Perspectiva+

In collaboration with the Biblioteca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History) in Rome this research project developed a digital platform [Perspectiva+] for the history of optics and its various appropriations in the decorative and visual arts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Taking as a starting point artists’ reception and appropriation of Alhacen’s De aspectibus, the treatise that shaped the science of optics from the eleventh century onwards, the digital platform integrates Latin manuscripts, printed editions, and translations of Alhacen’s treatise with historical and modern comments in the manner of a virtual workbench, enabling interdisciplinary research and collaboration for and between historians of science and art historians.