To develop our thoughts on a fundamental and complex notion to the art theory, the LexArt team invited two experts on drawing: Lizzie Boubli, associated curator at the Louvre Museum and researcher (CNRS) and Ilaria Andreoli, researcher (CNRS), both members of the project DIGA – International data Artistic Genetics (ITEM).

After a presentation of the two projects and of their approaches, common issues emerge as the difficulty of visualizing, through a database, shifting meanings of terms and translations and the changes from one language and one period to another. The teams focuse on the word “drawing” to illustrate this issue which lies at the heart of scientific issues of the LexArt project. Gradually, two groups of meaning emerge, with on one hand “drawing” understood within the concept of the Idea and Invention, and on the other hand, “drawing” apprehended as a step in the concrete genesis of the art work like the draft, the sketch. Distinctions that then lead to the establishment of families such as composition, disposition, mind or judgment of the painter, imagination and the notion of genius, which belong to the conception of the art work on one part, and on the other one, line, contour, involved in both the materiality of the art work but also in the painter’s apprenticeship. In the example of these major categories, the project investigator proposes to work on the development of conceptual fields to structure data of the future digital tool while highlighting family of terms that reflect the reconciliations or on the contrary, the ruptures, that are slowly operating within different authors. The study of those conceptual fields will be initiated on the basis of specific books and then, tested for our entire corpus to evaluate their relevance.

A final seminar section is devoted to books described as works with “reduced textual content”, such as those of Gerard Audran, of Crispijn van de Passe, Johann Daniel Preissler or Charles Errard and Charles Perrault. All are examined and each attached to specific terms according to illustrations and some parts of texts they present. Les proportions du corps humain mesurées sur les plus belles figures de l’antiquité by Audran is thus associated to the terms “proportion” and “antique”, the Gründliche Anleitung welcher man sich im Nachzeichnen schöner Landschaften (…) by Preissler is for its part attached to the terms “landscape” and “proportion”.