The main challenge of the Patrimalp project is the development of an integrated and interdisciplinary Heritage Science, in order to ensure cultural Heritage sustainability, promotion and dissemination in contemporary society. The ambition is to produce the forms of intelligibility of a global and moving process which starts from the collection of the raw material, its transformation into a primitive object, different lives as a material (alterations, degradations, transformations ...), and finally from its election as an object of historical and heritage value and its “promotion” into a work of art. This research is applied to understand how colors have been perceived, conceived, used from the late 15th century to early 18th, by craftsmen, scientists, counterfeiters in a specific field (jewelry) that may be reduplicated in other fields (Smith 2010). To make this study possible, the project has started gathering a large collection of textual material made up of alchemical works and collections of natural or artificial objects collected between the late 15th and the 18th centuries curated and largely digitized in European libraries. To narrow the field of research, the corpus will be focused on treaties about making false gems, with recipes of color. The corpus is mainly printed but few manuscripts will also be helpful as compilation of most practiced readings. To better understand the choice of colors for these "wonders", to better understand the connection between separated fields of knowledge (jewelry, chemical experiences, mineralogy, medical or magic lapidary...) we want to reconstruct the recipes for making colored material in its context of thought, whether technical or symbolic, textual or pictorial manifestations. The corpus will combine treaties used by non-artistic practitioners (scientists, craftsmen…) and practical treaties of colors dedicated to artists. To better understand the choice of colors for these "wonders", we want to reconstruct the knowledge transfer between books, authors, sciences and its disposal in recipes for making colored material in its context of thought, whether technical or symbolic. These recipes will constitute a new body of research for literary people and a new data-study case for understanding color and history of knowledge. This corpus indeed offers modes of verbalization, objects and representation inscribed in complex forms of writing and fiction whose modalities and frames of reference remain to be analyzed (accounts of technical, medical or physico-chemical experiments inscribed in fictional worlds or mythological, symbolic descriptions of artifacts, engravings, or materials collected in nature, mines).
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