Digitization, Editions, Indexing
Creating an index of students at the Prussian Akademie der Künste 1751 – 1875
Project duration: 2015 – 2024
Lists of students from 1763 to 1766
One of the Prussian Akademie der Künste’s key tasks was to provide academic training for visual artists. Several thousand students were taught from 1696, the year the Academy was established, until 1875 when the Akademische Hochschule für die bildenden Künste (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) was founded and became the centre for training students. In the late eighteenth century, when various educational divisions were formed, artistic training became more differentiated. The basic skills were taught in sketching and drawing classes. The Bauakademie school of architecture as well as schools of arts and trades provided courses to train applied skills. As gifted young academic students, the best drawing school graduates received more advanced tuition in painting, sculpture, architecture and the art of engraving and printing moulds and forms.
However, no matriculation registers exist for enrolled students, only lists of students filed in various volumes of documents. At present, the question of whether a particular artist actually studied at the Akademie der Künste can only be answered by extensive archival research. For this reason, in late 2015 the Historical Archives launched a project to create an index with all the names of students and make this available via a full text database. Due to the large amount of data, an Excel table is initially available for research in the reading room of the archives at Robert-Koch-Platz 10 with some of the student names. This makes the oldest surviving lists of students accessible, beginning in 1751, with details of full name, class attended, enrolment date and - where available - age, place of birth, desired career and father's profession, providing an extensive research resource for history of the Academy, social history, prosopographical, and family history research.
Project Management: Werner Heegewaldt, Dr. Ulrike Möhlenbeck