Giotto’s antique adaptations and knowledge of antique works of art and architecture in the Trecento
The cultural heritage of the antique period was not solely a reserve of the Renaissance, but was also highly present in the middle ages, especially in its works of art. Italian paintings of the Trecento (the 14th century) exhibit numerous approaches to a visual arts’ representation of antique culture. As part of the recently approved SFB ‘Transformations of the Antique’, this Middle Ages relationship to antique art and architecture is currently being analysed. The faculty of art history at the Humboldt University as well as the Census Antique Works of Art and Architecture Know in the Renaissance domiciled at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science with its exhaustive 230,000 data records are at the fore of the research.
In order to visualise the relationships between Trecento paintings (including the works of Giotto) and antique monuments, a three-pronged strategy between Mneme, HyperImage and the Census as an external database has been developed, with the latter supplying data entries to antique monuments. Image data and metadata on the works of Middle Ages narrative paintings have had to be taken – whenever available and legally possible – from other databases (e.g. Prometheus), or newly captured in Mneme. Subsequently, works of art and architecture are to be captured in detail using HyperImage and the relevant antique adaptations visualised. Research on the antiquarian knowledge of the late 13th and 14th centuries as well as on numerous other issues will certainly be enriched beyond the simple capturing of information in an image database by opportunities presented by networking bodies of knowledge.
Project Director: PD Dr. Peter Seiler
Department of Art History, Humboldt University, Berlin
Dorotheenstraße 28, D - 10117 Berlin
Phone +49 (0)30 2093 4441 | Fax +49 (0)30 2093 4209
peter.seiler@rz.hu-berlin.de
Contents:Susanne Hauer, Katrin Neumann
