Digitizing Renaissance Illustrations
The Institute is currently working on its collection of digital images of Renaissance printed herbals, that is, books describing and analyzing the plants used for medicinal purposes, which are often illustrated.
In past years (2003-2006), Alain Touwaide and Emanuela Appetiti organized a research expedition sponsored by Earthwatch Institute on Medicinal Plants of Antiquity. The aim was to list and personally analyze all the herbals printed between1481 and 1560, to inventory and digitize their representations of plants, and to publish all this material on the Internet, on the site PLANT dedicated to Renaissance botanical illustration. With the help of more than two hundred fifty Earthwatch Volunteers, they paged hundreds of such books at the National Library in Rome and, further on, at the library of the famous Botanical Garden in Padua, and viewed thousands of botanical illustrations. The results of the research exceeded any possible expectations as they collected more than seventy thousand images! After years of hard work devoted to digitize, identify, store and organize this collection -- among others with the help of Earthwatch Volunteers working with them at the Smithsonian Institution --, they are now revising the whole collection and gradually post it on the PLANT site, with all the metadata that are necessary for a good understanding of this material: not only the titles of the books and the biography of their authors, but also brief notes on the publishers, the modern name of the places of publications (usually in Latin in the books and sometimes not easily identified), the ancient names of the plants (in Greek and Latin), their medieval and Renaissance names, their modern names (in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish), and the scientific identification.
