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 the 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 realization of the project would highly affect the scientific research in the field of study of cultural heritage, especially in the field of History of printed books illustration, because the project¿s results would allow to have a complete picture of the engravings contained in the Italian printed editions of the mentioned centuries.
The relevant aspect in the state of the art is the 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), and linking engravings to the printed editions that contain them. The project aims to fill a gap in the field of Bibliography and of the study of engravings as illustration of early printed books. In the scenario of bibliographical works, there is a lack of compilations addressing the need to have a complete picture of engravings in early Italian printed books.
Therefore, the realization of the project will provide a real advancement of the knowledge and could open new horizons for research in many fields. The web portal for consultation of bibliographical data and engravings descriptions will provide materials and evidences for the study of the history of engravings as books illustration considering the point of view of Literature, Art History, Religion, Geography, Science. Moreover, it will allow the study of relationships between the images and the literary, religious and scientific texts and will provide the field of History of Art with a consistent documentation to carry on further studies.
It is worth mentioning that the scenario of inventories of prints and engravers shows that the period between the 15th and the 16th century is studied, and the 18th century, instead, is almost completely uncovered. The importance of this project consists indeed in the decision to cover a long period, including the 18th and the 19th century, up until 1830.
The project can represent a significant starting point for Sapienza University in the field of books illustration. Other researchers interested in the fields of Art History, Bibliography and History of early printed books, will find the technological infrastructure set up, and use it for further researches.
A significant aim of the project consists in offering the results of the research also as a dataset in a Linked open data format that allows the data reuse. That means that the data regarding the engravers and their works, and the data concerning the printed editions in which those have been published, will be inserted into the Semantic Web scenario. The Web will be populated with data connected by way of qualified links, selected with the help of experts in the field of the books illustration. To achieve the goal will be used the CIDOC-CRM ontology for the cultural heritage that offers a framework of relationships to retrieve, with an integrated approach, data already structured by memory institutions, such as museums, libraries, archives and galleries, and to navigate through heterogeneous and distribute collections.
The strength of this ontology consists in the large number of object-Properties (relationships) offered, which allows to clarify a range of relationships among engravers, drawers, dedicators and dedicatees, engraving techniques, and data of the printed books in which the engravings were printed, linking subjects and objects in RDF triples.
CIDOC-CRM ontology is the most important and largest ontology in the field of the cultural heritage. Its use gives assurance that the complete semantic interoperability with other initiatives of the same field will be achieved, and that the dataset in LOD format will be reused in the future. The creation of dataset in LOD format will constitute an added value to the project, and the results will receive the maximum of visibility and would be reused in other datasets, giving a contribution to the research development.
Some references
G. Boffito, Frontespizi incisi nel libro italiano del Seicento, Firenze, Libreria internazionale, 1922
L. S., Olschki, Le livre en Italie a travers les siecles: role joue par l'Italie dans le developpement de l'art de l'imprimerie et de l'illustration du livre, du XV au XIX siecle [¿]. Florence, Imprimerie Juntine, 1914.
P. Pallottino, Storia dell¿illustrazione italiana. Libri e periodici a figure dal 15. al 20. Secolo. Bologna, Zanichelli, 1998.
A. Pettoello, Libri illustrati veneziani del Settecento: le pubblicazioni d¿occasione. Venezia, Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 2005.
T. Berners-Lee, http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html.
M. Doerr, The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Module: An Ontological Approach to Semantic Interoperability of Metadata, ¿AI Magazine¿ 24 (3), 2003,75¿92.
CIDOC-CRM version, in progress: Version 6.2.9 April 2020 Current Main Editors: M. Doerr, G. Bruseker, C. Bekiari, Christian Emil Ore, Thanasis Velios, S. Stead,