Der Statt Rom, from Cosmographei
Welcome to the digital repository of The Early History of the Accademia di San Luca, containing notarial documents, maps, and guidebooks
The Accademia di San Luca was founded in Rome in the late 16th century as an academy for painters, sculptors, and architects. Much about the origins of the Accademia—including its governance, finances, teaching, and membership—has remained hidden in notarial records.
Archival document transcriptions and other research materials published on this website shed light on the breadth of the Accademia’s activities from around 1590 to 1657, including meetings, financial and legal transactions, and property rentals.
This repository is part of the digital project The Early History of the Accademia di San Luca, which also includes a volume of essays concerning the establishment of the Accademia, edited by Peter M. Lukehart; several recent online publications; and a general bibliography.
How to navigate this repository
This site includes three collections related to Rome and the Accademia di San Luca:
- notarial documents
- historical maps
- guidebooks
You can search across our collections by date or words (place-names, artists, notaries, key terms) using the search bar. A search for the word “map,” for example, will yield results of all of our collections’ maps.
Click on Resources (top right) to see a grid of all the items along with document transcriptions (Annotations). You can refine your results with metadata such as key terms, dates, and place-names.
Note: Transcriptions of notarial documents pertain to the Accademia di San Luca only. A document might contain writing that is not transcribed as it is not related to the Accademia.
Our timeline traces key moments in the early history of the Accademia di San Luca: its foundings, its buildings, and its first principi.
Five essays, in English and Italian, explore the early religious buildings that hosted the Guild of Painters, and then the Accademia—the Churches of San Luca, Santa Martina, Santi Luca e Martina, San Giuseppe dei Falegnami, and San Pietro in Carcere.
First launched as a research project at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in 2007, The Early History of the Accademia di San Luca makes accessible archival documents concerning the Accademia’s origins. Supported by past grants from the Getty Foundation and Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and directed by interim dean Peter M. Lukehart, the project team has transcribed and published hundreds of early modern documents in Italian and Latin.
Below are examples of filtered categories (metadata) that can be searched for in the digital repository.