Sep 30

October 2014 – September 2015: pursuit of the documentary researches

Thanks to a methodology now well established, the analysis of our corpus of books moves forward pretty quickly.

On September 2015, 68 books were fully studied and completed (of which 42 were handled during the 2014-2015 period). Besides the books (Van Mander, Bosse, Pader, Félibien, De Piles, Sandrart) handled during the first phase of researches, each language’s corpus has been begun, with the exception of the Latin’s corpus which yet contains only 4 references. Among the French books completed, we can mention the Petits traitez (…) by La Mothe Le Vayer, L’Académie de peinture (…) by La Fontaine, the Traité sur la Peinture (…) by Dupuy du Grez, the Discours sur la peinture (…) by Coypel or again the Abrégé (…) by Dezallier d’Argenville, while other books such as the Sentimens des plus habiles peintres (…) by Testelin or the Cabinet des singularitez (…) by Le Comte are currently being studied. Following the French corpus, the Dutch one now combines the Lof der Schilder-Konst by Angel and the Regulen (…) by Grebber, among which we can add the Groot schilderboek by Lairesse. The study of the English corpus has on its side been more than started with major works such as Salmon’s Polygraphice; Or, The Art of Drawing (…), or Evelyn’s Sculptura, or the History and Art of Chalcography (…) – all this added up to Aglionby’s works – Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues (…) – and Richardson’s ones – Two Discourses (…) and An Essay on the Theory of painting (…). Finally, the German corpus is almost finished after the study of Der Curiose Mahler (…) by Mieth, of Der wohlanführende Maler (…) by Cröker and of the 1745 edition of the Kurzer Begriff (…) by Sulzer.

All in all, the number of quotations selected from the texts by the researchers reaches at this point a number of 13200 extracts. The number of terms selected for each language increase considerably and now achieves the number of 950 entries for the French terms, almost 400 for the English one and around 465 for German and Dutch.