Vivante Drawings » Databases

After the Antique

Lucy Vivante — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 09:55:44 +0000

“After the Antique” like “Allegorical Subject” have to be among the most useful titles. Right up there with the 20th century favorite “Untitled.” The drawing by the Danish artist Melchior Lorck, just below, shows a group of draped figures (“draped figure” is also terrifically generic and useful). Lorck drew it in 1552, the year he visited Rome. The figures are fragmentary, all are headless and many have lost their arms, making them more difficult to identify. The Muse Melpomene at the center of the drawing holds a theatrical mask and as a consequence is much easier to recognize than the others. Since the mask is part of the main shaft, and not an extremity, it has survived. Often, people who study classical art are good at identifying figures even if they are without heads and attributes. The stance, and dress tell a lot.

The table below has some electronic resources for studying ancient sculpture and drawings (documents as they’re called by scholars of the antique). I hope to add more links here.

Resource LINK	Institution Behind Project	Detail
Bibliotheca Hertziana	Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome	Digital library to digitized books to Antike Kunst. Works by Pietro Santo Bartoli, Domenico Augusto Bracci. Adding
Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance	Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften	Combined with corpus of ancient art known in the Middle Ages and Winkelmann, Corpus
Monumenta Rariora: La fortuna della statuaria antica	Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa	Giovan Battista Cavalieri, Girolamo Franzini, Lorenzo and Andrea Vaccaro, François Perrier, Paolo Alessandro Maffei, and Dominic Magnan
Musei Capitolini, Rome	Musei Capitolini, Rome	25,000 images and adding
Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae	Univ. of Chicago	Publisher Antonio Lafreri's 1570s engravings after Roman art and architecture. +1,000 prints

Often draftsman would not be copying any specific work, but instead found broad inspiration in the antique. “All’antica” is what it’s called and the danger is that one could be looking for a sculpture that never existed in the first place.

Drawings Collections and Digital Search Forms

Lucy Vivante — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:31:33 +0000

The table below lists drawings collections that can be searched online. By clicking on the collection name, you will be brought to their search forms. The most useful of the sites are of the Louvre, Joconde (French state museums), and the British Museum. This table will be updated, not in this post, but at a page dedicated to web resources (left side of home page and called Resources and Links). The Tate has a number of interesting pages about the intricacies of putting their collection online and the initial page can be found here.

