DESCRIPTION

Project Description

Contents of the digital archive

The Years of the Cupola is a textual and structured digital archive of the documentary sources of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. The period covered, 1417-1436, corresponds to the two decades during which Brunelleschi’s dome was designed and constructed. The project includes all the documentary records of the cathedral’s Opera, or Board of works, which oversaw not only the work site for the construction of the cupola and the rich furnishings and works of art that adorned the church, but also the residence of the clergy in the nearby canonry and other real estate owned by the Opera, as well as important outside projects ordered by the city’s communal government, from fortifications throughout the territorial state to the papal apartments in the convent of Santa Maria Novella. The sources document the provision of building materials, the management of the work force, the institutional structure of the Opera itself and its efforts to collect the publicly decreed financing due it, its presence in the liturgical context and its relations with the city of Florence, that saw itself reflected in the great civic enterprise of the cathedral.

In 1331 the construction of Santa Maria del Fiore, promoted and supported by the Commune from the time of the foundation of the new cathedral in 1296-8, was entrusted by the city’s government to the rich and powerful Wool Guild (Arte della Lana), which in turn founded the Opera to carry out the task of supervision and management on a permanent basis. This ancient lay and civic body, though often reformed over the centuries, has always remained responsible for the care and administration of the cathedral and still possesses the archive that documents every historical phase of its activities. With The Years of the Cupola the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore has undertaken to enhance the use and appreciation of its own archival patrimony by providing a first, substantial electronic edition of its historical sources.

Structure of the digital archive

The project consists of the complete edition of the Opera’s administrative sources conserved for the period under consideration, accompanied by a system of structured analysis that presents its contents to the user and provides easy access to them. The basic unit of the digital archive is the single document or act, fully transcribed according to philological criteria and available for direct textual research. A series of analytical tools facilitates the search for individual documents within the corpus: there are richly articulated indices of names, places and institutions which can be interrogated in different modes; analyses of content by topics in expanding categories, where the specific terms found in the texts are recorded and grouped in handy and easily perused glossaries; reference tools such as document summaries, hypertext indication of direct relations amongst sources and indices of documentary and chronological references contained in the acts. The indexing and the analysis, though carried out in standard Italian, follow the diction of the original texts, preserving the full variety of forms for the user’s perusal in the search phase.

History of the project

The Years of the Cupola was undertaken in late 1994 as a pilot project under the aegis of the Opera del Duomo, in the context of the celebrations of the VII centenary of the foundation of the cathedral. A first campaign resulted in the preparation of the documentation for a sample two-year period, and this material was presented to the public during the centenary study week held in June of 1997. Since then, the Opera has supported the continuation of the project for the full period of 1417-1436.

Since 2001 the edition has been accessible to the Internet public in the form of an interactive HTML representation derived from the DBT database archives through the conversion program expressly conceived by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. This free access electronic edition, published both through the server of the Opera del Duomo and that of the Berlin institute, originally comprising about 5,000 documents, has grown by various stages through 2009, when it reached the quota of over 21,000 acts for the full period from 1417 to 1436. Since 2002 the option of an English version of the site has been made available for all the introductory, explanatory and navigational texts and for the summaries of the Latin and vernacular documents.

In 2004 a prototype for the online consultation of images of the original manuscripts was added to the website as a feature introducing the multimedia possibilities of the digital photographic materials used by the project. This enrichment of the original textual program answers the challenge posed by the state of conservation of the archival manuscripts, often so damaged after the 1966 flood that traditional photography alone would be of little use for reading the faded script. The prototype presents both photography carried out before the flood, when available, and new images processed through techniques of "virtual restoration," in such a manner as to distinguish digital tools for reading faded script from normal photographic records of the current appearance of the leaves. For this feature of the site, see Prototype of virtual archive.

Future developments

With the virtual archive of images The Years of the Cupola acquires a new dimension, gaining immediacy and offering new possibilities for verification and research on the part of users. Although the textual and analytical archive remains the heart of the project, and indeed the only viable system for making such a large corpus of documents fully legible, manageable and searchable, a natural goal remains the extension of the benefits of the multimedia tools prepared for the image management prototype to the entire content of the edition.

As far as the preparation of edited texts, it is our intention to complement the sources from the Archive of the Opera of Santa Maria del Fiore with the documentation directly concerning the Opera contained in the records of the Opera's parent institution, the Wool Guild, conserved in the Florentine State Archives. These records constitute an authoritative and integral part of the history of the same cathedral administration, which had been delegated to the guild by the Florentine Commune.

Thanks to the flexible and open programming of data stored in XML language, The Years of the Cupola project is capable of being enriched with new information and functions in the future. Structured links to related illustrative material, such as the ECHO photographic documentation of technical aspects of the cupola's construction system ( http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/cupola/photocampaign/), would enhance both projects. The results of planned systematic and statistical "foundation studies" of the archive can be incorporated into the website, with direct, coordinated access from the documentary edition.

Further information

For further information on the nature and development of The Years of the Cupola project and its use as a study tool, the following publications can be consulted:

Gabriella Battista and Margaret Haines, "Cresce la Cupola: documentazione online per la fabbrica di Santa Maria del Fiore a Firenze", in Costruire il dispositivo storico tra fonti e strumenti, eds. Jasenka Gudelj and Paola Nicolin, Milan, Bruno Mondadori, 2006, pp. 43-74.

Margaret Haines, "Gli anni della cupola. Archivio digitale delle fonti dell'Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. Edizione di testi con indici analitici e strutturali", in Reti Medievali. Rivista, III, 2002/2, online edition: http://www.storia.unifi.it/_RM/rivista/mater/Haines.htm

Margaret Haines, "Gli anni della Cupola: una banca dati testuale della documentazione dell'Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore", in La cattedrale e la città, Atti del convegno internazionale di studi per il VII centenario del Duomo di Firenze (Florence, 16-21 June 1997), vol. I**, ed. Timothy Verdon and Annalisa Innocenti, Edifir, Florence, 2001, pp. 692-736 (re-edition of "Gli anni della Cupola: una banca dati testuale della documentazione dell'Opera del Duomo di Firenze" in Bollettino d'Informazioni del Centro di Ricerche per i Beni Culturali, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 1999).