Italian Sales and Auction Catalogues

The project aims at the digitization and systematic enhancement of auction and sales catalogs published in Italy between approximately 1930 and 1945, housed in the library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut. Among other things, the project includes the scholarly investigation of private collections auctioned on the Italian art market during this period.
The auction and sales catalogs are digitized via high-resolution scanning and made accessible on the DLC platform. In collaboration with the DH Lab, we are working on an online database that allows for targeted searches of individual auction lots. Special attention is paid to the integration of handwritten annotations and the enhancement of iconographic material from the illustrative apparatus of the catalogs, as well as linking the lots with information drawn from external sources such as archival material and photographs.
The goal is to create a research infrastructure that facilitates the reconstruction of private art collections sold on the Italian art market, keeping an eye, among other things, on the major collections dispersed following the 1929 financial crisis.

The collection of auction catalogs on DLC