Collection	Country	City/Loc.	No. of Drawings	No. of Drawings Online	Notes
Accademia Carrara, Ambrosiana, Brera, Poldi Pezzoli, and other Lombard Collections	Italy	Lombardy Region		3,223	Site of the Beni Culturali, Lombardy
Albertina, Grafische Sammlung	Austria	Vienna	50,000		5,000 prints and drawings online. Drawings not broken out.
Ambrosiana, Biblioteca	Italy	Milan	12,000	8,315
Art Institute of Chicago	USA	Chicago	11,500	6,797
Ashmolean Museum - Oxford Univ.	UK	Oxford		5,090
Basel Kunstmuseum	Switzerland	Basel			300,000 prints, drawings, and watercolors. 2513 online
Biblioteca Nacional	Spain	Madrid	45,000
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery	UK	Birmingham	1600		Pre-Raphaelite
Bologna – Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe	Italy	Bologna	9,000	192
Boston Museum of Fine Arts	USA	Boston		712
British Museum	UK	London	50,000
Cleveland Museum of Art	USA	Cleveland	3,733	3,733
Cologne – Wallraf-Richartz	Germany	Cologne		1,000	1,000 19th century drawings in database. 75,000 prints and drawings in coll.
Courtauld Inst. of Art	UK	London		7,260
Detroit Institute of Fine Arts	USA	Detroit		2,500	35,000 prints, drawings, photographs, watercolors, posters and artists books
Dresden – Staatliche Kunstsammlung	Germany	Dresden		377	500,000 works on paper
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts	France	Paris	65,000	33,694	20,000 drawings and 45,000 architectural drawings
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts	USA	San Francisco			70,000 works on paper
Fitzwilliam Museum - Cambridge University	UK	Cambridge		17,406	40,000 paintings, drawings, and prints
Flemish Art Collections – Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, the Groeninge Museum Bruges and the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent	Belgium	Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent	40,000
Getty Museum	USA	Los Angeles	700	700
Harvard University Art Museums - Fogg, Busch-Reisinger etc.	USA	Cambridge		24,451	Fogg has 12,000 drawings.
Istituto Nazionale della Grafica	Italy	Rome		7,132
LA County Museum of Art	USA	Los Angeles
Leiden University	Netherlands	Leiden		12,489
Louvre	France	Paris	140,000	140,000
MAK - Österreichisches Museum fuer angewandte Kunst/Gegenwartskunst	Austria	Vienna		16,932	Wiener Werkstätte drawings
Metropolitan Museum of Art	USA	New York	15,000	23,871	56,663 prints and drawings
Morgan Library	USA	New York	10,000	7,444	Strangely, no images in database
Museum of Modern Art	USA	New York	10,000	5,960
National Gallery of Canada	Canada	Ottawa		11,136	24,000 prints and drawings. 5,595 drawings with images
National Gallery of Denmark	Denmark	Copenhagen	60,000	21,463
National Gallery of Scotland	UK	Edinburgh	20,000	525
National Gallery, Washington, DC	USA	Washington DC		32,107	1,953 with images
National Library of Ireland	Ireland	Dublin			100,000 prints and drawings
Nationalmuseum	Sweden	Stockholm	see note	21,235	500,000 prints and drawings. 2,000 French drawings of Carl Gustaf Tessin.
Philadelphia Museum of Art	USA	Philadelphia		652	150,000 prints, drawings, and photographs
Prado, Museo Nacional del	Spain	Madrid	6,300	556
Princeton University Art Museum	USA	Princeton	7,000	1,133
Rijksmuseum	Netherlands	Amsterdam		3,495	800,000 prints, drawings, and photographs
Royal Academy of Arts	UK	London		1926
Royal Collections - Windsor etc.	UK	Windsor	40,000	1,072
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium	Belgium	Brussels		2,018
Smith College Museum of Art	USA	Northampton	1,600		Smith shares database w. area colleges
Tate	UK	London		48,041	Unique Works of Art is phrase used on site.
Uffizi and other State Museums in Florence	Italy	Florence		3,780	145,000 records of paintings, sculptures etc. drawings not broken out. Uffizi has 120,000 prints and drawings.
Victoria & Albert	UK	London			1,000,000 objects online. Data for drawings not broken out.
Walters Art Museum	USA	Baltimore		900	19th c. French Drawings
Yale University Art Gallery	USA	New Haven	8,174	8,174

Catalog Entries and Databases

Lucy Vivante — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 20:25:55 +0000

If we were collecting drawings centuries ago, at least in Italy, we would probably have assembled our drawings as Padre Sebastiano Resta (1653 – 1714) had–using albums and writing pertinent information right by the drawings. A major drawback of keeping drawings in albums, or laid down on mounts, is that a good many drawings are double-sided and by pasting drawings down, you lose one side. (Discovering that you have another drawing on the verso of a laid down drawing is similar to the thrill of discovering that there are two layers to the chocolate box.)

Padre Sebastiano Resta | Libro d'Arabeschi | Album of Drawings | Biblioteca Comunale | Palermo

Most people now keep their drawings in mats and information is stored apart. FileMaker Pro and Access are two databases that can be used for storing this type of information. Since I’m always worried about losing information, whether by corrupted programs or computer failure, it would be wonderful if one could use Google docs to keep all the information together, both fields and images. This would be useful for accessing information from computers at libraries and anywhere. Once I finish this post, I’m going to write to suggest the idea to Google.

The following is a list of possible fields for catalog entries or fact sheets.

Creation Place
School
Century
Artist’s Name
Birth Place
Birth Date
Death Date
Death Place
Image Recto
Title Recto
Date of Work
Media Recto
Insciption Recto
Image Verso
Title Verso
Date of Work
Media Verso
Inscription Verso
Carrier/Drawing Support
Size in Millimeters/Inches
Watermark Image
Watermark Reference
Inventory Number
Acquired from
Date
Price
Provenance
Lugt Image
Lugt Number
Exhibitions
Bibliography – Real
Bibliography – Related
Notes/Correspondence