Collections of Drawings of Animals as Complex Codices in the Early History of Ethiopian Studies
 

Pietro Maria Liuzzo

My current research looks at Classical Ethiopic and Amharic annotations on late 16th-century drawings of animals attributed to Hans Verhagen der Stomme, now at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. A structural analysis of the collections of animal drawings, which included these specific drawings with annotations and are documented in manuscripts in Wien, Amsterdam and New York, with works attributed to Liberale, Joris Hoefnagel, and many other artists, have been formalized as XML and RDF following the structural method of La Syntax du Codex. This allows a study of the circulation of the drawings between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries in central Europe where the annotations where most likely produced by Hiob Ludolf and Abba Gorgorios.