The online database “Antiquitatum Thesaurus: Antiquities in European Visual Sources from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” is available in open access.
“Antiquitatum Thesaurus” investigates prints and drawings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on artifacts from antiquity, and links them with the ancient objects that they document as well as with other evidence of their reception in a digital repository. The aim of the project is to make extensive visual material available to scholars of various disciplines: first and foremost of the archaeologies of Europe and the Mediterranean, of art history and history, of ancient and early-modern philology, as well as of the history of knowledge and of the Humanities.
At its launch, the “Antiquitatum Thesaurus” database provides access to over 10,000 datasets, including over 7,000 on early-modern prints and drawings and over 1,400 artifacts from antiquity or objects considered to be such. Thousands of internal links relate the artifacts and their images. In addition, different types of dependencies between the visual sources themselves are documented. The database and its contents will continue to grow and develop in the future.
“Antiquitatum Thesaurus” offers a user-friendly and intuitive web interface for querying and navigating the database. More features for analyzing and visualizing its contents as well as direct access to the data will be available in the near future.