We are happy to announce that from February 2023 the online database “Antiquitatum Thesaurus: Antiquities in European Visual Sources from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” will be available in open access under: https://db.antiquitatum-thesaurus.eu.
“Antiquitatum Thesaurus” investigates prints and drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on artefacts from antiquity, and links them with the ancient objects that they document as well as with other evidence of their reception in a digital repository. The aim of the project is to make extensive visual material available to scholars of various disciplines: first and foremost of the archaeologies of Europe and the Mediterranean, of art history and history, of ancient and early-modern philology, as well as of the history of knowledge and of the Humanities.
At its launch, the “Antiquitatum Thesaurus” database provides access to over 10,000 datasets, including over 7,000 on early-modern prints and drawings and over 1,400 artefacts from antiquity or objects considered to be such. Thousands of internal links relate the artefacts and their images. In addition, different types of dependencies between the visual sources themselves are documented. The database and its contents will continue to grow and develop in the future.
“Antiquitatum Thesaurus” offers a user-friendly and intuitive web interface for querying and navigating the database. More features for analysing and visualising its contents as well as direct access to the data will be available in the near future.
Data collection began in July 2021 and has been ongoing since then according to the project's modular work plan. Currently, it is focused on Module 1 “Egypt — In Search of Origins.” Already recorded are works by Lorenzo Pignoria, Giovanni Battista Casali, Hans Georg Herwart von Hohenburg, Athanasius Kircher, Bernard de Montfaucon and many others. An overview of the current state of progress, together with more information about the criteria of data entry as well as the internal and external relations of the database can be viewed on the project’s website (https://www.antiquitatum-thesaurus.eu).
The Academy research project “Antiquitatum Thesaurus: Antiquities in European Visual Sources from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” is hosted at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and is part of the Academies Programme, a research funding programme co-financed by the German federal government and individual federal states. Coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, the programme intends to retrieve and explore our cultural heritage, to make it accessible and highlight its relevance to the present, as well as to preserve it for the future.
For more information about the project “Antiquitatum Thesaurus”, please visit our website: https://www.antiquitatum-thesaurus.eu.