Renaissance Art & Architecture: Digital Humanities Projects

Florence As It Was is a digital project that reconstructs the city the way it appeared toward the end of the 15th century. In addition to digital models of the city, the website includes, in English, the Italian and German interpretations of Florence that were written by critics and scholars in the 17th, 18th, and 20th centuries.

DECIMA refers both the acronym Digitally Encoded Census Information & Mapping Archive and to a version of early modern Italian tax document from which it takes most of its' data. The project tracks human movement in the city of Florence in the 15th and 16th centuries through the larger DECIMA web map and through several specialized maps, such as those tracking spaces of sex work or neighborhood churches. It is currently accessible to the public and scholars are able to utilize the information to build their own specialized maps.

Digital Sepoltuario offers an online resource for the study of commemorative culture in medieval and Renaissance Florence. The website includes an illustrated digital catalogue of the city's tomb monuments that recreates the memorial landscape of the pre-modern city.

This website pairs with a smartphone app that invites users to experience Renaissance Florence through the eyes of five contemporary characters. Each guide takes users on a unique walking tour through the city’s rich past, linking the sites you visit to stories from their own lives and times. Also, this resource features a 3D reconstruction of the now-lost church of San Pier Maggiore in Florence, which can be used on-site through their app.

Bernard Berenson’s Drawings of the Florentine Painters is a digital resource based on namesake of the Berenson’s publication. This research tool permits searches for any of the drawings listed in the three editions (1903, 1938 in English; 1961, in Italian). Filters allow browsing and searching by title and artist (as provided by Berenson, in English or Italian), technique and location. Each entry includes key information from all three editions of Berenson’s text, as well as the current location, an image of the catalog page, and plates included in 1903 and from the British Museum. Many entries for drawings by Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi (and their schools), have been enriched to include links to museum webpages.

Oxford’s historic musical instrument collections offers digitized items in versatile 3D model formats. This project advances discussions within the digital humanities and museum studies on the potential benefits (and limitations) of digital objects as conceptual tools for virtual museology, and as technologies for preserving, accessing and displaying tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and increasing accessibility during an ongoing pandemic.