Topographia Helvetiae. Linked Art in Switzerland - from panel 'Linked Art: Networking Digital Collections and Scholarship'

The historical view of Switzerland’s nature and landscape has been defined by artworks describing a ‘visual topography’ of the Alpine country long before the emergence of a broader touristic interest for Switzerland across Europe. Paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs depicting alpine landscapes, natural monuments, picturesque villages and much more shaped the perception of Swiss landscapes both nationwide and beyond. Access to all sorts of historic visual and textual resources is fundamental for researching and understanding the perception of the Alpine landscape and the construction of Switzerland’s »visual topography«. The project »Bilder der Schweiz Online« (Images of Switzerland Online), developed under the aegis of SARI, provides a unique access point to topographic artworks and photographs from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century from major Swiss libraries, museums, and private collections. Starting from mass-printed, but hand-coloured vedute of the so-called ‘Schweizer Kleinmeister’ -- an affordable visual medium to propagate a canonised view of Switzerland that gained increased popularity over time -- the research portal includes related materials such as landscape paintings, drawings, printed textual sources, travel guides, travel journals, and further materials related to artist production, printing and marketing of printed ‘vedute’. The project will provide unified access to these heterogeneous materials from comparable, but technically different, institutional repositories following the Linked Art data model; and in doing so enhance public visibility of these little known, but widely consumed artworks of the ‘Schweizer Kleinmeister’, and make them accessible to scholars.The project also provides an excellent test of the Linked Art framework’s flexibility, assessing the model’s ability to describe specific non-mainstream subject-based collections