Viewsari: Enabling New Perspectives on the Renaissance with a Knowledge Graph of Giorgio Vasari's The Lives

In the digital humanities, semantic technologies have been recognized as providing the necessary bits and pieces to represent the complex and often ambiguous nature of humanities data. Despite this growing interest, a lack of practical frameworks for modeling the complex, usually multifaceted and multilingual, historical sources remains. In this paper, we present Viewsari, an ongoing Ph.D. project aiming to build a knowledge graph based on Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568), referred to as The Lives. This collection of biographies of important Renaissance artists, recounting tales of their lives and describing their artistic styles and works, is widely regarded as the first modern work of art history. With it, Vasari shaped the canon of the Italian Renaissance. The Viewsari project draws on knowledge extraction and aims to contextualize content from different editions of Vasari’s The Lives, addressing the challenges of working with complex, multilingual historical texts. Situated at the intersection of digital humanities and the Semantic Web, it demonstrates how modular, pattern-driven ontology development, leveraging Ontology Design Patterns and the eXtreme Design methodology, can support the structured representation and exploration of information across different editions and linguistic versions. The central goal is to generalize the Viewsari framework to match similar challenges, i.e., enriching and interconnecting textual sources in different domains.