999, pp. 11–21. PDF
  • JB Trapp: Phyllis Pray Bober. December 2, 1920 - May 30, 2002. In: Pegasus. Berlin contributions to the afterlife of antiquity , No. 4, Berlin 2003, pp. 167–178. PDF
  • On the history of the census. In: http://www.census.de/census/projekt

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Strauch, Timo: Of river gods, horse-tamers and temples. On the trail of ancient art and architecture in the Renaissance. In: Yearbook of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences for 2015 , p. 111. PDF