The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590-1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma

• Host: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
• Other institutions involved: Archivio di Stato di Roma, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca
• URL: http://www.nga.gov/casva/accademia
• Main language: Italian

General description: is an open-access research database which provides researchers, scholars, students and others with the first comprehensive documentary history of the founding years of the Accademia di San Luca. Free text and guided searches by means of drop-down menus yield results with complete transcriptions of many new and previously unpublished documentary materials, accompanied by a digital image of the original document as well as a summary in both English and Italian. The site also features artist bibliographies and a growing database of images associated with the early history of the Accademia di San Luca and with its members during the 16th and 17th centuries.

The searchable database of this Web site provides access to a complete transcription of every extant notarial record of the period from the Archivio di Stato di Roma identified by the project team, as well as a digital image of the original document. The transcriptions and page images are viewable side by side.

The transcriptions are encoded in Extensible Markup Language (XML) following the guidelines of the Text-Encoding Initiative (TEI) for digital encoding of literary and linguistic texts (http://www.tei-c.org). The transcriptions may be searched by personal name (under all known variant spellings), place name, key term, document type, notary name, and year. The documents included are not only newly available to students and scholars of early modern Italy, but are also accessible in a way that both promotes their use and allows for the identification of additional archival material.

Implementation description: We used TEI tagsets specific to manuscript material, personal names, and place names. Our programmer implemented Perl script to batch process the documents from MSWord to XHTML to XML to HTML. We tagged the XML files in TEI according to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) P5 Guidelines (November 2007).

Copyright information: Copyright, 2009. Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. Publicly accessible for non-commercial use.

Contact:

National Gallery of Art (ATTN: Peter Lukehart, Project Director)

Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts

National Gallery of Art

2000B South Club Drive

Landover, MD 20785

Telephone: 202 842-6480

Fax: 202-842-6733

Email: accademia@nga.gov