12. Research Archive for Greek and Roman Sculpture

Portrait of Antonine youth Sotheby's

The Research Archive for Greek and Roman Sculpture was begun in October 1998 under the direction of R R R Smith, Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art. The Archive is essentially a computer database that combines research and photographs targeted at selected categories of sculpture from the classical world. The Archive is housed in the Cast Gallery at the Ashmolean Museum, and its database is available on the web.

One goal of the Archive is to catalogue fully the extraordinary collection of over 1,000 plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture in the Ashmolean Cast Gallery and to present the catalogued objects in a computerised database that provides written and visual information about them in an accessible manner. A second goal is systematically to record in the same way new Greek and Roman sculpture appearing on the art market.

Cast of Old Fisherman Ashmolean Museum

Cast of Kore Ashmolean Museum

The research and database entries for casts and new sculpture take the same form. Each entry consists of photographs of the object; measurements, provenance, date, current location, size, and state of preservation of the object; an annotated bibliography, a summary of the previous research, and our own brief commentary and historical assessment of the piece. The presentation of the material proceeds from factual description to researched evaluation. The database is thus both a research tool and a museum resource providing access to ancient monuments for several levels of users from school children to scholars.

Index

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Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles', Oxford, OX1 3LU.