This project is as a wiki-based catalogue of the paintings and drawings by Jan Brueghel, his workshop, and his imitators. This includes a corpus of perhaps 500-600 works that are entirely or largely the work of Jan himself, and hundreds more copies and variants. In the wiki, each of these objects has its own page with an image and full cataloging data and bibliography; behind each of these pages, a discussion page allows other facts and opinions to be added. The goal of the site is to be an open-access, limited input collaborative venture, one where interested students can find reliable scholarly information on the artist but also where scholars, curators, and even the owners of Brueghel paintings can contribute information and further the study of Brueghel’s oeuvre. To enable the study of how all these interconnected images were produced, we are creating an Image Investigation Tool (IIT) that can be used to compare imagery between one object and another. Many of Brueghel’s visual ideas derived from the work of his famous father, Pieter Bruegel. The next stage of our project will therefore involve constructing a second wiki on Pieter’s paintings, prints, and drawings. The two wikis will be linked to a separate umbrella site where other kinds of information about the Brueghel family and their visual products can be gathered. This will include a “scale gallery” where visitors can see the relative sizes of various works, a visual timeline, a full bibliography, and scans of published documents and early critical sources.

A project by Digital Humanities at Berkeley.