The primary purpose of the digital tool is documentary: it must gather all the data that will allow researchers to reflect on the various terms and concepts of the artistic vocabulary in Early Modern Europe. Semantic and conceptual cross-references between fundamental terms and concepts in the theory of art will be made, based on a corpus of multilingual texts (French, German, Dutch, English and Latin). The inclusion of translations of these concepts will ensure the linguistic dimension. The database will also contain images and references to art works. All these data will be interconnected with one another.

In order to reach this result, the tool will combine documentary information and a digital library, thus allowing:

– to offer a comprehensive visualization of sources necessary to grasp the thought of an author (or group of authors) about a particular concept or a larger way, an idea of ​​his conception of art

– to provide a corpus of European art theory books published between 1600 and 1750 in France, Germany, England and the Netherlands

– to promote a targeted reading by comparing, for each concept, its various definitions taken from the texts

– to show the evolution of the meaning of terms and concepts between 1600 and 1750 in transalpine Europe

– to show the circulation of terms and concepts from one region to another

– to facilitate rapid access to secondary literature (bibliography or images) on each of the notions

– to develop complex semantic networks that will demonstrate the nuances and changes of meanings for each of the terms

The lexical data entries include functions and analyses that will offer users the possibility to conduct an autonomous and personal query within these data to build their own research. The possibilities will range from basic to complex, from amateur to professional. The deployment of the data is organized in a way that allows for a largely modulated research (artistic, literary, historical, semantic, geographical, etc.) and with components that can be crossed.