Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture, and Society

FAIN: PW-296829-24

University of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)
Niall Atkinson (Project Director: July 2023 to present)
Anne Conyers Leader (Co Project Director: April 2024 to present)

A project to build a platform that would bring together data from five digital humanities projects focused on the cultural history of late medieval and early modern Florence.

Florence Illuminated, a free online research platform, will be a repeatable model that resolves the redundancies of digital humanities projects on similar topics to offer a streamlined way to share research and build on it. The resulting website will be an extensible platform for data integration and digital collaboration that maintains the autonomy of participating collections. This proof of concept will produce a dataset drawn from five projects on Florentine cultural history to illuminate the city’s social and material infrastructure, one of the most dynamic urban phenomena of early modern Europe. Our platform will allow collaborative exploration of the city’s cultural phenomena—not as a series of discrete well-known artworks, buildings, or elite individuals, but as a comprehensive aggregate of diverse people, groups, spaces, and objects that all contributed to the city’s growth and diversification—on a scale unprecedented in scholarship on Renaissance Florence.

Media Coverage

Project Consortium Awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Brian Laubscher
Publication: The Columns
Date: 5/8/2024
Abstract: Write up in W&L campus newsletter. "George Bent, David Pfaff and Mackenzie Brooks from Washington and Lee University are part of a consortium that was selected by The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to receive one of the organization’s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) grant. The consortium, headquartered at the University of Chicago’s Department of Art History, received $349,969 in total to fund a humanities project titled “Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture and Society.” The project seeks to build a platform that will bring together data from five individual digital humanities projects focused on the cultural history of late medieval and early modern Florence...."
URL: https://columns.wlu.edu/project-consortium-awarded-a-national-endowment-for-the-humanities-grant/

Florence Illuminated project to receive generous NEH grant (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Sara Patterson
Publication: Humanities Newsletter
Date: 7/9/2024
Abstract: Humanities Assoc. Prof. Niall Atkinson is spearheading a comprehensive, collaborative, multi-university digital research platform called Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture, and Society. The National Endowment for the Humanities is supporting this crucial scholarship with a grant of $349,969. It’s one of 238 humanities projects in 2024 to “help preserve and expand public access to important historical records and humanities collections at archives, libraries, museums, and universities” nationwide, according to the NEH.
URL: https://humanities.uchicago.edu/articles/2024/07/florence-illuminated-project-receive-generous-neh-grant

RSA Members Awarded National Endowment for the Humanities HCRR and Richard Lounsbery Grants (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Renaissance Society of America
Publication: RSA News and Announcements: Awards and Prizes
Date: 10/16/2024
Abstract: RSA Members Awarded National Endowment for the Humanities HCRR and Richard Lounsbery Grants Wednesday, October 16, 2024 Independent digital humanities projects seek to build a freely available online platform for collecting and sharing data and research on the cultural history of late medieval and Renaissance Florence. RSA Members Niall Atkinson (Associate Professor, University of Chicago), Anne Leader (Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia), George Bent (Professor, Washington & Lee University), Peter Sposato (Associate Professor, Indiana University), and Lorenzo Vigotti (Università di Bologna) have secured over $400,000 funding for their collaborative digital humanities project Florence Illuminated.
URL: https://www.rsa.org/news/684643/RSA-Members-Awarded-National-Endowment-for-the-Humanities-HCRR-and-Richard-Lounsbery-Grants-.htm

OLLI at Auburn instructor receives more than $400,000 in grants from National Endowment for the Humanities, Richard Lounsbery Foundation (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
Publication: Auburn Insider
Date: 1/23/2025
Abstract: Local art historian to present lecture Jan. 29 Anne Leader, an OLLI at Auburn University guest speaker, recently received more than $400,000 in grants and will present, “How Will They Remember Me? Tomb Reuse in Renaissance Florence,” at Pebble Hill.
URL: https://wire.auburn.edu/content/ocm/2025/01/230927-anne-leader-olli-grant.php

NEH Awards Grant To Florence Project (Media Coverage)
Publication: The News-Gazzette
Date: 6/5/2024
Abstract: Three W&L Professors Involved In Digital Effort George Bent, David Pfaff and Mackenzie Brooks from Washington and Lee University are part of a consortium that was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to receive one of the organization’s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) grant.
URL: https://www.thenews-gazette.com/article/6604,neh-awards-grant-to-florence-project

