Italian Renaissance Documents Site

The Italian Renaissance Document Site (IRDS) is a fully searchable database of 2364 transcribed original documents and early sources in Italian and Latin relating to thirteen Italian Renaissance artists. No other e-resource duplicates or goes further than this database, and it was visited 97450 times in 2019, since it was published in November 2016 the total traffic has exceeded 300000 visitors. For each of these artists the corpus of documentation is complete, and combines previously published documents together with newly discovered documents and/or new transcriptions. The database intends to make as much source material as possible available to a wide audience, and to allow this material to be scrolled through in chronological order or to be searched across the group as a whole. The search function is particularly effective, allowing for research based on comparative terminologies (e.g. to see how the constituent parts of altarpieces were described in different localities or at different times), extending its use beyond History of Art to other historical disciplines. HENRY was the PI in this research project and was responsible for establishing the overall research parameters and for adding 3/13 artists (Luca Signorelli, Melozzo da Forli and Antonello da Messina) to the database, plus new documents inserted into several other corpuses (e.g. new documents for Raphael and for Luca Signorelli). The remainder was added by a project team of post-doc researchers. The authors of individual transcriptions are credited, and each document has a bibliography. The site has been published in English and Italian versions to further extend its reach in the scholarly community. Some translations into English have also been added; and the pagination of the originals has been maintained such that photographs can be added in the future.