PROJECT INFORMATION
The primary mission of Catena, the Digital Archive of Historic Gardens and Landscapes, is to fill a void in American higher education by assembling a searchable collection of historic and contemporary images that include plans, engravings, paintings, and photographs to make the following possible:
Provide Images for Teaching Landscape Studies
Catena offers a readily available set of images to illustrate classroom lectures. It thus serves as a means of integrating a relatively new academic field into the curricula of institutions that, for lack of visual resources, would not otherwise be able to offer courses in landscape design history.
Integrate Images and Educational Materials
As an online resource, Catena makes it possible for scholars, teachers, and students of landscape history to fully integrate images and contextual materials in a more dynamic manner than is possible with traditional teaching and study materials.
Provide a Supplement to Textbooks
Digital technology offers an important way to augment the images found in books, which are necessarily limited because of publishers’ specifications concerning page count and illustration number. A textbook may have only one or two images of a major landscape site, but Catena can offer unlimited computer-accessible images.
Better Simulate the Experience of Landscape
Unlike other works of art that can be comprehended in a single view, landscapes are for the most part spatially extensive and should be experienced from multiple perspectives and several vantage points. Catena makes it possible to visually tour landscapes with plans that are keyed to sequences of views.
Preserve Existing Slide Collections
Catena performs a valuable visual resources preservation function. Slides have a limited life span. By scanning and cataloging the images that belong to the personal collections of professors and landscape photographers, Catena ensures that certain notable collections of images of historic gardens, parks, and cities are not lost.
The 2005 Catena project team consisted of a committee of advisors, participating scholars, a steering committee, and BGC staff.
COMMITTEE OF ADVISORS
This group includes some pioneers in the field of landscape design history. The books listed bear the most relevance to this project.
James Ackerman, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus in Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, is the author of The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (1990).
Miroslava Marie Benes, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Design School is the co-author of Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (2001).
Joseph Connors, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University and Director of the Harvard Center for the Study of the Italian Renaissance at the Villa I Tatti in Florence.
Claudia Lazzaro, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Art History at Cornell University, is the author of The Italian Renaissance Garden (1990).
David Lowenthal, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography at University College London, is the author of The Past is a Foreign Country (1985).
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, MCP (Project Founder and former Director), President, Foundation for Landscape Studies is the author of the award-winning Landscape Design, A Cultural and Architectural History. She was the founding director of the Garden History and Landscape Studies concentration at the Bard Graduate Center and was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Catena digital archive.
David Schuyler, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of American Studies at Franklin and Marshall College, is the author of Apostle Of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 (1996).
PARTICIPATING SCHOLARS
This group is providing the visual materials and intellectual content contained in the database and website. The books listed bear the most relevance to this project.
Dr. Alberta Campitelli is the Superintendent of the Villas and Historical Parks Service, Rome, and has worked on the restoration of the secret gardens of the Villa Borghese.
Denis Cosgrove, Ph.D., Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is contributing images and documentation for the villas of the Veneto. He is the author of The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth-Century Italy (1993).
Tracy Ehrlich, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History at Colgate University, is a specialist on the villas of Frascati and is the author of Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Rome: Villa Culture at Frascati in the Borghese Era (2002).
Bernard Frischer, Ph.D., Professor of Classics and Director of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, is an authority on ancient Roman landscape and director of the excavations at Horace’s Villa from 1997–2001.
Giorgio Galletti has been Director of the Office of Villas, Parks, and Gardens of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici in Florence since 1986. His principal responsibilities have included the maintenance, conservation, and restoration of the Giardino di Boboli and the villas of Castello, la Petraia, and Poggio a Caiano. The Acádemie de France selected him for the conservation project of the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome, on which he has been working since June 2000. He was a fellow at Dumbarton Oaks for the academic year 1998–1999.
Kathryn Gleason, Ph.D., is Associate Professor and Department Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. She specializes in garden archeology.
Dianne Harris, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Architecture in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has worked extensively on Lombard gardens and is the author of The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape, and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy (2003).
Robin Karson is the Executive Director of The Library of American Landscape History and is the author of The Muses of Gwinn: Art and Nature in a Gardens Designed by Warren H. Manning, Charles A. Platt, and Ellen Biddle Shipman (1995).
