The Salisbury Project

Marion Roberts, Art History

1996 TTI Fellow

Project website: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/salisbury

An extensive visual archive of the architecture and decoration of Salisbury Cathedral will permit the study of a complex monument of medieval art in a new, holistic approach. Hundreds of color photographs of the exterior and interior of the building as well as details of decorative elements such as sculpture, stained glass, liturgical furnishings, tombs and floor tiles, are now being translated into digital, web-accessible form, offering a completeness of coverage impossible in the traditional printed media. Images are presented in ways that emphasize the experience of visiting the cathedral as it is today and encourage careful observation of the wealth of details that illuminate the building's medieval history. As the project continues the archive will expa nd to include the residential houses in the cathedral Close, the town of Salisbury and its parish churches, the earlier site of the cathedral at Old Sarum and churches in the Wiltshire countryside that had connections with the cathedral in the thirteenth century. The resulting site provides a visual record that is permanent, requiring no archival maintenance. It supplements the extensive photographic archives at the National Monuments Record in Swindon and the Conway Library of the Courtauld Institute in London with color images. Once on the World Wide Web it will be available to students of all disciplines who wish to visit the cathedral visually and to draw on the electronic archive for study projects and research. In the spring it will be the focus of a USEM course for first-year undergraduates who will compare the traditional methods of studying the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages with the many learning possibilities of this new technology-enhanced approach.