Innovation in Ship Design in the Age of Sail: A Digital Approach
The Age of Sail saw significant innovations in ship design, which greatly increased European nations' ability to explore, compete, and trade globally. However, historians lack evidence to assess the performance of these vessels. This project aims to develop a new methodology to rigorously study technological innovation in ship design across time, taking as comparison Dutch and British ships of the eighteenth century. By combining historical analysis with 3D scanning techniques and engineering simulations, the study pioneers a new methodology for the study of the historical past and provides insights into one of the most innovative periods in navigation history.
- Project leader: Dr Lia Costiner
- Participants: Project team, national and international partners
- Duration: 2024 - 2025
- Funding: NWO XS Grant
Decoding Raphael: Computational Study of the Production and Reproduction of Italian Renaissance Paintings
This project investigates the use of computational techniques for the study of artistic practice, taking as point of departure the paintings of the Renaissance artist Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483-1520). Dozens of faithful reproductions survive of Raphael's paintings, attesting to the lucrative practice of serial production of paintings within the artist's workshop and to the lasting demand for the master's designs. This project will apply computer vision techniques to the study of these reproductions, providing new insights into Raphael's working methods while, more widely, pioneering new digital approaches for the study of artistic practice in art history.
- Project leader: Dr Lia Costiner
- Participants: eScience Center
- Duration: 2023 - 2024
- Funding: eScience Center, Digital Approaches to the Humanities
Dynamics of the Durable: A History of Making Things Last in the Visual and Decorative Arts
How long can an art work survive? This question is typically considered a problem of cultural heritage conservation—as the physical problem of how art can best be kept and stored in its original condition for as long as possible. This research programme investigates the problem of durability in art in an entirely new manner.
Structures of Strength: Unusual Collaborations on Porous Materials
Structures of Strength will develop workable innovative solutions to societal challenges relating to porous materials; create discussions across disciplines from which we learn to identify the parallels in the work of different research fields and obtain unique skills that help us act more effectively on future challenges.
Everlasting Flowers Between the Pages: Botanical Watercolors in Seventeenth-Century
The flower book (an assemblage of flower watercolors) became a popular pictorial genre for garden enthusiasts to visually document their plant collections in the seventeenth century. Due to their beautiful images and the lack of text, flower books are mostly labeled as objects of affluence and pleasure with little to no scientific value today. This project questions such a notion by considering two contributions integral to the early modern development of botany: a collector’s garden as a site of studying and an artist’s technical expertise to picture nature.
Art DATIS: Integration and improvement of sources on glass for a Sustainable future
Art DATIS focuses on the questions of how historical sources were used to innovate glass production and education in the twentieth century, and how we can efficiently link the enormous amount of newly digitised art technical sources on artistic glass production, such as object documentation, technical texts, images, and research data. The project will digitise unique materials from the archives of glass artist Sybren Valkema, and integrate and enrich them with existing databases containing different kinds of data on the history of artistic glass production.
- Project leader: Prof. Sven Dupré
- Participants: Dr Marieke Hendriksen, Dr Evangelos Kanoulas (UvA)
- Partners: RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, Stichting Vrij Glas, Picturae, Corning Museum of Glass, Glasmuseum Hentrich/Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf
- Funding: NWO Smart Culture - Big Data / Digital Humanities
- Duration: 2018 – 2022
Recipes and realities: An analysis of texture rendering in still-life painting
Painters in the Dutch Golden Age were masters in the rendering of materials and their various surface effects, a know-how that was pivotal for the art of still life painting in particular. In the 17th century, a treatise on the medium of oil paint was written by Willem Beurs that contains numerous specific recipes for the pictorial construction of objects with different surface textures. The Recipes and realities project will study and test such recipes to gain a better understanding of how painters achieved their effects, and how they created patterns that somehow resonate with the patterns the human visual system uses to recognize, discriminate or perceive.
- Project Leader: Prof. Jeroen Stumpel
- Partner organisations: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Mauritshuis The Hague, Delft University of Technology, University of Amsterdam, University of Groningen
- Funding: NWO / Netherlands Institute for Conservation, Art and Science
- Duration: 2016 - 2021
Technique in the Arts: Concepts, Practices, Expertise (ARTECHNE)
The transmission of ‘technique’ in art has been a conspicuous ‘black box’ resisting analysis. Only in the most recent years, the history of science and technology has turned to how-to instructions as given in recipes. The project ARTECHNE proposes to undertake the experimental reconstruction of historical recipes to finally open the black box of the transmission of technique in the visual and decorative arts. This project will write a long-term history of the theory and practice of the study of ‘technique’ in the visual and decorative arts between 1500 and 1950.
- Project Leader: Prof. Sven Dupré
- Funding: ERC Consolidator Grant
- Duration: September 2015 to August 2020
