Madrid,
The Museo del Prado has today announced the collection of its new Digital Library, which offers free access to 5,600 issues of journals and 6,000 books specialising in artistic literature published between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In total, more than 1,700,000 pages have been digitised, the catalogues of 1,400 old books have been revised and another 220 rare books and 2,000 prints from drawing books have been catalogued. These rare books were often written or illustrated with prints by authors such as Dürer, Rubens, Giordano, Anibale Carracci, José and Federico de Madrazo, Goya, Luis Paret, Fortuny, William Hogarth, Gustave Doré and Toulouse-Lautrec.
This new virtual space, in addition to promoting the preservation of the original bibliographic funds by reducing their use and manipulation, can be a very useful tool for
art historical research and has also been incorporated into Worldcat, the largest international collective catalogue of art libraries and museums managed by OCLC, and Art
Discovery Group Catalogue.
There is an obvious relationship between the Prado’s bibliographic and artistic collections, and this is made clear through this website, as the Digital Library is the most important way to consult the sources that have sustained the historiography of European art, as well as the publications that artists had in their libraries and that served as theoretical and iconographic support for their production. Until now, the Museum’s bibliographic heritage was only accessible to users who could consult it in the Library’s reading room, in the Casón del Buen Retiro; now it can be accessed and reused free of charge through the website, as is the case with the Digital Archive and the artistic collection.
The art gallery’s first Digital Library was launched in 2012 with the intention of setting up a repository to house the Museum’s scientific production, the result of its activity.
research, and allowed the consultation of all the collection catalogues, reasoned or exhibitions published by the centre between 1819 and 1996. In parallel, a process of digitisation of the old collection was initiated, culminating in the presentation of this Digital Library, which has been able to be developed with funds from the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR), with which the Digibib system from the Digibís company has been acquired to manage digital objects and their metadata.
The digital library management system has a powerful search engine that allows you to retrieve all the words contained in the publications by free text, since it has been
digitized with ORC. In addition, it offers an advanced search form that allows combined searches by different bibliographic fields and an alphabetical search for titles and authors; the search results, which are displayed in a list or mosaic, can be sorted by different criteria and faceted by places, dates, subject descriptors, people and institutions, while the image viewer allows downloading and viewing digital objects in pdf and jpg format, as well as enlarging, reducing, and flipping images.
Finally, and with the aim of increasing the visibility and reuse of the collections, all digitized works will be added by collection systems to Hispana,
the portal for access to Spanish Digital Heritage, and from there to Europeana, the open-access European digital library.
The digitized works have been organized into sections to facilitate thematic visits or viewing of content by documentary typology. These sections and subsections reflect the characteristics and quality of the rare and ancient bibliographic collection held at the Prado Library.
The first of these sections is that of manuscripts: the Digital Library brings together a select collection of them in various subjects: from artistic collections and techniques, to treatises, religion or engineering. Of particular note is the handwritten copy from around 1600 of the Commentary on ancient painting and painters by Felipe de Guevara (around 1560), who
It contains the first references to the paintings of El Bosco collected by Philip II in El Escorial; the letter of execution of nobility in favor of Alfonso Garrido from 1795, meticulously illuminated; and the Memoir on the purification of coal (1785) by the engineer Agustín de Betancourt, with technical drawings in Chinese ink wash.
The second focuses on drawing booklets, made up of prints of body fragments and complete human figures that were used to practice drawing by constantly and progressively copying them. The most notable are those that follow the models of the Carracci family and those of José de Ribera, as well as the three copies of each of the booklets by José García Hidalgo and Matías de Irala.
Likewise, consulting old catalogues of auctions or sales of works of art can be vital to studying the provenance of cultural goods in public or private collections. In this regard, it is worth highlighting the Fortuny’s Atelierwhich contains a detailed description of the paintings, drawings and prints by Mariano Fortuny and the objects in his collection (weapons, textiles, bronzes, ivories, Hispano-Muslim ceramics) that were auctioned in Paris in 1875, after his death. One of the two digitized copies contains handwritten notes with the auction prices of the pieces.
The Museum’s publications section houses the scientific production generated by the Prado that was already shown in the previous Digital Library, but extending the time frame of the publications until 2007, and the magazines section is made up of almost a hundred titles of periodical publications that contain around 5,600 issues. In most cases, these are illustrated magazines, mainly from the 19th century, such as L’Art: revue hebdomadaire illustre (1875-1907), large format and illustrated with etchings, in which the four additional prints of the Nonsense by Goya. Among the Spanish ones, the following stands out: The artistpromoted by Federico Madrazo and illustrated with lithographs, prominent in the context of Spanish Romanticism. Likewise, various cultural magazines decorated with lithographs or woodcuts against the grain are preserved, such as The Spanish Picturesque Weekly (1836-1857), The Universal Museum (1857-1869), The Spanish and American Enlightenment (1869-1921), Artistic illustration (1882-1916) and Art in Spain (1862-1870). Another chapter is made up of the guides for foreigners, the set of fashion magazines and the one with satirical themes with titles such as Charivari, The skinny girl, Gil Blas either The LaughterFrench humorous newspaper with lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec.
The typology of printed books has more than 4,000 digitalized books and various subsections, such as architectural treatises (Vitruvio, Serlio, Palladio, Vignola, Andrea del
Pozzo, Viollet-Le-Duc, Hector Guimard, Otto Wagner), artistic treatises (Alberti, Leonardo, William Hogarth, Juan de Arfe, Carducho, Pacheco, Palomino), anatomy books (Vesalio, Juan Valverde de Hamusco, Durero, Lavater, Charles Le Brun), iconography books (the Illustrated Iconology of Cesare Ripa, various editions of the Metamorphosis We will also see monographs on artists, many of them published in the second half of the 19th century and illustrated with photographs, portraits and more than a thousand digitized works of great rarity and historical value that are difficult to label.
The Digital Library makes it easy for interested parties to create collections of digital objects on various subjects and, as a living project, will propose new digital collections, including: Traveling through Spaindedicated to travelers who chose our country as their destination in the 19th century.
