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Information is easy to find on the internet; authority is not.
Officially going public on April 17, 2014, the scholarly research website janbrueghel.net offers authority and accessibility. The creation of U.C. Berkeley art history professor Elizabeth Honig and a team of researchers, the wiki-format site has been three years in the making. janbrueghel.net provides scholars the only complete English-language resource on the 17th century painter Jan Brueghel, organizing the hundreds of paintings, drawings, and oil sketches he and his studio produced. Individual pages within the site document each object’s physical data, provenance, and bibliography. Visitors can browse the site by location and genre, while discovering related works through an extensive array of keywords. For more specialized scholars, the site enables dialogue and original research on Brueghel’s many interrelated images. Accompanying every object page, a discussion page invites registered users to voice opinions or add information about a painting, drawing or oil sketch. Registered users can also form a Library of works for personal study, using the site’s Image Investigation Tool for detailed visual analysis. Designed especially to address the complex nature of Brueghel’s art, the IIT enables users to make a transparency of one picture, resize it, and overlay it onto a second work. This tool, as it continues to develop, will advance the study of visual correlation and pattern use in the early modern workshop environment. We are excited to provide the platform for researchers around the globe to delve deeper into the works of Jan Brueghel and his collaborators.
Information on registered user access and research resources
Visitors are welcome to browse the site’s many features without registered user status. However, scholars, curators, and art dealers are encouraged to contact our team at janbrueghel@gmail.com to request access to our research resources including the library feature and IIT. Our registered users contribute signed posts to the latest scholarship on Brueghel on our discussion pages.
Our energy is endless and so are the Brueghels!
janbrueghel.net is already expanding! If 900 works of art wasn’t enough, researchers from the UC Berkeley based team have begun data collection and design for a constellation of sites including one dedicated to Jan Brueghel’s famous father, Pieter Bruegel. A generous grant from the NSF will allow the project to culminate in an umbrella site, brueghelfamily.net. This online synthesis will draw together data on the art of the extended Brueghel family over several generations.
In gratitude to our dedicated collaborators and funders
The RKD (The Hague), the Rubenianum (Antwerp), Johnny van Haeften and John Davies (London) and the app ArtAuthority. Generous funding has come from CITRIS, UCHRI, The Townsend Center, and UC Berkeley’s URAP program.