ARCHITRAVE - Project details (Art and Architecture in German Travel Accounts to Paris and Versailles in the Baroque Era)

Art and Architecture in German Travel Accounts to Paris and Versailles in the Baroque Era

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The core objective of the project is to contribute to a better understanding of the modes of appreciation of an alien culture in the baroque era. The project aims at scrutinizing the content of six substantial German travel accounts dating from 1685 to 1723, the earliest hitherto known, in which profound and reasoned judgements and opinions on French art and architecture have been rendered. These manuscripts and printed documents out of German public collections are partly unpublished and have never been investigated as a whole. The following sources will be treated:

  • Christoph Pitzler: Travel journal, 1685-1688
  • Ferdinand Bonaventure Graf Harrach: Travel journal, 1698
  • Christian Friedrich Gottlieb von dem Knesebeck: Journal relating a travel to France, around 1699
  • Leonhard Christoph Sturm: Architectonische Reise-Anmerkungen, 1699
  • Lambert Friedrich and Christian Heinrich Corfey: Reisetagebuch, 1698-1699
  • Johann Balthasar Neumann: Letters from his travel to France, 1722/1723

The project will make these documents available in a richly commented, comfortably researchable digital portal, aiming at a multi-layered linkage of text and image, and targeting both an academic and non-academic public in France and the German-speaking countries. Hence, the ambitions of the joint German-French research group are twofold: to merge the knowledge of French specialists on Paris and Versailles under Louis XIV with the acquaintance of their German colleagues with the chosen sources, and to demonstrate the capacities of a computer-based treatment of the texts to generate innovative and reliable ways of exploring and researching them.

Lead/Coordination

Affiliates

Project board at the SUB Göttingen

Project staff at the SUB Göttingen

SUB Göttingen departments / units involved in the project

Former project staff of the SUB Göttingen

Dr. Mirjam Blümm, Dr. Stefan Schmunk