Annie and Gabriel Verger’s Biographical Dictionary of the Residents of the French Academy in Rome was published in 2011 as a book, before Annie and Gabriel Verger completed the dictionary and published it online as a digital database in collaboration with the Artl@s project in 2018. The Dictionary gathers information on all artists sent to Italy by the French State from 1666, when the government of Louis XIV established the Prix de Rome competition, until its abolition in 1968. The profiles of individual residents provide biographical and professional information, such as places of birth and death, studies, shipments of artworks from Rome (envois), occupations, academic appointments, and awards and honours. Information about institutions that hold primary documents on the artists is also included. The content of the dataset is mainly in French, the headers are in English.

The archived data were remedied and transformed in order to facilitate easier quantitative analysis and visualisation. Key dates were extracted into separate columns, personal and topographic names were normalised and reconciled with Wikidata. The Wikidata identifiers for the individual artists are provided, as well. The Wikidata schema that was used for creating the Wikidata item records is attached in documentation.

The online version of these data is available at https://acad-artlas.huma-num.fr/. For further information, see Annie Verger, “Rome vaut bien un prix. An Artistic Elite in the Service of the State: the Pensionnaires of the Académie de France in Rome, 1666- 1968.” Artl@s Bulletin 8, 2 (Summer 2019), at https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol8/iss2/9 or in French at https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol8/iss2/8/.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Annie Verger; Gabriel Verger; Pejša, S.; Joyeux-Prunel, B.; Dossin, C. (2021). Archived data of the Biographical Dictionary of the Residents of the French Academy in Rome. Purdue University Research Repository. doi:10.4231/2P0V-7Q31

  BibTex | EndNote

1. artists
2. composers
3. cultural sociology
4. Digital Humanities
5. engravers
6. French art
7. history of art
8. painters
9. Prix de Rome
10. prosopography
11. sculptors
12. Visual and Performing Arts
13. Visual and Performing Arts (Dept)

The dataset was converted from MySQL database stored within the Omeka platform and converted into a csv file on 10 February 2021. Some residual artefacts, such as html tags, were removed, when possible values were normalised and dates were extracted. Personal and geographic terms were normalised and reconciled with wikidata.