National Gallery of Art

Under the direction of Associate Dean Peter M. Lukehart, this project is designed to provide the first institutional history of the foundation of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome.

Drawing from original statutes, proceedings of meetings, ledger books, and court records, the project brings together a large number of previously unpublished documentary materials with relevant secondary sources. Conceived as two complementary tools, the database of documentation on the website and the printed volume of interpretive studies, The Accademia Seminars: The Early History of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, 1590–1635, shed light on the foundation, operation, administration, and financial management of the fledgling academy from its origins in the late sixteenth century to its consolidation as a teaching institution with its own important church designed by Pietro da Cortona in the 1630s.

The searchable database on the website “The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590–1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma” provides access to a complete diplomatic transcription of extant notarial records related to the Accademia in the Archivio di Stato, as well as a digital image of the original document, the two viewable side by side. Transcriptions of the documents are tagged in Extensible Markup Language (XML) following the guidelines of the Text-Encoding Initiative (www.tei-c.org). Thus the user can select from multiple search parameters that link to all related documents, which are scalable for line-by-line comparisons. Summaries in English and Italian of the original documents are also provided. Search results for artists yield bibliographies and a growing database of related images, the majority of which are works in the collection of the National Gallery of Art.

Since its official launch in 2010, the website has been presented at universities and research institutes, both nationally and internationally, and possible partnerships for further development of the site are being explored. Over the past two years, the project team has been developing a geotagging feature that allows place names mentioned in the database documents to link to their respective locations on interactive, historic maps of Rome. Using new technologies made available through Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the mapping project lends spatial and chronological dimension to the documentary and visual material on the site, placing the academy’s early history within its greater urban context. These and other new features play an important role in the Accademia website’s future growth, both as a valuable resource for historians of the visual arts and as an exemplar of the potential for digital initiatives to foster scholarly exchange.

This volume reexamines the establishment and early history of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, one of the most important centers of governance, education, and theory in the arts for the early modern period and the model for all subsequent academies of art worldwide. Eleven essays by an international group of historians, archivists, and art historians provide the most comprehensive history of the Accademia to be published in more than forty years, and the first in nearly two hundred years to be based almost entirely on primary and documentary material. The authors examine the institution’s founding and development through unpublished documents as well as reinterpretation of technical materials and theoretical treatises. In so doing, they also provide new means for following the progress of the most significant artists—in addition to a host of lesser-known painters, sculptors, and architects—who were working in Rome in the early seventeenth century. Copublished by the National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press.