Opera magazine
2016-05-02
The Years of the Cupola: new site with Studies and images.
Friday, May 27, at the Centro Arte e Cultura, a workshop for studies and the digital humanities.
The online edition of the sources of the Opera Archive for the period of the work on the Cathedral’s great dome reaches out to a wider public with systematic studies of the documentation conceived as tools for the understanding, analysis and assimilation of new perspectives on the history of that extraordinary achievement.
The digital edition of the documentation on the construction of Brunelleschi’s cupola and on the board of works and the city that revolved around that innovative worksite becomes the focus of modern research and reflection on the value and the challenge of having made fully accessible more than 21,000 administrative acts.
Subjects studied range from the composition and the contributions of the workforce that labored alongside Brunelleschi, to the supply of materials not only for the building, but for the construction process, such as the vast movement of lumber from the Casentino forests for scaffolding and machines. Attention is called to various projects managed by the Opera in the same years as the cupola, such as the clergy’s dwellings in the new canonry and the rushed preparation of the apartments in the convent of Santa Maria Novella for two Popes forced to reside outside Rome. Research opportunities are numerous and interdisciplinary, as for example the linguistic study of the worksite terminology presently in preparation.
The authors of the inaugural studies are collaborators of the documentary edition, who undertook the complete review of the registers and notebooks of the Opera scribes required for the preparation of the vast photographic material used for deciphering the original manuscripts, often flooded and fragmentary, in order to make it available for guided consultation alongside the transcribed texts. In this way the edition has been enriched with a precious resource for verification by experts and for instruction of neophytes.
The site development took place in continuing dialogue with colleagues of the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science, Berlin, who programmed the online representation from the first segment of 2001 to the present multifunctional edition. We invite you to visit it and experience the ease of interactive links amongst texts, images, studies and analytical apparatuses.
Workshop for Studies and the Digital Humanities
The meeting will take place from 3pm to 5.30 pm at the Sala Brunelleschi of the Centro arte e cultura, Piazza San Giovanni, 7.
Free entrance.
Photo by David Battistella for the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore
