Bostonia: Travels with Titan
Art historian Jodi Cranston and her students developed an interactive guide to the work of the master painter Titan. Cranston, a CAS professor of Renaissance art and Institute Faculty Fellow, and a team of students from the CAS history of art and architecture department created this work with support from the Institute and the Kress Foundation. “The goal,” says Cranston, “is to help people visualize the interrelationship between an artwork and its changing historical context.”
Created with support from the Kress Foundation and BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, Mapping Titian allows users to customize collections of paintings and maps that show the movement of the pictures over time. It includes a glossary with short biographies of patrons and collectors of Titian’s pictures and references with a selected bibliography of relevant scholarship.
Putting the website in historic perspective, Cranston sees a prototype that could be applied to artists throughout all history—a Google-sized undertaking with a profound and lasting reward.