Art TracksFrom Provenance Textsto Structured Data

Louise Lippincott

Curator of Fine ArtsCarnegie Museum of Art

David Newbury

Lead Developer, Art TracksCarnegie Museum of Art

Due Diligence: Legal Ownership

Due Diligence: Establish Authenticity

Due Diligence: Inform Connoisseurship

What can you do with it? The Analog World

Unknown Florentine. Unknown collector, England, 1800? until 1857? [1]; Possibly Miss Rogers, London, in 1857 [2]; Collis P. Huntington [1821-1900], New York, NY, until 1900; by descent to Arabella D. Huntington, his widow [1851-1924], New York, NY, 1900 until 1924 [3]; by descent to Archer Milton Huntington [1870-1955], New York, NY, 1924 until 1925 [4]; bequest to Metropolitan Museum of Art [1870-], New York, 1925 [5]; sold at American Art Galleries, New York, November 20, 1925, no. 106. Arthur E. Braun [-1976], Pittsburgh, until 1976. By descent to Mrs. Paul B. Ernst, his daughter, Pittsburgh, 1978 [6]; gift to Museum, in 1978.

NOTES:

1. In England by the mid 19th century when restored by F. Leedham who was active in London c.1830-1860. 2. Waagen II p. 269. "Agnolo Bronzino. Portrait of Leonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I., Grand Duke of Tuscany; half the size of life. An admirable work, distinguished from most of the pictures by this master by the transparency and warmth of the flesh tones." 3. Collis P. Huntington passed life interest of this work to Arabella, his second wife, upon his death. Arabella married Henry E. Huntington [1850-1927], who was the nephew of Collis P. Huntington, in 1913. She is referred to as "Mrs. Henry E. Huntington" in documents after 1913. 4. Although life interest in this work was transfered to Archer Huntington from Arabella Huntington after her death, he terminated his life interest in 1925. 5. This was the bequest of Collis P. Huntington, but he gave life interest to his wife and then subsequently her son, before Archer terminated his life interest and gave the work in the Metropolitan. Arabella was a prolific collector, and at her death, this work, along with many others, were given by her son to the Metropolitan Museum. This was Metropolitan Museum accession number 25.110.131. 6. Her full name is Elizabeth Braun Ernst.

What can you do with it? The Digital World The CMOA Provenance Standard

A Linked Data representation of theAAM provenance recommendations.

http://www.museumprovenance.org

museum_provenance

Software for automatically parsingprovenance texts into structured data

https://github.com/arttracks/museum_provenance

What can you do with it? The Digital World

Elysa

A user interface for editing and visualizing provenance texts

https://github.com/arttracks/elysa

What can you do with it? The Digital World

The Digital World

Elysa, our user interface for editing provenance.

(https://github.com/arttracks/elysa)

Analog meets Digital: First Encounters

Analog/Curators• We have lots of data!• We guesstimate a lot!• Messy human behavior!• Paintings, books, documents!• Inches, miles, oceans!• Years, decades, centuries!• Easy to do in my world!• Not possible in my world!

Digital/Technologists• No you don’t!• We are ridiculously exact!• Obsessive rule followers!• Numbers, dates, code!• Pixels and bytes!• Nanoseconds, next week!• Really hard in my world!• Easy to solve in my world!

Art Tracks: Advancing scholarship

• Create bigger data sets by standardizing and sharing data

• Data mining & pattern detection• Visualizations• New questions

Art Tracks: Disrupting Museums& Art History• Objects become data;

collections become databases• Data that can be reused, and

grows more valuable over time• Multiple stories become possible• A digital enterprise erasing

institutional & disciplinary boundaries

Event-Based Digital Art History

• Yale Center for British Art

• Freer and Sackler Galleries

• Getty Provenance Index

• Itinera, University of Pittsburgh

• Johnson Collection, PMA

• Mapping Titian, Boston University

• Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, CMU

• American Art Collaborative

• Palladio, Stanford

…and many, many more.