Antonio Canova is known throughout the world as the greatest exponent of Neoclassicism for his large production of sculptural and pictorial masterpieces. Yet many people may not know that the great Venetian artist also left behind a corpus of over 40,000 pages of documents of various kinds. Letters, notes and travel diaries are just some of the 6,658 documents that make up the collection held in the Municipal Library of Bassano del Grappa. These manuscript documents have inestimable historical and artistic value, and they are also fragile by their nature. To support conservation and ensure access, Canova’s archives have been the subject of an important high-definition digitization project, which will open the door to enhanced use of this precious archival treasure.

The Municipal Library of Bassano del Grappa is celebrating the bicentenary of Canova’s death with this ambitious project. It includes the digitization of the entire collection in ultra-high definition, the attachment of metadata and the reorganization of documents and ends with the creation of a digital library which can be viewed online.

The project has been entrusted to a group of leading companies in the fields of cultural heritage scanning (Mida Informatica), cataloging (Hyperborea), high-definition image storage and management (Haltadefinizione and Memooria) and the management of digital libraries (Horizons Unlimited).