Progetti di ricerca in corso

Progetto di ricerca grande di Ateneo 2020-2023

Engravings in the early modern Italian printed books: a bibliographic tool and a cultural web portal

The aim of the Project is to individuate the engravings used as an illustration of text in Italian books printed between the 16th and the 19th century and allow to consult their descriptions in a web portal. The project does not include the study of incunabula, considering that they constitute a corpus for which is required specific knowledge and expertise. Many inventories describe technical and artistic features of engravings as single plates: for instance, Bartsch, and, as regards the Italian engravers, Vasari, Baldinucci, Gori Gandellini, and Hind. However, it must be highlighted the deficiency of inventories that let us study the engravings held in Italian books as an illustration of the text. Except for some monographs about engraved title pages in Italian books (Barberi, Boffito), there is a lack of an inventory offering an overview of the use of the engravings in Italian books, which allows connecting the works of the engravers to the editions in which they were printed. This project aims to fill this gap.

The project's plan consists of making a census using catalographic sources (OPACs and card catalogs) and monographic sources.

The collected engravings and editions of books will be described and stored in a digital archive. A public web portal will be provided to consult the bibliographic data and the engravings descriptions. The names of engravers, dedicators and dedicatees, sponsors, techniques of engravings, and the names of authors of works and editions' data will be retrieved and navigated by filters and faceted tools. Links to public digital images of the engravings, published with open licenses, will be set up. The innovative aim of the project consists also in exposing data in the LOD format, using the ontology for the cultural heritage CIDOC-CRM, as a source to choose the qualified relations and populate the Semantic Web with data linked through relations selected by scholars. Data will have full exposure and large reuse.

The project has been funded in December 2020 by Sapienza University. The census of the Italian books printed between the 16th and the 19th century (until 1830) started in January 2021 and it is going forward.

As it is well known, catalographic records do not offer complete information about the presence of illustrations in the printed editions. In most cases, the information is limited to the declaration "ill." or "carte di Tav.", or "front. inciso".  

The relevant fact is a lack of a complete resource allowing to highlight all the engravings held into the Italian printed books as illustrations of text, providing a complete picture of the use of engravings in the Italian printed books (1501-1830), linking engravings to the printed editions that contain them.

The most relevant challenge of this project is to individuate the engravings in a so impressive large number of printed books, which encompasses three centuries.

The first step consisted in taking the census and checking the Italian editions printed in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries (until 1830), which hold illustrations of texts. We are using the catalographic records from the Italian EDIT 16 and SBN OPAC, thanks to the collaboration of ICCU of the Italian Culture Ministry, and selected monographic sources. The workflow plans to check on the Web the digital copies of the editions that we have found in the records from EDIT 16 and SBN OPAC.

The research group dealing with this first step of the work is made up of Maria Teresa Biagetti (Principal Investigator), Annalisa Anastasio, Gemma Donati, Claudia Masztalerz, Marianna Morreale, Eleonora Pischedda, Ilaria Sanetti, Lucrezia Signorello.

In December 2021 the research group has taken the census and checked around 1200 editions.