Research horizons and new technologies

The Euploos project for the Collection of the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi

Florence can be considered by all rights the capital of drawing. It was here—thanks particularly to Giorgio Vasari—that the idea developed in which a series of lines traced on a sheet, perhaps in an apparently disorganized manner, could have an artistic and not just functional value. Vasari's concept of drawing as the father of the three arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture contributed to the early appearance in Florence of numerous drawing collections. The most important of these is certainly that of the Medici and House of Lorraine, the core of the holdings of the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, an extraordinary collection and also a centre for drawing-related research. The presence of the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe was in fact one of the reasons that Florence was chosen for the seat of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz on its founding in 1897. The interest in the study of drawings shared by both institutions is at the heart of the Euploos Project, which also includes the participation of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and has among its goals the high-tech cataloguing and digitalization of the vast patrimony of the prints and drawings collection held here. The project is designed to simultaneously advance scientific research into the graphic arts, and the Euploos Project promotes academic seminars, conferences and meetings of international scope. Recently such enterprises have included the LINEA series of conferences and publications.

The exhibition on view here was previously displayed online by the Photo Library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz coordinated by Almut Goldhahn. It presents the scientific potential of the Euploos Project, which has opened new avenues of research in addition to registering a prodigious quantity of data. The drawings shown here are thus in a certain sense "re-viewed": newly seen, studied, and in some cases reclassified by the Euploos researchers.