A Photographic Archive of Medieval Architecture in Southern Italy
The Caroline Bruzelius Photographic Archive is a collection of 2,300 photographs of over 200 medieval monuments that the architectural historian Caroline Bruzelius commissioned in a series of campaigns throughout southern Italy in the early 1990s. These campaigns represented the first comprehensive photographic survey of Gothic architecture in the Angevin Kingdom of Sicily. The resulting corpus of monuments has formed the foundation for Bruzelius’s field-defining research, and will continue to shape the work of future scholars and students.
A Professor emerita of Art and Art History at Duke University, Caroline Bruzelius gifted the collection of photographs to the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History in 2023. Over the course of Fall 2023 through Summer 2024, the O’Donnell Institute organized, digitized, and archived the collection to form The Caroline Bruzelius Photographic Archive. The archive consists of physical materials and digital files, now catalogued and stored to follow Bruzelius’s original organization by region, city, and monument. A detailed key allows researchers to navigate through and between the physical and digital portions of the archive.
We invite you to learn more about the creation of the photographs from a narrative by Caroline Bruzelius, and the project overview on organizing, digitizing, and archiving the collection.
To inquire about access to the archive, please write to arthistory@utdallas.edu with the subject line The Caroline Bruzelius Photographic Archive.
Visit our related project, The Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database, and follow the project on Instagram @medieval.kosid.
