As part of her PhD research and thanks to the Erasmus traineeship program, Giorgia Agostini will conduct research at the Census for six months, between October 2023 and March 2024.
Giorgia Agostini is a PhD student in the History of Art programme at the University of Florence, Pisa and Siena. She was awarded a scholarship titled ‘Archiving and Valorisation of 16th-century Antiquarian Texts and Images’. She completed her BA in History and Conservation of Cultural Heritage at the University Roma 3 and her Master’s degree in History and Forms of Visual Arts, Entertainment and New Media with honours at the University of Pisa, writing her thesis on the topic, ‘From Text to Image: the Table of Cebes and its Iconography in Italy in the Sixteenth Century’. Her research interests include 16th-century art and collections, Renaissance iconography, the sources of allegorical and symbolic figurative language, and digital humanities for art-historical research.
Giorgia Agostini is currently working on her PhD project, entitled ‘Project LiDi 1.0: a Methodological Study for the Construction of the Digital Ligorio Platform’. Li(gorio)Di(gitale) 1.0 is a pilot project that aims to investigate and test methodologies and tools suitable for a digital edition of Ligorio’s manuscripts. It starts with the manuscripts in Pirro Ligorio’s alphabetical Encyclopaedia of Antiquity preserved at the State Archives of Turin. The intention is to make a facsimile and transcription of the text available as an annotated, digital edition that opens up multiple perspectives on Pirro Ligorio’s work. Different solutions will be explored for the three parts of the project: the application of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology for the automatic acquisition of the content of the manuscripts; the tagging of the text’s structure and semantics with XML TEI; and finally the visualisation of data to implement a prototype for an online platform.
Through the analysis of selected case studies, a proof of concept will be developed in view of a larger collaborative project. Moreover, the project aims to link the data recorded in the text to existing online databases, such as the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture known in the Renaissance. This process will help to reveal connections and relationships with Pirro Ligorio’s work, giving a more complete view of the Renaissance culture of his time.
Giorgia Agostini’s work at the Census will focus on how to implement connections with the Census database. Specifically, she will be adding and editing material already in the database, which is connected to her case studies. Primarily, she will be focused on volume XV of the alphabetical Encyclopedia, which contains all the entries starting with the letter R (including ‘Roma’).
