EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | "Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture, and Society"
Presented by Dr. Niall Atkinson
with Additional Commentary by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

In 1427 the fiscal crisis of the Florentine economy caused by its disastrous wars against the duchy of Milan prompted it to make a massive overhaul of is taxation policies. The resulting Florentine Census (Catasto) would become the first modern taxation policy in the Western world. Every household was required to file what we would understand as a tax return: an accounting of one’s assets and debts in order for the government to assess the net worth of each of its citizens. The result is a treasure trove of demographic information about the city at a specific moment in its history, precisely at the threshold of what we now understand as the Florentine Renaissance.

“Florence Illuminated” is a consortium of five separate digitally based projects focuses on reconstructing and mapping the city’s population in order to construct an online map that will allow anyone to investigate the wealth, poverty, and real estate holdings of the city’s individual and institutions. This talk will take the audience through this ongoing project that will produce a cartographic image of the city that has not ever seen before. It will also show how humanities-based research can harness the power of digital technologies to make historical data available to anyone interested in answering questions about one of the most dynamic urban communities of pre-modern Europe.

The webinar will include a 45-minute lecture followed by 15-minutes of Q&A.

Please note:

• Your participation is confirmed once you have purchased your ticket. You will receive the Zoom Link to join the presentation circa 30 minutes before the start time.
• VIDEO RECORDING of the webinar will be available for unlimited streaming at your convenience for 7 days after the event.

Dr. Niall Atkinson is Associate Professor of Art History and Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the experience of architecture and urban space in early modern Italy in order to understand the build environment as a collective social construction of the body’s sensorial apparatus. His recent work has explored the relationship between sound, space, and architecture and their role in the construction of civic society, culminating in the publication of The Noisy Renaissance: sound, architecture, and Florentine urban life (Penn State, 2016). He is currently co-writing a book on the urban visual and spatial effects of the narratives and itineraries of French travelers to early modern Rome (with Susanna Caviglia, Duke University). He is also experimenting with digital technologies to spatialize the demographic data contained in the 1427 tax census of Florence (catasto) into an interactive geographic platform. In collaboration with a consortium of related digital reconstruction projects focused on Renaissance Florence (Florentia Illustrata), this method of geo-referenced spatial history will lay the groundwork for future experiments in mapping the soundscapes and other sensory experiences of early modern cities. Future projects include the role of city descriptions in mediating cultural exchange in early modern Mediterranean travel accounts, as well as an ongoing interdisciplinary collaborative project exploring the cultural interactions of the Indian Ocean (“Interwoven: Sonic, visual and textual histories of the Indian Ocean world”). In 2018, he co-curated the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale on the theme, “Dimensions of Citizenship.”