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3. The Beazley Archive : Classical Art Research CentreThe Beazley Archive: Classical Art Research Centre (BA) is a research centre of the Faculty of Classics under the direction of Dr Peter Stewart. The original archive of Sir John Beazley, Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art from 1925 until 1956, was purchased for the faculty in 1965. On his death in 1970 it was brought to the Ashmolean Museum. Within a few years the personal archive of material relating to the study of classical archaeology and art was transformed into a research resource for students and scholars. It consisted of photographs, notes, drawings, books and impressions from engraved gems. The photographs of Athenian vases are the largest archive of this class in the world and were the basis of Beazley's life work.
Since 1970 the entire collection has been enlarged and enhanced through gift and purchase. There are now an estimated 500,000 notes, 250,000 black and white photographs, 33,000 negatives, 7,000 colour prints, 2000 books and catalogues, and 50,000 gem impressions. Major benefactions have been the personal archives of other scholars, most recently Llewelyn Brown's (summer 2000), photographs (about 10,000 from the German Committee for Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum) and digital images (5000 from the Musée du Louvre). All of this material is available for the use of students and scholars. The BA is housed in several rooms on the lower level of the Ashmolean Museum's Cast Gallery. There is an area for users in the public gallery space outside the main archive offices. Although the space has always been restricted, users and staff have benefited from being able to work in a museum department surrounded by objects documented in the Archive. Students have also benefited greatly from being able to engage in volunteer work in academic, curatorial and technical projects While the original archive was being enlarged and enhanced, a new electronic archive was being created. From 1979 computers were used to document Athenian figure-decorated pottery c. 625-325 BC. Today that database [a below] has nearly 98,000 records, 120,000 images and 15,000 registered users. The data structure and lists of terms developed for it have been the foundation on which other databases have been created by BA since 1992. They have also been made available to other scholars for comparable databases on a variety of materials being compiled elsewhere.
In 1998 all the assets of the electronic archive were put on the world wide web with the intention of combining resources for advanced scholarship with programs for the public. The Beazley Archive website has more than 2600 'fixed' HTML pages with many thousands more programmatically produced on demand from the various databases (Casts, Pottery and Gems). There is an illustrated dictionary of more than 300 pages and 900 images, bibliographies for classical archaeology, architecture, sculpture, gems, pottery, coins, history of collections and reception of classical art, plus illustrated programs for students about pottery, sculpture and engraved gems. All of these programs are on-going. A principal aim is to make BA's extensive resources widely available; web-based technology offers an ideal means to achieve this. To give one example Beazley made more than 1,500 tracings from Athenian red-figure vases during the first decades of the twentieth century. These line 'drawings' are the foundation on which Beazley based his system of attributing vases to painters. Works of art in themselves, they are now too fragile to be handled by researchers. All were scanned for the web in 1999 and linked to records held in the pottery database. To give another example, in which BA's assets are linked to those in the Ashmolean Museum: between 2000 and 2001 Ian Hiley made more than 1000 colour digital images of the museum's Greek pottery; these are presented on the web as an Ashmolean collection and they have been incorporated into the pottery database. The photographs of Athenian vases are the single largest component of Beazley's original archive. He collected them over more than 60 years; often they are the only record of lost or damaged vases. By the end of 2004 more than 53,500 had been scanned and incorporated into the pottery database. These are photographs of vases which Beazley had assigned to painters in Attic Black-figure Vase-painters (1956) and Attic Red-figure Vase-painters (1963). BA has an almost equally large number of photographs of Athenian vases which Beazley had not assigned to painters and groups in these publications. Since 2002 they have been scanned and incorporated into the pottery database. They are a unique resource because so many of the vases are unknown to most scholars. With different types of classical antiquities on its own web site BA was interested in developing a means of searching across them to show students, for example, how certain mythological figures could be represented on vases, gems, and in sculpture. In autumn 2000 BA developed a model for searching across datasets on different types of material held by other Classics research projects [1,3, 4, 6, 8, 12]. In spring 2001 it inaugurated a project to develop a model for searching across datasets in classical archaeology held at a selection of sites on the continent with considerable experience in electronic documentation [b]. These are the Forschungsarchiv für antike Plastik in Cologne, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Department of the Musée du Louvre, and the Paris office of Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae in the University of Paris X. In June 2001 the Foundation Council of LIMC, representing some forty countries, agreed to participate in the project. BA is also interested in avoiding duplication of effort. For this reason it made available to the Perseus Project a copy of its documentation on the nearly 70,000 records of Athenian vases. The intellectual property right of the contributor is acknowledged for each entry and all of the images are watermarked for copyright control. The Beazley Archive's use of computers for the generation of publications began in 1982 with Beazley Addenda (British Academy and Oxford University Press). It has continued with two editions of Summary Guide to Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (British Academy, 1984 and 2001) and developed into in-house publication of two new series - Studies in the History of Collections (from 2000) and Studies in Classical Archaeology (from 2002). Formats designed by BA are held in electronic shells that can be e-mailed to authors. Extensive catalogues can be published and illustrated versions can be mounted on the Beazley Archive website. An example is the catalogue from Kurtz's Reception of Classical Art in Britain (volume one in Studies in the History of Collections) which has colour illustrations of nearly 900 casts in the Ashmolean Museum.