Florence Illuminated Project to Receive NEH Grant (Media Coverage)
Publication: Neubauer Collegium for Culture & Society News
Date: 7/9/2024
Abstract: UChicago art historian Niall Atkinson has won a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a digital research platform entitled “Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture, and Society.” Atkinson and a team of scholars and experts are integrating data from five digital humanities projects into a public, web-based interface, including a geo-referenced map of 1427 Florence. This ambitious experiment in “digital interoperability,” as Atkinson puts it, will be run on the University of Chicago’s Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment, a computational platform known as OCHRE. Building on work Atkinson and his colleagues conducted on the Visualizing the Changing Spatial and Social Ecology of Renaissance Florence research project at the Neubauer Collegium, the new project will enhance access to important historical records and collections, supporting new research and exploration into late-medieval and early-modern Florence.
URL: https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/news/florence-illuminated-project-to-receive-neh-grant

Associated Products

The CATASTO project (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: The CATASTO project
Abstract: Presented overview of project and Florence Illuminated methodology to the Digital Literacy workshop series at Villa I Tatti as part of discussion of CATASTO portion of the collaboration. NEH grant and all five projects referenced.
Author: Niall Atkinson
Author: Carmen Jaramillo Caswell
Date: 5/15/2024
Location: I Tatti: The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy and zoom

Florence As It Was: San Remigio 3D point-cloud model (Web Resource)
Title: Florence As It Was: San Remigio 3D point-cloud model
Author: George R. Bent
Author: Florence As It Was
Abstract: Florence As It Was is a digital project that aims to reconstruct the city the way it appeared at the end of the fifteenth century. Users can review, inspect, tour, and visit the streets, palaces, churches, shops, and offices that formed the fabric of one of Europe’s most vibrant cities. They will find images, people, payments, relationships, literary references, contemporary descriptions, and sometimes even music related to the individual structures that shaped a Florentine’s daily experience in 1500.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://florenceasitwas.wlu.edu/architecture/san-remigio
Primary URL Description: Object page for Church of San Remigio on Florence As It Was website.
Secondary URL: http://https://3d.wlu.edu/v21/pages/Remigio/Remigio.html
Secondary URL Description: More than twenty-five Florentine institutions or independent buildings built before 1500 have been scanned by the Florence As It Was team since 2018. The San Remigio model is under construction in Fall 2024. Most of these scanned structures have been edited, modeled, and posted online. Data has been collected using two LiDAR scanners produced by Leica Geosystems: the BLK360 and the RTC360. Point clouds have been edited and modeled with Cyclone Register 360 and, in some cases, enhanced through a program called Reality Capture. These models are exported to an open source program called Potree, where they are made available to the public gratis.

How Will They Remember Me? Tomb Reuse in Renaissance Florence (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: How Will They Remember Me? Tomb Reuse in Renaissance Florence
Abstract: In 1384 a marble slab carrying an effigy was installed at the foot of the stairs before the high altar of the Badia Fiorentina, the oldest monastery in the city of Florence, Italy. The portrait showed the silk merchant and magistrate Filippo di Ser Giovanni Pandolfini. Perhaps contradicting his portrait, the inscription around the perimeter of the slab indicated that the grave was not only for Filippo but also for his descendants. Both women and men were buried under their forbear’s slab from 1384 through 1663 when the church floor was redone. The singularity of the tomb’s portrait effigy masks the repeated use of this gravesite and raises interesting questions about what it meant to be a tomb honoree in the Renaissance, who was remembered, and how.
Author: Anne Leader
Date: 1/29/2025
Location: Pebble Hill, Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities, Auburn University
Primary URL: https://wire.auburn.edu/content/ocm/2025/01/230927-anne-leader-olli-grant.php
Primary URL Description: Announcement of lecture

Florence Illuminated Online Research Enviornment (Web Resource)
Title: Florence Illuminated Online Research Enviornment
Author: Carmen Jaramillo Caswell
Abstract: Florence offers scholars, teachers, and students a rich environment in which to pursue historical questions and engage with primary sources thanks to its unparalleled documentary archive and the preservation of its historical built environment by bringing together various digital humanities projects on the city. At present they include: Catasto of 1427, Digital Sepoltuario, Florence As It Was, Militia, and Pupilli.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://ochre.uchicago.edu/project/fiore
Primary URL Description: Home page for project, under construction

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