THE PROJECT For centuries Pliny the Elder’s chapters on the history of art (34-36 and sections of books 33 and 37) in the Naturalis Historia have been merely considered a list of excerpta: 3000 pieces of information derived from more than 70 Greek and Roman authors have been completely taken out of context in order to reconstruct lost sources, treatises, artists’ lives and works. This project aims at overcoming the limitations of this approach, by providing an updated historical, philological and archaeological commentary of these books and making results available through the web.
