The Still Life Thesaurus of the Zeri Photo Archive is a controlled glossary designed to organize and handle terms corresponding to objects in compositions. It was devised bearing in mind both the iconographic material of the Zeri Photo Archive and the main thesauri used by various institutions to file artworks, photographs and books: especially the Thesaurus Iconographique invented by François Garnier in 1984 which was used by Base Joconde and the Archivio Fotografico Scala, among others.
The Thesaurus sets three hierarchical levels: 17 types of object (e.g. vegetables │ animals │ musical instruments) to which there correspond 64 subtypes (e.g. flowers, fruit │ mammals │ wind instruments, stringed instruments). These in turn contain implementable lists relating to the specific objects (e.g. carnation, tulip │ hare │ recorder, lute).
Explore the thesaurus shows the structure of the glossary. From it one can surf the tree from types to individual items, from which last one passes to the relevant files.
Using Research by term one may visualize all the terms in alphabetical order or search for them by special operators.
Each term in the Thesaurus is accompanied by an:
- Image illustrating the feature in question, obtained by isolating one significant detail from a composition
- Ambit note, varying according to the type. In a botanical or zoological ambit it will correspond to the name of the species; for musical instruments it will be the SACHS code, and so on.
- Linguistic variant, or English translation of the term. Thus with Still Lifes, beginning by subject, one can type in queries directly in English.
Within the artworks fact-sheets (OA) other Specifications are given as to precise features of the object within a composition: e.g. what music appears on a score, what kind of fruit, flower, etc. it is.