Developed by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and partners all over the world, this new database serves as a powerful new digital resource for understanding the history of books.
November marked the inauguration of a compelling new digital resource hosted by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies (SIMS). BASIRA, or Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art, is an open-access online database of representations of books and other textual documents in the figurative arts between the years 1300 and 1600.
With the launch of the search portal, users anywhere can browse and query thousands of images of books from a constantly expanding dataset. Dozens of aspects of a book’s depiction can be investigated, including details of its binding, bookmarks, contents, and position. In addition, users can search for the particulars of who or what is interacting with the book, and how that action is taking place. The new resource is designed to appeal to students and scholars across a wide range of disciplines, from book history and art history to musicology, gender and sexuality studies, comparative literature and languages, religious studies, museum studies, book conservation, library science, and more. Over the coming years, our project team, with the help of an international board of advisors, plans to build BASIRA into a major global resource for all those interested in historical depictions of the book.
Founded in 2014, BASIRA is largely the brainchild of independent scholar and SIMS research associate Barbara Williams Ellertson who, after a wide-ranging career in book design, turned her energies to the exploration of the depiction of documents in late medieval and early modern art. In 2019, Ellertson partnered with Penn Libraries staff, including Special Collections Digital Content Programmer Doug Emery, and me, the SIMS Lawrence J. Schoenberg Curator, to transform the database and enrich its content. With the support of a transformative digital humanities grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 2019, and with additional student support from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, the BASIRA team was able to work with Performant Software LLC to produce both a robust back end for database enrichment and the compelling public search interface described below.
The new BASIRA search interface is intuitive yet powerful, unlocking a world of previously inaccessible historical information. Users begin with a list of document records, which show summaries of a particular depiction of a book or book-like object. By inputting keywords and selecting facets, the result list can be narrowed down accordingly. Facets include particulars of the artwork (what, when, where) and its current location, as well as aspects of its iconography and cultural context.
The most detailed facet groups concern the book depiction itself; a myriad of details can be searched, including general details like format, type, and size, as well as external features such as bindings, fastenings, bookmarks, and decoration. What color is the book’s cover? Is anything written on the spine? What type of endband does it have? How many bookmarks? What kind? Finally, if the book is shown open, can its contents be read? What language and script? Is anything else shown on the page? The possibilities are endless and the details are endlessly fascinating.
What is more, in BASIRA every document is engaged in one or more action. Most commonly, artworks depict books being held or touched or read (frequently all three simultaneously) by someone or something depicted in the work, but they can also be flying, burning, leaning, supporting, being sung from, and more. Each transitive action involves an entity: a person or thing performing the action. This entity has various characteristics and can be undertaking the action with a body part. Thus we can search for all images of female laypersons holding or touching a book with a thumb, even if we don’t have a particular individual in mind. The selected facets show up at the top of the search page and can be deselected at will.
Once a user has located one or more relevant results, clicking on any document summary brings up a detail page for that particular depiction. Here, we can see all the details of the first record in the search results, a book held by a woman thought to be Cassandra Cavalcanti Bandini.
In addition to a beautiful detail image, we see a summary of the actions taking place, as well as the external features and, if applicable, the internal features of the document. Note that each record is stable and has a unique BASIRA identifier (in this case, “documents/2492”). Clicking on the navigation menu in the upper left corner allows us to explore all elements of that record, namely the encompassing Visual Context, Physical Component, and Artwork. This menu is particularly useful for complex works of art like altarpieces and fresco cycles, which may contain many physical parts, individual figures, and depictions of books (Raphael’s School of Athens has 13 documents shown over 10 different visual contexts).
Users can investigate the other related records, then return to their search result list and continue browsing. All record types can be cited, and URLs can be shared at will. From the main search page, users can also contact the BASIRA team, visit the project website for news and updates, and suggest new content and contribute photos through a Google form. Future development plans include the ability to save searches and view one’s search history in the database. New records are being added weekly, and long-term plans involve expanding the scope and chronological range of the resource significantly.
As a project, BASIRA aims to be a central resource for all those who are interested in historical depictions of the book. After a sneak-peek preview at the Workshop in the History of Material Texts on November 13, 2023, the official launch of the search interface was held during the 16th annual Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, titled The Image of the Book: Representing the Codex from Antiquity to the Present. The symposium featured 16 speakers who investigated all kinds of historical depictions of books, from wax tablets in Greco-Roman antiquity to pop bibliographic illustrations in playing cards from Magic: The Gathering. Several speakers used BASIRA as the basis of their presentations.
The proceedings began with a keynote address at the Free Library of Philadelphia by Jeffrey Hamburger of Harvard University, who investigated the manifold ways in which authorship could be depicted in high-medieval frontispieces. Over the next two days, speakers discussed the ways books and other documents were depicted across space and time, from 12th-century Germany to Ming dynasty China to the Ottoman Court. Additionally, there was a special presentation of an array of extraordinary book-shaped objects (“Blooks”) by conservator/collector Mindell Dubansky of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a live demo of a Virtual Reality manuscript-viewing environment by Sanna Zonno of the Huntington Library and the University of Southern California.
As a project, BASIRA aims to foster connections among scholars, curators, conservators, and all other persons interested in book history and the visual arts. The BASIRA team encourages web users everywhere to explore the database for research and teaching (see these sample student assignments), propose new artworks for inclusion through our online portal, and contact the project team with any questions or remarks. Follow BASIRA on Instagram and Facebook for a steady stream of fascinating project content and updates.
Want to learn more about BASIRA? Join us for an online talk on March 22 about how students and scholars can use this powerful database. Register now.
March 13, 2024