About
InscrChArt
Inscriptions on Chinese Artworks Database (Prototype)
ABOUT
InscrChArt brings together inscriptions on Chinese artworks from different museum collections in a single searchable database.
Chinese artworks were often inscribed by their makers, patrons, and later viewers. Millions of these inscriptions exist across artworks in public and private collections around the world, and they sometimes number up to several dozen on a single artwork. These texts range from simple labels with a date, place, and name, to complicated essays and poem cycles that contain many layers of cultural allusion. Modern scholars use these primary texts to answer a wide variety of historical questions. Social interactions among elites, provenance histories of artworks, and changes in aesthetics over time can be all be tracked in these inscriptions, among many other possibilities.
Currently, a number of factors hamper researchers that use inscriptions on Chinese artworks. The modern institutions that care for these artworks, such as museums and library special collections, tend to favor their image-bearing portions rather than the inscriptions. Furthermore, few institutions have had either the resources or the specialists to fully transcribe the inscriptions on all Chinese artworks in their collection. Even fewer institutions have been able to make their transcriptions available in searchable online catalogs. This means that interested researchers often must travel from collection to collection to look at objects in person in order to know what information the inscriptions may hold; an extremely inefficient method.
InscrChArt, once complete, will alleviate some of these problems. It will give researchers a primary tool for identifying inscriptions related to the research questions. It will centralize information from multiple institutions in one database, encouraging connections between historically-related artworks that now exist isolated from one another; A single database search for an artist’s name, patron name, historical place, or aesthetic term will reveal its relative commonness across the span of known Chinese artworks. Eventually, with enough funding and input, it will account for inscriptions on all Chinese artworks across public collections, even those without specialists or resources to do in-house transcriptions.
CURRENT STATE
Currently, InscrChArt is a prototype database. It is designed to prove the usefulness of the idea and to gather feedback for an improved, larger version of the database. The entries are now limited in scope to inscriptions on painting and calligraphy from two dynasties [the Song (960-1279 ) and Yuan (1279-1368)] and to three museums that have already cataloged the inscriptions on their artworks and made that information publicly available [Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Taibei National Palace Museum].
FUTURE GOALS
The ambition is to catalog all inscriptions on Chinese artworks in American, European, and East Asian collections. This will involve institutional collaboration and future funding for transcription specialists.
CAVEATS
Transcription of classical Chinese text is a difficult task, and those in this database may well include errors of reading or omission. Researchers who use information from this site to make claims should always double-check against the original artworks or against images of them, which are available either through the links provided or by contacting each institution directly to see the object in person.
Full image sets of these artworks and their inscription are not always available, and are furthermore the property of their holding institutions, each of which differs in reproduction policies. Therefore, images of the transcribed documents are not always provided. Users should either use the links provided to find images or contact the holding institution directly for images.