Photo Library

The Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Institute of Art History houses – and makes available to scholars – a very rich photo library, home to around one million photographs, more than 300.000 of which are mounted on card and are freely accessible through a series of special consultation drawers.

The remaining positives are split up among some thirty photo collections acquired by the institute since the 1950s and now housed in the spaces of the Manica Lunga library. Worthy of mention among them are the personal photo libraries of leading scholars such as Giuseppe Fiocco and Rodolfo Pallucchini, the very first directors of the Institute of Art History; the collections belonging to art historians Evelyn Sandberg Vavalà and Raymond Van Marle; the collection of the Venetian antiquarian Ettore Viancini, and lastly the Fototeca Italiana (Italian Photo Library), put together by the photographer of the Superintendency of Florence, Nicolò Cipriani.

Since 1981, the Institute of Art History has also housed the Regional Photo Library, including more than 60,000 reproductions of works of art preserved in museums throughout the Veneto region.

Finally, the Institute’s scientific research and cataloguing activities have led to the establishment of a series of photographic atlases: genuine catalogues of works of art that may be consulted online.