The Morgan Library and Museum announced Friday that it planned to digitize its entire drawings collection, one of the most important in the world, containing works from the 14th through the 21st centuries by masters like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dürer, Rembrandt and Cézanne.
The project, expected to be completed by October 2014, will eventually yield more than 10,000 images that will be available free of charge on the Morgan’s Web site, in two formats: one for general viewers and another with enhanced resolution for scholarly study. The digital archive will even contain as many as 2,000 versos - the reverse sides of drawings, with sketches, inscriptions and historical information that is rarely seen in public displays.
William M. Griswold, the museum’s director, said that despite the drawings collection’s renown, “only a small part of our holdings have been available in digital form.†The project “is critical to our institutional goal of promoting drawings scholarship and reaching out to an ever larger audience,†he said. The museum hopes to expand digitization in the coming years to include its prints collection and artists’ sketchbooks.