Patricia Osmond, Ph.D., is the Consultant for Research and Development and the curator of the archives at Villa Gamberaia. In 2002, she was guest editor for Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, a special issue devoted to the Villa Gambaraia.
John Pinto, Ph.D., is Howard Crosby Butler Professor for the History of Architecture in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the co-author (with William Macdonald) of Hadrian’s Villa and its Legacy (1995).
Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, Ph.D., Professor in the Dipartimento di Storia delle Arti dell’Universita di Pisa, is an expert on Medici villas and gardens. She is co-author (with Gretchen Hirschauer) of The Flowering of Florence: Botanical Art for the Medici (2002).
PROJECT STEERING COMMITTEE
The steering committee consists of people who have experience either with new media applications, creating databases of visual resources collections, or using online content as a teaching tool.
Jeffrey Cohen, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, Growth and Structure of the Cities Program; Director, Digital Media and Visual Resources Center, Bryn Mawr College
Therese O’Malley, Ph.D., Landscape historian and Associate Dean, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Reuben Rainey, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Virginia
Ann Whiteside, MLS, Fine Arts Librarian, University of Virginia, Former President of the Visual Resources Association
PROJECT STAFF
The project staff is affiliated with the Bard Graduate Center and works closely with the steering committee to reach decisions regarding the appropriate metadata tags for images as well as all other matters relating to the construction of the project website and its searchable database.
Johanna Bauman, Ph.D. (Project Director and Landscape Historian), Visual Media Curator, Bard Graduate Center
Erik de Jong, Ph.D. (Project Advisor and Participating Scholar), Professor, Garden History and Landscape Studies, Bard Graduate Center
Polly Giragosian (Project Assistant), Assistant Curator of Visual Media Resources, Bard Graduate Center
We would like to thank the following institutions for providing support to the project:
LuEsther T. Mertz Library, New York Botanical Garden
The library of the New York Botanical Garden has generously provided several items from its collection of rare books concerning the history of landscape design. It is one of the world’s largest and most important botanical research libraries. Its diverse collections hold irreplaceable materials that date to the twelfth century as well as electronic resources such as e-journals and searchable databases containing the latest results of research and discoveries in plant science and modern horticultural practice. The library and its collections serve both as a scholarly resource and a general-public information center.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden Library
The rare book room of the Library at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has two Renaissance era print editions of Piero de’Crescenzi’s Liber ruralium commodorum. A selection of pages was photographed from these and have been included in the Catena database.
Dumbarton Oaks
The Garden Rare Book Collection of the library at Dumbarton Oaks has donated several digital images of items from its collection, which focuses primarily on landscape and garden history of the western world from the seventeenth century to the present, with the greatest emphasis on the U.S. and Europe. (Please note: The images from Dumbarton Oaks are currently not included in the database, but will be available by January 2006.)
Morgan Library
The The Morgan Library has given permission to use images of its fifteenth-century manuscript of Piero de’Crescenzi’s Liber ruralium commodorum, the most important medieval treatise on agriculture.
University of Virginia Libraries
Acting as consultants and providing resources and training, specialists in digital media and visual resources from the Robertson Media Center and the Fiske-Kimball Fine Arts Library provided assistance in directing the technical aspects of the project.
Update September 23, 2005
Interpretive texts were added to nearly all the featured sites, along with primary texts. Elsewhere in the website greater interactivity was achieved by allowing users the option to browse by site name, location, and work type and illustrating the Glossary. The Bibliography was updated to include both primary and secondary sources.
Update April 18, 2005
An additional 600 images was added to the collection, bringing the total number of images to 1,700. Additional terms were added both to the Search Terms List and the Glossary.
November 1, 2004
Work on Catena began in May 2003, and the first installment of the website and database was launched which included 1,100 images of villas and their gardens.
Catena’s archive of digital images is hosted on Luna Commons, powered by Luna Imaging Systems.
Quick Start Guide for viewing Catena on Luna Commons:
- Browse the collection by clicking through the various categories on the left.
- Search the collection by entering terms in the search bar at the top right.
- Double-click on a thumbnail to open the full-size image and view the image’s cataloguing data on the left.
- From an image record, zoom in to view the image in greater detail.
The images and educational materials in this website are for research and educational use only as dictated by the doctrine of “fair use.” To obtain copyright permission for publication or other purposes, you must contact the copyright holder directly.
Fair use is defined by U.S. copyright law in section 107, which contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also lists four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
