Archive. Italian Renaissance Documents Site

Documentary website containing 353 unpublished documents relating to the life and art of Luca Signorelli

This website is a fully searchable database of 353 published and unpublished documents relating to the Italian renaissance artist Luca Signorelli (c.1450-1523). It was developed to act as the documentary appendix for T. Henry, The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli, New Haven & London (Yale University Press), 2012. ISBN: 978-0-300-17926-2 (item 1). In addition to acting as the documentary appendix for my Signorelli monograph, this website is a pilot for a proposed larger site for the publication of Italian renaissance documentation.

The 353 documents make up a complete corpus of documents and early sources (all of them newly transcribed and mostly unpublished) relating to the artist, and runs to 105000 words. This innovative website was praised by Yale’s external readers as a solution for publishing voluminous source material (“an extraordinary resource for scholars in a multiplicity of disciplines … a remarkable achievement … trail-blazingly influential”).

In a few cases these Latin and Italian documents are accompanied by a photograph of the original document, and very occasionally by a translation into English. The idea is to make as much source material as possible available to a wide audience, and to allow this material to be searched and (wherever possible) compared with an image of the original document which can be enlarged for ease of comparison. The intention is to add more images in the future.