What is Sandrart.net?
The project and its goals
Sandrart.net was a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. While being located at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main/Germany and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence (Max-Planck-Institut)/Italy, it was carried out in cooperation with a number of other institutions.
The project’s main goal was an annotated, enriched and web-based edition of Joachim von Sandrart’s Teutscher Academie der Edlen Bau, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste (1675–80), one of the most important source texts of the early modern period. Having lived and worked in a number of places throughout Europe, Sandrart’s biographical background makes his writings (with first-hand narrations on art, artists and art collections) a work of European dimension.
First project phase (April 2007 to March 2009)
The primary goal of the first project phase was to publish the “Teutsche Academie“ on the web. The opulent, lavishly decorated work has been available at http://ta.sandrart.net/ since July 2008, not only as digitized images, but also as fulltext. Besides the ‘regular’ search, the text was edited in a way which makes locating occurrences of any persons or places in the text possible – regardless of spelling, typesetting errors, naming variations etc. Moreover, all these occurrences are linked to corresponding records in accompanying databases. In some parts of the text the same method was also applied to works of art mentioned in the text. Finally, the records in these databases as well as those in the bibliography were cross-linked by a dense web of thousands of relation records.
Second project phase (April 2009 to March 2012)
Due to the great results achieved in the first project phase, the application for the renewal of the project’s funding was granted by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The starting time of these three additional years was primarily dedicated to finishing a few tasks from the first phase, the addition of annotations by contributing scholars and the addition of many more artworks in the database.
Then, a number of new features were added, some of which we would like to present you:
- Visualizations of source texts used by Sandrart: The Teutsche Academie was compiled from Sandrart’s own thoughts and writings by Vasari, van Mander, Serlio, Palladio, Ridolfi and others. References to these texts can be made visible in the edition.
- Translations: For some parts of the text, translations to French and Italian were contributed by scholars. These translations can be displayed side-by-side with the German text.
- Tagging of publications in the text: Sandrart mentions a large number of antique and contemporary writings. These parts of the text were edited in the same way as occurrences of persons, places and works of art (see above), providing bi-directional linking between the text and the bibliography.
- Web Services and Linked Open Data: The database content has been made available via a RESTful Web API. Cross-references to and from other projects were added based on the “PND BEACON” format. Additionally, a large part of the databases’ content has been added as Linked Open Data in RDF format.
- Online edition of the Latin edition: In the early 1680s, Sandrart himself published a Latin edition of the Teutsche Academie, which is important insofar as it is not a mere translation, but comprises additional content. This edition has been available since spring 2012 at la.sandrart.net.
Besides these features, there were numerous improvements, ranging from a rewritten search to better display of the facsimile images or the extended use of vocabularies such as PND, ULAN, TGN or GeoNames.
End of the project and outlook
After some remaining tasks had been finished, the edition was handed over to the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, which has offered to provide long-time availability of the project’s results.