From Digital Library to Virtual Museum:

Making the most of illustrated books for research in Art history and Iconography

Fátima Díez-Platas

Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

This contribution aims to present the opportunity for research in art history, iconography and mythology offered by the way of presenting, studying and analyzing the ancient illustrated books that the Biblioteca Digital Ovidiana project (www.ovidiuspictus.net, from now on BDO) performs on the illustrated editions of the Ovidian works, ranging from the XVth to the XIXth century and contained in Spanish public and private libraries. Focusing on illustrated books, and on the illustrations themselves, the structure and the features of the information displayed on each edition entails a virtual process of “dismembering” the book to extract the iconographic information.

Illustrated books are full of images, miniatures or engravings that accompany, explain, quote, or “translate in images” the textual contents. Being so attached to the text in different ways, illustrations within the book are submitted to the book structure and the requirements of the page that force them to be apprehended in the same way as the text, and the page, that is, consecutively, submitted to the concurrence of time. Book illustrations thus acquire some textual or “bookish qualities”. On the other hand, book illustrations are images, figurative proposals that count on the ability of the images as medium to convey information in an immediate way. The illustrations, the engravings within a book are related to each other by the unity and the narrative or discursive sequence of the text, that they illustrate. Therefore, the images within a book are submitted to sequence and time that make impossible the complete and simultaneous apprehension of the full illustration of the text.

The images contained in the BDO which are the digitized engravings that illustrated the editions of the Ovidian works, compound a sort of different galleries of a virtual museum that are able to convey the full figurative content of each edition. Using the gallery format of displaying (comparable to the page of results of a search in Google images), the display of the engravings of each edition allows the viewer to capture in an almost immediate way, which is peculiar to images, the whole figurative version of the text.