A Treasure Trove of Material for Study (2016-2017)

The project aims to achieve the comprehensive digital accessibility and assessment of the Ludwig Burchard Collection. Burchard was the leading Rubens specialist of his century. Given its wealth of unique information on the Flemish art of the 16th and 17th centuries, this collection can be regarded as the Rubenianum’s core collection, besides which it provides the foundations for the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, the annotated oeuvre catalogue of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).

The project can be divided into two parts. The first part is a continuation of the project "Digitizing the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard", previously funded by grants from the Kress Foundation and the government of Flanders. This project involves the online publication of all parts of the Corpus that may be published until 2018, in accordance with an agreement with Brepols Publishers, with links to RKDimages.

The second part is an in-depth continuation of the project completed in 2015 on the archives and documentation of Ludwig Burchard. This first project charted virtually the entire collection with the aid of a scholarly inventory that was made accessible online through the archive description system in Anet. This renewed project will focus on specific objects in the inventory, most notably Burchard’s notebooks, diaries and letters, and examine them in greater depth. It will also look at certain parts of the collection that have been neglected up to now, such as Burchard’s annotated books, his collection of original prints and drawings, and documentation on other early modern artists of the Southern Netherlands.

Interim findings will be published in the Rubenianum newsletters.