Module 1 – Current State of Progress

The works listed below in the tabular overviews – printed works, books of drawings and albums – are to be fully indexed in the course of Module 1. The tables provide an overview of how extensive the individual works are in terms of the illustrations they contain, and for which works indexing has been completed or where work is currently underway. Due to the sometimes very close interdependencies between the various source works, changes and additions may be made at any time in the further course of the project, even to works already marked as "completed".

In particular, the indexing of volumes 2,1 and 2,2 of Bernard de Montfaucon's "L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures" (1719) as well as volume 2 of its "Supplément" (1724), with which the work of the Thesaurus began in July 2021, yielded a large number of additional early modern visual sources. For Montfaucon almost always drew on previously published material for his depiction of antiquity in images, but also noted the sources of his compilatory approach. All these modells were also identified – as far as possible – and included in the Thesaurus database. Internal links with the attributes "has copy" or "is copy after" establish a relationship between the image sources.

In this way, more than 60 additional works are already include in the Thesaurus, but unlike the sources in the work plan, they are not expected to be indexed comletely, but only to the extent justified by Montfaucon's recourse to them. Here too, however, the proportion included in the Thesaurus may continue to grow as the project progresses.

A special feature of Module 1 results from the indexing of a volume of the so-called "Papiers de Montfaucon" (Paris, BnF, Ms. latin 11916). This album contains the almost complete documentation of Montfaucon's preparatory work for volumes 2,1 and 2,2 of "L'antiquité", i.e. the actual extracts from the above-mentioned original works from which he compiled the plates for his own publication in order to pass them on to the engravers working for him. Ms. latin 11916 also contains a large number of proofs of plates from "L'antiquité" that have not yet been finalised. The clippings pasted into the album are linked in the Thesaurus database on the one hand with their counterparts in the 'external' source works with the attribute "is duplicate of", and on the other hand with the attribute "has copy" with the proofs. These, in turn, are linked to the plates published in 1719 with the attribute "is preparatory for".

In this way, a close-meshed network of information on ancient (and non-ancient) artefacts and their early-modern representation in images is already emerging, with Montfaucon's work as the (provisional) centre of gravity.