Usage information on the index of people

The index of people is a list of the people (in the broadest sense) who appear in the "Teutsche Academie". This index not only makes it possible to identify all occurrences of the person in question in the text, but also displays all variations on the person's name, which can be searched for specifically if required.

Information about the search

You can enter one or more term(s) in the search field, enclose phrases in quotation marks and exclude unwanted terms by preceding them with a minus sign (or hyphen respectively). In each of these cases, the system always searches in the official name and the existing notations (that is, the words as they are used in the text).

In addition, the search terms are also found within words—the entries Sandr, andrar or ndrart would also find all people by the name of Sandrart. There is an exception in this respect only for search terms that consist of two characters: These must be identical to the name or the annotation.
Furthermore, the search is not case-sensitive.

Some examples of search queries:

alexander: All entries that contain “Alexander”.
alexander papst: All entries that contain both “Alexander” and “papst” (pope).
papst -alex: All entries that contain “papst” (pope), but not “alex”.
"papst alexander": All entries that contain “papst alexander” as a phrase; a person called “Alexander Papst” would therefore not be displayed.
"papst alexander" -VI.: All entries that contain “papst alexander” as a phrase, but not “VI.”.
sandrart -"joachim von": All entries that contain “sandrart”, but not the phrase “joachim von”.

Please also note that people can belong to groups of people. Therefore, if you are searching for a person, for example Willem Backereel, and results appear in the entry for the person, we recommend checking the references for this group of people in the text as well. (We hope to provide a search option that can do this automatically in the medium term, but cannot commit to this at the moment.)

There is a similar situation for related terms: Personifications in particular are occasionally listed with reference to entries for place names (such as the river god Neilos and the Nile), if their occurrence in the text may also be of interest to you.

Notes on the temporal filter

Additionally, the index of people offers filtering by a temporal criterion. Depending on the available facts for a person, this filter is based on a person’s year of birth, year of death and/or years for which this person’s existence was verifiable. And as dates like these are not always indisputable, we decided on a ‘fuzzy’ approach: you can select an approximate timespan, but not exact years, and—more important—the filter uses a tolerance. This means you will not be able to select people who lived exactly between 1612 und 1614, but you can search, for instance, for artists who lived around the year 1600.

To use the filter, please click the “Temporal filter” checkbox. The page will reload and you will see a slider bar with two buttons that you can move with your mouse to set the lower and upper threshold. Every time you change a slider’s position, the page will be reloaded and present the records matching the selected period.

Please note: this functionality is only available for people who lived approximately in 1240 or later. We chose this year because, according to Sandrart, with the birth of Cimabue, it marks the “Wiedergeburt der Mahl-Kunst” (rebirth of the art of painting).

Information about records contained in the index of people

The name “index of people” should not be taken literally: The index also includes some animals, mythological animals and personifications that are significant from a content perspective or as visual motifs.

Sandrart often referred to the gods of ancient mythology using both the Greek and the Latin names. To make it possible to find them separately and in combination, we have linked the Greek name and Latin name to one another as “related terms”. Furthermore, while doing this, we have also tried to allow for the fact that the gods in each of these cultures do not completely correspond to one another, but are often significantly different in their importance and purpose, which is why it should be possible to search for them separately. Sandrart had the best way of putting into words the difficulty of this task of identifying the gods: “It is not always possible to distinguish the gods of the Ancient World from one another.” (TA 1680, Iconologia Deorum, p. 77)

Where do the standardised names come from?

Our standardised naming originates mainly from the Personennamendatei (name authority file, PND), a standardised file of people, which is used mainly for indexing literature in libraries. The German National Library and all German Austrian libraries manage this file together. In the case of people, for whom there is no data record and therefore no identification number in the PND, we consulted standard works or works of reference (for example, Thieme-Becker, Roscher, Neue Pauly, ADB/NDB).

Who identified the people?

In the majority of cases, the assignment of the spelling of a name to a person was a simple task or even already done in A.R. Peltzer’s edition of the lives (1925) or in Christian Klemm’s monograph (1986). In other cases, investigation work and creativity were necessary – on the one hand, to assign the wide variety of spellings to the respective correct name (for example “Carac”, “Carazo”, “Carraza”, “Caracco” and “Carazz”, which were used for members of the Carracci family); on the other hand, to identify the person meant (for example the phonetically-written “Contomonte Ree” as a spelling of Manuel de Fonseca y Zúñiga, the Conte di Monterrey).