PHAROS is an international consortium comprising 14 of the world’s leading photo archives documenting art history. Its aim is to set up a common research platform linking the various institutes’ digitalized images and metadata, so as to form an interactive research tool available to the community of art historians.

Ever since PHAROS (Photo Archives Online Search) was constituted in January 2013, the Federico Zeri Foundation has been a member. It is a consortium that links 14 internationally renowned institutions holding photo collections of art historical interest: the Biblioteca Hertziana; Bildarchiv Foto Marburg; Courtauld Institute of Art; Frick Art Reference Library; Fondazione Federico Zeri; Fototeca Berenson; Getty Research Institute; Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art; Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz; National Gallery of Art; RKD - Netherlands Institute for Art History; Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art; Yale Center for British Art; Warburg Institute.

From the outset the aim has been to test out forms of image and datum sharing and, in the medium term, set up a single platform pooling the resources of all participants: 25 million images.

PHAROS is the perfect setting in which to test the operative compatibility of databanks based on different cataloguing standards, and the real research utility of tools offered by ICT technology, including visual searching systems based on recognition of adjacent patterns. In 2016 the PHAROS Art Research Database was launched, enabling research by image among some 100,000 photographs mainly of Italian Renaissance paintings, conserved in 8 different photo archives. Research may start from a photograph in one’s possession and go on to compare images of and data on the same artwork supplied by different providers, which the system automatically finds.

In 2019 funding from the Mellon Foundation launched the first pilot scheme to pool catalogue data on the ResearchSpace platform.

Six archives, including the Federico Zeri Foundation, supplied their own data which were structured according to CIDOC-CRM ontology and rendered compatible with international vocabularies and authorities in the art history domain. The eventual interface will enable users to set up personalised research pathways, compare information on the same works supplied by different institutions, ascertain the provenance, gain immediate access to other external resources and re-use the data as they think fit. Images will be published under the IIIF standard which permits one to zoom and rotate, to calibrate lighting, contrast and saturation, to identify and tag specific areas in the image, and to compare photos coming from different collections.

The first version of the PHAROS in ResearchSpace database is scheduled for release in autumn 2020.