The First Early Modern International, Interdisciplinary Research Network (on Roman Architecture, Art, Epigraphy, Numismatics etc.)

This database is a work in progress. — Because of copyright restrictions images of drawings are NOT shown in this database!

This website is collecting information and, in the long run, is intended to serve as a meeting place for researchers who have done ore are doing research on the Roman Accademia, a network of more than 235 people around Claudio Tolomei, Marcello Cervini and others active in Rome between ca. 1535 und 1555. 

The name of this Accademia was an open question for a long time: Modern research always identified it with the Accademia della Virtù, of which some of its members like Tolomei obviously were members, too. But as Ambra Moroncini has shown, this 'special interest group' was dedicated to the reform of the Italian language and philological studies in (neo) Latin. The name Accademia vitruviana was invented by modern research, but does not seem to appear in contemporary sources, while the names Accademia Romana (to which the Dorico brothers refer in their impressum to Marliano's Topographia of 1544) and Accademia de lo Studio de l'Architettura (Dionigi Atanagi) or Accademia d'Architettura (Egnatio Danti) do. The name Accademia de lo [or in modern Italian: dello] Studio de l'Architettura seems to be the one fitting best to its activities, because it did not limit its studies to Vitruvius (as the name Vitruviana suggest) but studied everything related to (not only ancient) Roman architecture to lay the foundations for the common and any future architecture based on the rules derived from the best surviving examples from antiquity and the modern architecture of their time.

Because of the vast amount of material that could be traced to the work of the Accademia's members and its truly interdisciplinary character, it seems useful to unite here the information that already has been or will be collected by researchers from different disciplines like archaeology, architectural history, numismatics, epigraphy and others to re-establish the overview that the Accademia already gained some 480 years ago. In addition, a comprehensive bibliography with citations and annotations should also be established as well as a catalog of the original objects and the other sources the Accademia used or generated. When this material is already available on the internet in places that could be regarded as "stable", links to these sites should be sufficient to inform other users.

The idea behind this is that no one individually can get a full overview of the Accademia's work because of its really interdisciplinary character and the vast amount of collected material. Therefore, this website could serve as a "hub" for researchers interested in this fascinating field of the history of many modern disciplines. Hopefully, in the long run, it may be possible to do this on a more professional level by coordinating funded research.

To prepare a scientific network for research on the Accademia I would like to suggest the organisation of an international workshop.

The languages used on this website are mainly English, German and Italian; for sources and documents, their respective language like Latin or French may be used, too.

For a longer introductions, please read the project's description ("Projektbeschreibung", in German) which is updated as often as possible.

Because the site is "under construction" some links may not work and some information is not fully visible to anonymous users.

The transition to a new format which allows to export structured content as PDF via LaTeX is going on. Please be patient if something does not look perfectly yet: Another LaTeX template for the PDFs will be used in the future, and texts of entries will be rewritten for better readability.

I would be very thankful for any supportive hints, advices, and information!

Bernd Kulawik

contact:
e-mail: be_kul [at] me [dot] com

The different areas (= folders) of this website:

• Accademia: general information about the Accademia, that does not fit into one of the other folders
• Bibliography: a list of printed literature that could/should be extended by citations, links to digitized versions on the web etc.
• Chronology: An attempt to develop a chronology of the Accademia's activities according to sources such as letters, books etc.
• Objects: list of objects dealt with by the Accademia as, such as buildings, inscriptions, coins and medals, works of art etc., usually ordered according to where they are located today (as far as their place is known)
• Persons: list of people (with additional information) who belonged to the Accademia or were losely connected with its members
• Problems: Open questions, problems and research desiderates that can be identified with (if possible) a suggestion of how to solve them
• Projects: information about research projects related to the Accademia
• Sources: documents regarding the Accademia, that are not printed (or very rare) and do not exist in different copies, e.g. manuscripts and drawings etc.
• Watermarks: Overview of the watermarks occuring in the papers used by the Accademia's members and collaborators
• Links: Collection of links to other internet resources that to do not fit into one of the other categories
• Meetings: Information about possibly interesting conferences, colloquia, workshops etc.
• About: some information about this website and its administrator.

About this website:

• Because I am not a programmer I want to keep this website as simple as possible. Therefore, I'm using the free and open source content management system Plone, which I have been familiar with for more than 17 years now, without any "bells & whistles".
• If you think additional functions are needed, I may look for plug-ins to Plone already programmed by others at plone.org and which are freely available – IF these plug-ins seem to be stable and do not look like they could cause problems in later versions: because the chance to upgrade the basic software for the foreseeable future is of crucial importance for me.
• This website is, of course, not intended to "substitute" long-term projects like the Census or other database projects collecting structured information, but rather as a meeting platform for researchers working with the materials on different platforms.