Digital Sepoltuario

Digital Sepoltuario is a proposed online research collection cataloguing the tombs, chapels, altars, and other church memorials of medieval and Renaissance Florence. It will be published by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia.
==Description==
Beginning in the late thirteenth century, Florentine churches came to contain many stone plaques, slabs, and coffins, often serving multiple generations of the same family. The city saw explosive growth in private lay burials in the 14th and early 15th centuries.
 These burials are documented in the archival tomb registers known as sepoltuari, which are housed at the State Archives of Florence (Archivio di Stato di Firenze) and other manuscript collections in the city. These archives are notable for their quantity and variety considering their period of origin: "Historians are drawn to Florence because of the unparalleled riches…of the archival and manuscript sources that permit in-depth inquiries into more and more varied questions than is possible anywhere else."
Digital Sepoltuario is intended to be the first internet-accessible, interactive catalogue of the tombs of Florence and will be part of the growing number of online resources that allow users to study Florentine archival collections via the internet. Its entries transcribe tomb descriptions found in the manuscript tomb registers, including the best known sepoltuario written by Florentine antiquarian Stefano Rosselli between 1650 and 1657. 
For example, entry number 23 in the section describing the tombs of the Badia of Florence, shown at right, records that "From the door of the choir towards the organ, there is a round, marble tomb cover with a coat of arms of gold and red vertical stripes, and an inscription: The tomb of Ser Piero di Antonio da Vinci, and his descendants. In the year of our Lord 1474." This tomb belonged to the Florentine notary and father of Leonardo da Vinci. His monument would see at least twenty-one burials underneath it between 21 February 1474 when Ser Piero laid his first wife Francesca di Ser Giuliano Lanfredini (1449-1474) to rest and 19 March 1614 when Giovanni di Piero di Guglielmo da Vinci, Ser Piero's great-grandson, was the last to be buried in the family sepulcher. The funeral for Ser Piero himself was held in July 1504 after he died at age seventy-eight. The tomb no longer survives, for it was pulled up from the church floor during extensive renovations undertaken at the Badia in the later seventeenth century. 
Digital Sepoltuario offers more information than any single manuscript sepoltuario can by enhancing each relatively simple tomb description with art historical facts about the form, materials, and decoration of each monument as well as information about the social, professional, and political lives of those buried underneath. Coverage spans the decades leading up to the Black Death of 1348 through the successive waves of epidemic that plagued the city into the 18th century, when Grand Duke of Tuscany Pietro Leopoldo (ruled 1765-90) commissioned an extramural cemetery intended to house all Florentine burials.
== References ==
== External links ==
* Digital Sepoltuario - University of Virginia
* Anne Leader presents Digital Sepoltuario in Florence
* Affiliated Projects | DECIMA
* Anne Leader | University of Virginia - Academia.edu
* Browse the Collection - Kress Foundation
* Institute for Advanced Technology in the ... - University of Virginia
Category:History of Florence
Category:Inscriptions
Category:Online databases
Category:Online research methods
Category:Project-Class Internet articles
Category:University of Virginia