Census of the Reception of Antique Art and Architecture

A new cooperation between Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome marks an important step in the long-term management of the Census. At the end of May 2026, an agreement was concluded between these institutions that made the Census a shared project, opening up new possibilities for research and for the continued development of the Census as a digital infrastructure.

The Census has been based at Humboldt-Universität since the 1990s, and its directorship still forms a core part of the Professorship of Early Modern Art History at the HU. The Census has also long been an international collaboration: since the 1940s between the Warburg Institute and New York University, and then in the 1980s between the Warburg Institute, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and the Getty Research Institute. The cooperation agreement transformed the Census into a joint project of the Humboldt-Universität and the Bibliotheca Hertziana, with two directors: Kathleen Christian, Professor of Early Modern Art History in Berlin, and Tristan Weddigen, Director of the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome.

The goals of this collaboration are to safeguard the Census for the long term, to open the Census to new input, to preserve and archive its research, to keep its data openly accessible, and to place its digital infrastructure on a sustainable foundation. The HU and Bibliotheca Hertziana will work jointly to secure the future of the Census, to combine data, and to encourage active engagement with the project both in Berlin and in Rome.

There are numerous synergies between the research of the Census and the Hertziana, which is a leading institute for the study of Early Modern art and has a strong tradition in the study of the reception of antiquity. The Hertziana is also a major research institution in the field of digital humanities. Since 2022, the Hertziana has been a co-sponsor of the Census fellowship, now shared between the Humboldt-Universität, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and the Warburg Institute.

The new cooperation provides an opportunity to extend this fruitful collaboration. It also offers the chance to rethink and renew the identity of the Census, and the project has therefore received a revised title. The word “Renaissance” has been removed from the title: even though the project began with a chronological limit of c. 1520, the scope of the Census has for many decades been broader than the Renaissance in a narrow sense. Today, the Census contains a wide range of resources relating to the reception of antique art and architecture across different periods, media, and historical contexts. The new title, “Census of the Reception of Antique Art and Architecture,” better reflects this wider scope. It also makes it easier to connect the Census with research questions, projects, and collaborations, allowing the project to be understood in a broader and potentially less Eurocentric way, and opening the door to more expansive approaches to the study of antiquity’s afterlives. The website has been revised so that these changes are visible, and key content has also been translated into Italian. The Census project also has a new logo as part of its broader redesign.

This cooperation ensures that the Census can preserve the work of the last eight decades and continue to serve as a core resource for the study of classical reception.