Cooperation Census and DFG project "Jacopo Strada's Magnum ac Novum Opus" (2nd phase)

Jacopo Strada’s “Magnum ac Novum Opus” is the most comprehensive corpus on ancient coins from the 16th century and therefore an essential source for the history of numismatics. This 36-volume manuscript work is an illustrated corpus of coins of the Roman Republic and the (Holy) Roman Empire from Julius Caesar to Charles V. At the same time, it is a corpus of drawings of the highest quality. In particular, it consists of four volumes in the British Library with coins of the Roman Republic, and of 29 volumes in the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha with coins of the Roman Empire. Furthermore, there are two volumes in the ?sterreichische Nationalbibliothek with drawings that are very close to those of the “Magnum ac Novum Opus” and therefore originally were probably intended to be part of it. The project aims on analysing the coin drawings together with the coin descriptions and on defining the historical and art-historical context of the entire corpus. This includes the digitisation of the drawings and descriptions and their structured storage in a database. The best choice for this task is the database of the “Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance”, founded by Fritz Saxl, Richard Krautheimer and Karl Lehman at the Warburg Institute in London in 1946 and today an Academy’s project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte at Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin. The Census’ online database, in accordance with the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities”, provides continuous and worldwide access to Strada’s digitised coin corpus.
In its second phase, the project will study and analyse the volumes no. 16 to 29 of drawings from Gotha.