Vivante Drawings

Frits Lugt’s great work Les Marques de Collections de Dessins & d’Estampes is now online, courtesy of Lugt’s Fondation Custodia. HERE is the link and just below is a screenshot of the search fields.

Les Marques de Collections de Dessins & d'Estampes Screenshot

The first volume was published in 1921, a supplement printed in 1956, and the 2010 supplement is just now available online (from what I can tell, there won’t be a paper edition). All three are online and together they add up to being an invaluable database.  I immediately bookmarked the site and set it as a start page on my phone.   The search fields are easy to understand, navigate, and reset.  For the name and place fields, you can start typing and without completing the word, a selection of names or places materializes. Many of the mark entries reproduce just the line drawings from the earlier Lugt volumes. Especially useful are the entries that have both the published reproduction and a photograph. In time, maybe all of the reproduced marks will be supplemented by photographs.

After a quick look through, one can see that there are still many marks needing to be identified.  If enough people use it, especially museum people with their vast holdings, and they share their findings, more and more marks will be identified. Since it is so easy and fun to use, the database will surely grow. It is also free, wonderfully free.

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.

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

The French win. Of the three websites on my bookmarks toolbar for researching drawings, two are French: Joconde and the Louvre. The other is the British Museum. I return to these again and again. You’d think that America, the land of computing and the World Wide Web, would have magnificent, complete resources, but no.  German electronic resources are also uneven.

The legacy of Diderot and the state structure of French museums have made their research websites remarkably strong.

The Louvre has 140,000 drawings online. For results, each page delivers 5 entries, mostly with thumbnail images that are sufficiently readable (unlike the BM, where the thumbnails are a bit small). If there are too many results, say for Stefano della Bella (there are 688 results or 138 pages) and it becomes laborious going through them all,  I then switch to Joconde which gives 100 results per page, and includes the Louvre and other state collections. The Louvre’s images are richer, so I weave back, via inventory number (listed under oeuvres),  to view the better images.

• Louvre Search

• Joconde Search

The British Museum’s database is also close to heavenly. Results include prints which can be good, but also overwhelming.

• British Museum Search