The Classical Art Research Centre is raising funds to digitize and put online almost 160 notebooks from the Beazley Archive. The notebooks contain comments and sketches by Sir John Beazley which record his early observations of Athenian vases in many European and North American collections from around 1910 on.
The notebooks form part of the Beazley Archive's large manuscript collection, which also comprises some 200,000 later, loose-leaf notes and tracings by Beazley. Rarely seen before, Beazley's notebooks give a fascinating insight into his working methods as he began to build his lists of attributions, using a form of 'Morellian analysis' to identify the hands behind individual pot paintings.
Thanks to the generosity of donors, CARC has already raised sufficient funds to scan the notebooks and put them online - a development expected in the course of 2013-14. If sufficient financial support can be found, the next phase of the project is to identify the vases in many of the individual drawings and notes and to integrate images of the manuscript pages into the Beazley Archive Pottery Database so that they can be freely studied alongside photographs and other information on the vases.
New: Read about the Beazley Notebooks Project in Minerva magazine, May/June 2013.
To support the project please contact peter.stewart@classics.ox.ac.uk, or give online.
Below: Beazley's sketches of an amphora attributed to the Kleophrades Painter (early 5th century BC) together with a photograph of the vase.
