Past Research Projects

With thousands of texts and citations and around 1,700 images, the History of Early American Landscape Design (HEALD) is an inquiry into the language of early American landscape aesthetics and garden design. Encouraging a contextualized approach to data analysis, the HEALD website allows you to search, read, sort, and parse. The project is built on the open-source platform MediaWiki, with custom code freely available for reuse.

The Felsina pittrice (1678) is one of the most important early modern texts on Italian art, yet it lacks a modern critical edition and full English translation. A team of scholars led by dean emerita Elizabeth Cropper and professor Lorenzo Pericolo (Florida State University) is producing a richly illustrated multivolume edition of the Italian text and associated preparatory notes, together with an annotated English translation. Volume 1, devoted to the art of late medieval Bologna, appeared in 2012. Volume 13, on the lives of Domenichino and Francesco Gessi, was published in 2013. Published in 2017, volume 2, part 2 (2 vols.), features the life of Marcantonio Raimondi but also includes the most detailed catalog of prints published in Europe before the 18th century.

This project was directed by Joanne Pillsbury, formerly assistant dean of the Center. The three-volume reference work, published in 2008, supports research on the pre-Hispanic, viceregal, and early republican periods of the Andean region of South America. The work is intended for scholars in anthropology, history, archaeology, art history, and related disciplines. It includes 29 thematic essays and 186 biographical and bibliographical entries reflecting contributions from 125 scholars in 19 countries. Copublished by the National Gallery of Art and the University of Oklahoma Press, the guide addresses key texts of the 16th to the 19th century concerning the region defined by the extent of the Inca Empire (modern Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and parts of Colombia, Argentina, and Chile).

A Spanish translation (Fuentes documentales para los estudios andinos, 1530–1900) was copublished with the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in 2016.

In 1983 the Center convened an international group of architectural drawings specialists representing major repositories in North America and Europe to build consensus concerning cataloging standards for architectural drawings. The Architectural Drawings Advisory Group (ADAG) explored how a network might be established to apply guidelines for descriptive cataloging in both electronic and printed form. In 1986 the Foundation for Documents of Architecture (FDA), a nonprofit corporation, was founded by several ADAG members to promote ADAG’s recommendations in an automated cataloging environment and to translate ADAG’s recommended standards into published guidelines. In 1994 ADAG and the FDA published A Guide to the Description of Architectural Drawings by Vicki Porter and Robin Thornes with G. K. Hall & Company on behalf of the Getty Art History Information Program. Henry A. Millon initiated and led ADAG and also served as president of the FDA (1986–1992).

The Italian Architectural Drawings Photograph Collection (IADPC) was assembled under the direction of the Center’s founding dean, Henry A. Millon, for the photographic archives of the National Gallery of Art Library. The collection of approximately 45,000 photographs and 350 manuscripts on microfilm documents drawings made before 1800 of Italian architecture from repositories around the world. The artists and draftsmen who produced these drawings are not exclusively Italian, but come from throughout Europe. The architectural drawings fall into various categories, such as working, project, and presentation drawings, views, panoramas, travel sketches, treatises, architectural details, and architectural ornament. Also included are drawings from related fields in which the influence of architecture is pronounced and where the designers frequently were architects, for example shipbuilding, carriage and furniture design, and gold and silverware. The IADPC photographs may be consulted by scholars in the National Gallery of Art Library department of image collections.