Volume two in this series, Giovanni Pietro Campana (1808-1880), The man and his collection, by Susanna Sarti (D.Phil Oxon), has a catalogue of many thousands of objects on the web. The first volume of Studies in Classical Archaeology publishes the highly successful conference, Excavating Classical Sculpture, organised by Maria Stamatapoulou and Maria Yeroulanou (D.Phils Oxon) and held in Oxford in March 2001. New titles in this series will include a new edition of Beazley's Lewes House Gems (1920) by John Boardman. The development of BA's electronic resources has been funded from outside grants since 1979, from the British Academy, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and European Commission, in several of whose projects the Archive was an active member. A two-year research project [c] on nineteenth-century Belgian and British collections of classical antiquities has been funded by the Wiener Ansbach Foundation (Brussels). There have also benefactions from private funds for the work on gems [f, g]. The staff of the Beazley Archive - Dr Thomas Mannack, Dr Claudia Wagner and Greg Parker - do not hold permanent research positions in the university; continuity of BA research projects depends on outside grants. The Beazley Archive has on-going and finite research projects, both its own and projects shared with other universities and research centres. The Pottery Database [a] begun in 1979 and listing references to published illustrations of Athenian vases, is on-going. Closely related are two finite (2001-2004) projects. One is the electronic conversion of Henry Immerwahr's unpublished magnum opus - Corpus of Attic Vase Inscriptions (8000 records). The other [d] concerns more than 300 out-of-print fascicules of Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (CVA) which had been published under the aegis of the Union Académique Internationale since 1922. In 2000 BA was commissioned, with funds from the J.Paul Getty Trust and the British Academy, and with the collaboration of national committees for CVA overseas, to mount an indexed and searchable publication of more than 250 volumes on the web by 2004. CVAonline was launched in October 2004 and consists of an illustrated catalogue of 100,000 ancient vases from more than 120 collections in 26 countries. The CVA project, is of particular importance because it provides an opportunity for museums to add new data and bibliography remotely, if they wish, thus establishing national data centres. National academies sent interns to Oxford to be trained in this work. One of their tasks was the creation of multi-lingual thesauri which may be used in the cross-searching project. Records from both Immerwahr and CVA will be integrated into the pottery database, which will be developed to cover all major types of Greek pottery, not only the Athenian, in collaboration with other scholars and institutes.
Work on the Collection of Casts [e] began in 1992 as part of a European Commission project with British Telecom to develop broadband networks, then in their infancy. Florence Maskell, under the direction of Kurtz, identified and catalogued about 900 plaster casts from antique sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum. Work was completed in 2000 and published in The Reception of Classical Art in Britain, an Oxford Story of Plaster Casts from the Antique. On-going projects relating to sculpture include preparations of anatomical models. BA's collection of about 15,000 photographs of classical sculpture will be used in collaboration with other research institutes. Work on BA's gem impressions (collections begun by Sir John Beazley and continued by Sir John Boardman) is on-going. A finite project (2000-2002) mounted on the web Rudolph Raspe's Descriptive Catalogue (1791) of James Tassie's 15,800 impressions using photographs taken for BA in the 1980s and now accessible on [f] the Gems Database. This is a major resource for knowledge of older collections of gems, otherwise available in only three complete sets of impressions that are known to have survived.Gem impressions are particularly well suited to the web since the tiny objects can be enlarged many times their actual size. They are also a primary source for the study of the reception of classical art. Another gem project [g] is the Corpus of Classical Phoenician Scarabs, compiled by John Boardman, the first comprehensive account of a major class of scarabs of the Persian period, which display Greek, Egyptian and Levantine iconography. This project was funded from a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship and has also been mounted on the web. Dr Claudia Wagner has been assisting Professor Boardman. Joint projects are finite and on-going. A study of nineteenth-century Belgian and British collections of classical antiquities has been undertaken with the Université Libre de Bruxelles since 1999 [c] and has resulted in a bilingual publication by Boccard in 2002 by a team of six Belgian and six British scholars (John Boardman, Oswyn Murry, Richard Jenkyns, Jas Elsner, Dyfri Williams, Donna Kurtz). Collaboration with the international project of the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, and the more recent Thesaurus Cultus Rituumque Antiquorum, began in the late 1970s. BA is the LIMC centre for collection of data from British collections. The Beazley Archive aims to make its original and electronic archives on classical archaeology and art available as widely as possible and to collaborate actively with colleagues in Oxford and elsewhere.The great range of assets offer a unique resource not only for the study of classical antiquity but also for the history of art and the reception of classical art since the Renaissance.
[a] Pottery Database [b] Cross-searching [c] Nineteenth-century British and Belgian collections
of classical antiquities [d] Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum [e] Collection of Casts [f] James Tassie's eighteenth-century gem impressions [g] Classical Phoenician Scarabs © C@O 2011: Classics at Oxford, Faculty of Classics. Webmaster. Last updated:
November 1, 2011.
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