This website is collecting information and, in the long run, is intended to serve as a meeting place for researchers who have done ore are doing research on the Roman Accademia, a network of more than 190 people around Claudio Tolomei, Marcello Cervini and others active in Rome between ca. 1535 und 1555.
The name of this Accademia was an open question for a long time: Modern research always identified it with the Accademia della Virtù, of which some of its members like Tolomei obviously were members, too. But as Ambra Moroncini has shown, this 'special interest group' was dedicated to the reform of the Italian language and philological studies in (neo) Latin. The name Accademia vitruviana was invented by modern research, but does not seem to appear in contemporary sources, while the names Accademia Romana (to which the Dorico brothers refer in their impressum to Marliano's Topographia of 1544) and Accademia de lo Studio de l'Architettura (Dionigi Atanagi) or Accademia d'Architettura (Egnatio Danti) do. The name Accademia de lo [or in modern Italian: dello] Studio de l'Architettura seems to be the one fitting best to its activities, because it did not limit its studies to Vitruvius (as the name Vitruviana suggest) but studied everything related to (not only ancient) Roman architecture to lay the foundations for the common and any future architecture based on the rules derived from the best surviving examples from antiquity and the modern architecture of their time.
Because of the vast amount of material that could be traced to the work of the Accademia's members and its truly interdisciplinary character, it seems useful to unite here the information that already has been or will be collected by researchers from different disciplines like archaeology, architectural history, numismatics, epigraphy and others to re-establish the overview that the Accademia already gained some 480 years ago. In addition, a comprehensive bibliography with citations and annotations should also be established as well as a catalog of the original objects and the other sources the Accademia used or generated. When this material is already available on the internet in places that could be regarded as "stable", links to these sites should be sufficient to inform other users.
The idea behind this is that no one individually can get a full overview of the Accademia's work because of its really interdisciplinary character and the vast amount of collected material. Therefore, this website could serve as a "hub" for researchers interested in this fascinating field of the history of many modern disciplines. Hopefully, in the long run, it may be possible to do this on a more professional level by coordinating funded research.
To prepare a scientific network for research on the Accademia I would like to suggest the organisation of an international workshop.
The languages used on this website are mainly English, German and Italian; for sources and documents, their respective language like Latin or French may be used, too.
For a longer introductions, please read the project's description ("Projektbeschreibung", in German) which is updated as often as possible.
Because the site is "under construction" some links may not work and some information is not fully visible to anonymous users.
The transition to a new format which allows to export structured content as PDF via LaTeX is going on. Please be patient if something does not look perfectly yet: Another LaTeX template for the PDFs will be used in the future, and texts of entries will be rewritten for better readability.
I would be very thankful for any supportive hints, advices, and information!
Bernd Kulawik
contact:
e-mail: be_kul [at] me [dot] com