The Photographic Atlas is the result of a census and cataloguing project of 16th-century statuary created for the churches of Venice in a chronological span from 1527, date of Jacopo Sansovino’s arrival in the lagoon, to 1625, year of the death of Girolamo Campagna, the last great representative of the modern manner in Venetian sculpture.
The Institute of Art History conducted new digital photographic campaigns for the project, documenting the works with several previously unpublished details. This new repertoire of images was supplemented by a precious corpus of historical photographs (Alinari, Anderson, Böhm, Naya, Fiorentini, Giacomelli, Lieberman) from the Photo Library collections, which were attached to the same entries to document the state of conservation of the sculptures and, through a plurality of details and points of view, to encourage comparisons between the works and the formulation of new hypotheses of attribution.
The work of photographic documentation and indexing was conducted according to a topographical criterion, by sestieri: the first group of entries, relating to sestiere of S. Marco, including the sculptural complexes of the great 16th-century sites of San Salvador, San Giorgio Maggiore and the Basilica Marciana itself, will be progressively followed by the works of the other sestieri of Venice.
It is the hope of the Institute of Art History that the availability of the new photographic atlas - conceived as an open and constantly updated research tool - will stimulate studies and general interest in the work of the great 16th-century Venetian sculptors.