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.
