About the project

Besides being a particularly precious part of the collection, the Individual Graphic Sheets of the Albrecht Haupt Collection (GESAH) are so unique and cover such a broad contextual and technical spectrum that they offer the greatest potential to international researchers of construction and fine arts. And yet this collection is only known to a very small circle of experts who were only able to use parts of it for their work. The key problems are the lack of specialist indexing and the difficulty in accessing the sheets. In this respect, the collection’s heterogeneity poses the greatest challenge.

After having been rearranged several times and reorganised in part over the past decades, the Individual Graphic Sheets are presently arranged only rudimentarily by formal and geographical criteria, and indexed in a card file system. Since it is not possible to systematically access the graphic sheets by content or to specifically search them by subject, their usability is severely restricted. The aim of the project is to fully digitise this high-quality stock of Individual Graphic Sheets from the collection that researchers from home and abroad have found difficult to access in the past. In the future, the items will be indexed by subject and made freely accessible online in a bid to give new impetus to research in this area.

Inadequately indexed graphics collections such as the Albrecht Haupt Collection are predestined for collaborative processing with the use of digital and virtual methods, because they appeal to different (expert) communities. Processing is therefore carried out in close cooperation with project partners from various specialist disciplines who are based at various departments of TIB and at the Chair of History of Architecture and Urban Development at Leibniz Universität Hannover’s Institute for History and Theory of Architecture.

The project is composed of three main task fields and objectives:

1. Digitisation

Objects from the Individual Graphic Sheets of the Albrecht Haupt Collection that have not yet been digitised will be digitised in line with the DFG Practical Guidelines and ingested to the Rosetta Digital Archive.

2. Indexing

a. Basic indexing will be carried out for all Individual Graphic Sheets based on existing information and provisional attributions.

b. The part of the collection containing unique architectural drawings will undergo thorough specialist indexing. In this connection, the provenance history and the genesis of the collection will be investigated for the first time.

3. Indexing environment

On the basis of Vitro software, an indexing environment (GESAH website with links via the TIB Portal) that meets the specialist requirements will be created for processing in an expert dialogue that is independent of space and time. This development should set the technical conditions and indexing environment for the further thorough indexing of the whole GESAH collection for subsequent projects. Data, data models and software should also be made available open source to comparable indexing projects.

Object of the month

December 2020

Josef Hager, View and floor plan of a sacral portal architecture, around 1760

washed pen and ink drawing

TIB Slg. Albrecht Haupt, kl. D. Z. 11:7

The sheet of a multi-storey portal architecture shown here testifies to the high compositional and drawing mastery of the Bohemian artist Josef Hager (1726-1781). The depiction of the Madonna with the Child Jesus and a saint (probably St. Luke, who could be represented here with a canvas and a book (Gospel)) sketched in the upper field of the picture possibly indicates a design in an ecclesiastical or monastic context. But perhaps Hager is also alluding here to St. Luke as the patron saint of painters and thus to his self-image as an artist drawing from faith. Hager, who trained under the painter Johann Karl Kowarz in Prague and under the scenographers Antonio d'Agostino and Antonio Galli da Bibiena in Vienna, made a name for himself in the Bohemian and Moravian regions, especially with his late Baroque trompe l'oeil cupolas and illusionist altar architecture. Although only a few altar projects built by Hager are known, he liked to refer to himself as an "architect"; this is also stated in a note on the verso of the drawing.

The Haupt Collection contains a total of six sheets by Hager with illusionist altar architecture, trompe l'oeil cupola designs and fantasy sceneries. These drawings provide an important insight into the historical context of the collection: they are all marked with a note stating that they come from the renowned collection of the Bohemian Count Franz Joseph von Sternberg (1763-1830) - from 1780 “von Sternberg-Manderscheid”. After von Sternbergs death the collection was sold in Prague 1831 and probably the sheets came into the collection of Albrecht Haupt via an intermediate owner.

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