Disiecta Membra: construction and reconstruction in a digital catalog of Greek sculpture

Abstract

Article included in Part 2 of a special issue devoted to the theme: Metadata and organizing educational resources on the Internet. Ancient sculpture is fragmentary. Some sculptures exist only in pieces, others have been split up and many of the ancient world's most famous statues now survive only in multiple copies created later than the originals. Discusses the evolution of a Greek sculpture catalogue on the Perseus Project and its recent redesign that brings the visitor's attention to these complexities of ancient art. A data field in the Fourth Dimension database categorizes artworks according to their degree of entirety and automatically generates links to related objects. More than one relation for each object is permitted, which encourages users to investigate the whole range of possible connections. This multirelational database enables the next phase of catalogue development, which will include the construction of series of copies, the contextualization of groups of sculptures and the reconstruction of lost originals.