Digital Tools and Technical Views. The Intersection of Digital Art History and Technical Art History in a Digital Archive on the Painting Technique of Caravaggio and his Followers

Digital Art History is currently moving into a new phase. As a result of the ongoing digitization and creation of huge digital repositories, collecting literary sources, images, historical and technical data, new perspectives point to data mining and data/image processing. The article reviews the main data/image bases dealing with technical and material studies on works of art. Technical Art History and Digital Art History are taking on complementary tasks, since the online viewers implemented by some digital archives – i.e., The Bosch Research and Conservation Project, the Bibliotheca Hertziana's Technical data/image base on Caravaggio and his followers – provide tools valid for both representation and research. The state of the art of technical research on Caravaggio and its critical issues are also sketched out, in order to propose a methodological approach considering the painting process rather than the painting materials. Such a perspective aims at tracing the "time of creation" and can profit highly from the digital tools for integrating and representing technical data and multispectral imaging. A theoretical premise to the approach is suggested, looking back to Henri Focillon's position and to the role he played in the International Conference for the Study of Scientific Methods in the Examination and Conservation of Artworks, held in Rome in October 1930. Finally, the work-in-progress "Technical data/image base on Caravaggio and his followers" of the Max Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte/Bibliotheca Hertziana is presented within the context of the historical and theoretical framework, describing the establishment of technical research in art history.