History of the Census

The Census began in 1946 as a colla­bo­ra­tion between the art histo­rian Richard Kraut­heimer (1897–1994) at Vassar College; Fritz Saxl (1890–1948), the director of the Warburg Insti­tute in London; and the archaeo­lo­gist Karl Lehmann (1894–1960) at New York Univer­sity. All three had fled the perse­cu­tion of Jewish acade­mics in Germany and found posi­tions abroad. The initial rese­arch ques­tion arose in 1945, when Kraut­heimer and his wife, Trude Kraut­heimer-Hess, were writing a mono­graph on the Renais­sance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti. Strugg­ling to find specific infor­ma­tion about the antique monu­ments known in fifte­enth-century Italy, Richard Kraut­heimer asked Saxl whether they should orga­nise a ‘corpus of anti­qui­ties’ known in the Renais­sance. Their exch­ange led to the idea of crea­ting a syste­matic record of ancient works known to—or that could have been known to—Renaissance artists. In spring 1946, the Warburg Insti­tute and New York Univer­sity began deve­lo­ping a census of Renais­sance sources, prima­rily from fifte­enth-century Italy, that responded to antique monu­ments: visual sources—at that time limited to sculp­ture and figural works of art—and textual sources. They decided to gather this infor­ma­tion on index cards and to combine it with photo­graphs wherever possible. 

The Census had been an offi­cial project of the Warburg Insti­tute since 1949, with Phyllis Bober as its director. In the early years, Enri­quetta Frank­fort, director of the Photo­gra­phic Coll­ec­tion, began working with Bober to cata­logue the project’s visual resources. When Ruth Rubin­stein was appointed in 1957 as an assistant in the Photo­gra­phic Coll­ec­tion, with special respon­si­bi­lity for the Census, the project gained further momentum and found, in Rubin­stein herself, a long-stan­ding protagonist. 

Over the follo­wing decades, Rubin­stein acquired photo­graphs of sketch­books and drawings after the antique for the Census, thereby helping to make the Warburg Insti­tu­te’s Photo­gra­phic Coll­ec­tion one of the most important rese­arch centres for Renais­sance drawings. The Insti­tute further supported the Census by publi­shing nume­rous cata­lo­gues of Renais­sance sketch­books in its series Studies of the Warburg Institute. 

In the early 1980s the Biblio­theca Hertziana—under the direc­tor­ship of the archi­tec­tural histo­rians Matthias Winner and Chris­toph Luit­pold Frommel—became a partner insti­tu­tion of the Census project. At the same time, the Census expanded to include ancient archi­tec­ture, a cate­gory that had previously been excluded.

The idea of compu­te­ri­sing the Census’s index card system had already been proposed at the end of the 1970s, and the project’s expan­sion to include archi­tec­ture offered a further reason to pursue it. The J. Paul Getty Trust had just laun­ched its Art History Infor­ma­tion Program to test the possi­bi­li­ties of elec­tronic data proces­sing for the humanities. 

The project won the support of the Getty Trust, and programming began. From 1981 onwards, the data model was deve­loped under the direc­tion of Arnold Nessel­rath in Rome, in coope­ra­tion with the computer programmer Rick Holt. An input mode was programmed, followed by a retrieval mode. In deve­lo­ping the data model, it was crucial to struc­ture clearly the complex infor­ma­tion recorded on Bober and Rubin­stein’s index cards. The object-rela­tional data model that was chosen made it possible to access the Census data from every side: whereas the index card system could be ‘entered’ only through the names of the ancient monu­ments, the compu­te­rised data could be queried from any direction. 

The project’s next change of loca­tion coin­cided with the dawn of a new tech­no­lo­gical era. Although funding from the Biblio­theca Hertziana ended in 1995, Horst Brede­kamp succeeded in secu­ring the project’s perma­nent affi­lia­tion with what is now the Depart­ment of Art and Visual History at the Humboldt-Univer­sität zu Berlin, where he had been appointed professor. Addi­tional funding and support were provided by the Bundes­mi­nis­te­rium für Bildung und Forschung (Federal Ministry of Educa­tion and Research). 

During the first years in Berlin, the data­base soft­ware was reor­ga­nised. A migra­tion to the Dyabola system preserved the data model. Whereas the data­base had previously been available for consul­ta­tion only in London and Rome, it was now published on CD-ROM and later on DVD. The first internet version of the Census data­base followed in 2000.