Fieldwork

Media Center Image Database

The Columbia University Media Center Image Database (MCID) hosts the Department of Art History's teaching collections, special collections, and original photography of globally significant art and architecture. As part of the MCID, fieldwork conducted in 2015 extensively documented the art and architecture of Medieval and Renaissance Venice. To access the database's Venice fieldwork, please visit the Media Center for Art History website, as well as the MCID's Art Atlas, which incorporates the databse's imaging resources into an interactive map of the city. 

 

Mapping the Art & Architecture of Renaissance Venice 

Led by Meyer Shapiro Professor of Art History David Rosand from 2002-2007, Mapping the Art & Architecture of Renaissance Venice produced online interactive digitization of Jacopo de'Barbari's monumental woodblock print of the city now housed in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The virtual experience allowed students to explore fifteenth and sixteenth-century Venice through the print, utilizing a digital magnifying glass to enlarge the map's monuments and view them in greater detail. For example, one such site included the Scuole Grande di San Marco, a charitable confraternity of the period, and one of the most important monuments of Renaissance Venice. Students could then view the structure according to the urban context of Piazza San Giovanni, zoom in on the façade's renowned sculptural decoration, and even study the major pictorial cycles of the chapter room and albergo which include works by Bellini and Tintoretto.

To learn more about this project, which was generously supported by The National Endowment for the Humanities and ARTstor, please visit the Media Center for Art History website

 

Venice, A Database 

In 2007, ARTstor sponsored a Media Center photography campaign in Venice, Italy, which produced over 340 panoramas of a range of historically significant sites from various eras in the city's history. 

A Venice Database