The LBC (Lessico dei Beni Culturali) English Corpus

Abstract

The lemma gathers the essential entries in the field of artistic goods and includes place names and personal names strictly connected to Italian and Florentine art. It is a reference work, of great interest also for researchers of specialized vocabulary and extremely useful for translators and cultural operators. The corpus used contains over a million words and constitutes, along with comparable corpora in French, German, Russian, English, and Spanish, the General LBC Corpus http://corpora.lessicobeniculturali.net. It is composed of texts of different types and genres from the Renaissance to the twentieth century and collects, alongside original language writings, also translations from other languages. It includes classic works dedicated to the Florentine and Italian artistic heritage, such as Giorgio Vasari's Vita and Benvenuto Cellini's Vite, technical texts like Andrea Palladio's I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura; famous historical-artistic writings by non-Italian authors, for example, Jacob Burckhardt's Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien or John Ruskin's Mornings in Florence, along with works by great writers dedicated to the Grand Tour in Italy, such as Stendhal's Promenade dans Rome, Goethe's Italienische Reise, etc. The list of sources used for each language is presented on the website. By clicking on the words in the lemma, a window will open containing the list of concordances, as well as citations of the terms in the corpus sources, accompanied by an abbreviation that refers to the bibliographic indication of the originating text. The lemma includes about 2000 words of essential art lexicon and about 10,000 concordances that show their usage in context.