Abstract
Introduction The CoenoBIuM project aimed to investigate the architectural and artistic culture of the Cassinese Congregation from its foundation to the end of the eighteenth century through a comparative approach based on the innovative application of Building Information Modelling (BIM). The reform of the Rule of St Benedict, promoted by Ludovico Barbo in 1419, profoundly transformed Benedictine monastic life by placing renewed emphasis on meditation and personal prayer. This spiritual renewal led to significant changes in the organisation of monastic spaces and inspired new theological and iconographic themes in the painting and sculpture commissioned for the churches and monasteries of the Congregation. Several studies have suggested that these developments fostered a common artistic and architectural culture across the Cassinese abbeys, reinforced by regulations issued by the General Chapters. Testing this historiographical hypothesis requires reconstructing the relationships between architectural spaces and their decorative programmes, as well as between the different functional areas of churches and monasteries. Such an approach demands an operational framework capable of integrating large and heterogeneous datasets – including archival, bibliographical, iconographical, and geometric information – and supporting comparative analyses across multiple case studies. To achieve these objectives, the project adopted the BIM methodology. Beyond providing an accurate digital model of buildings in their current state, BIM makes it possible to integrate information on materials, construction techniques, structural systems, geometry, and artistic artefacts, together with historical documentation and semantic relationships between objects. Although BIM was originally developed as a tool for building management and conservation, the project demonstrates its potential as an innovative research methodology for the study of architectural and artistic heritage. The research was organised into closely integrated work packages involving the three Research Units, combining the investigation of the case studies, three representative and historically significant monasteries – Santa Giustina in Padua, San Pietro in Modena, and Praglia Abbey – with a broader analysis of artistic patronage within the Cassinese Congregation. From the outset, the project was conceived as a collaborative and scalable research framework, designed to be extended to the entire network of Cassinese Congregation and, ultimately, to comparable monastic institutions through the open sharing of data, digital resources, and research outcomes.
Results achieved
The principal achievements of the Bologna Research Unit are outlined below. Within this collaborative framework, the Bologna Research Unit focused on the monasteries of San Pietro in Modena and Praglia Abbey through extensive archival, bibliographical, and iconographic research. A postdoctoral researcher recruited through the project carried out part of the documentary and iconographic investigation. The Bologna Unit also made a substantial contribution to the development of the BIM platform by providing documentary and iconographic materials and by defining the historical phases of the monasteries of San Pietro in Modena and Santa Maria di Praglia, making their historical evolution fully accessible within the digital environment. A research fellow was recruited to contribute to the transcription and subsequent TEI encoding of the eighteenth-century manuscript Informazione sul monastero di San Pietro by the monk M. A. Lazarelli, preserved in the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria in Modena. This manuscript represents an invaluable source of knowledge about the now partially lost monastic archive and constitutes a fundamental witness not only for reconstructing the history of San Pietro but also for identifying administrative and artistic practices shared within the Cassinese Congregation. Originally conceived as a transcription project, the activity on the manuscript evolved into a fully searchable and interoperable digital scholarly edition, transforming a fundamental archival source into an open-access resource for future research on the monastery of San Pietro and the Cassinese Congregation. Following the standards of the Central Institute for Catalogue and Documentation (ICCD) of the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Bologna Unit also developed a catalogue record specifically designed for the historical and artistic heritage of monastic complexes. Together with the Padua and Brescia Units, these records were integrated into the project's relational database and linked to the BIM environment, creating a research infrastructure that enables comparative analyses across monasteries. The validated records relating to the architectural heritage and artworks of San Pietro, Santa Giustina, and Praglia are already freely available through the project website, while the database continues to expand through collaborations with scholars from other universities. The Bologna Unit made a further major contribution through the study of the terracotta sculptures by Antonio Begarelli (1499–1565), one of the artists most closely associated with the Cassinese Congregation. By integrating archival research, art-historical and architectural investigation, digital surveying, and BIM methodologies, the project aimed to reconstruct the original arrangement of the sculptures within the monks’ dormitory and Chapter House and produced three-dimensional virtual reconstructions, now accessible through the project website. These visualisations restore the relationship between the artworks and their original architectural settings while making complex historical research accessible to scholars, museum professionals, and the wider public. They also provide valuable resources for future conservation strategies and the interpretation of monastic heritage. The project’s results have been widely disseminated through international conferences, peer-reviewed publications, and open-access digital resources. The Bologna Research Unit organised the International Conference on Cassinese Art and Culture (April 2025), whose proceedings, together with those of the Padua conference on Cassinese Architecture and the project’s Digital Humanities seminars, were published by Viella in the peer-reviewed volume La congregazione benedettina di Santa Giustina. Arte e architettura (edited by Cavicchioli and Guidarelli). Further dissemination included additional peer-reviewed publications by the Principal Investigator and other members of the Bologna Research Unit, presentations at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (San Francisco, 2026), and the presentation of the project’s digital infrastructures and virtual reconstructions at the AIUCD Conference (Cagliari, 2026). The collaboration established with the Gallerie Estensi in Modena has further extended the project’s impact by supporting museum activities, heritage interpretation, and public access to the cultural legacy of the former monastery of San Pietro. In conclusion, beyond advancing historical knowledge, the project developed innovative digital tools supporting heritage conservation, management, and public engagement. More importantly, CoenoBIuM established an integrated, transferable, and replicable methodology for investigating monastic architectural and artistic heritage, combining historical research with Digital Humanities tools and open-access research infrastructures. The project demonstrates the value of PRIN–NextGenerationEU funding in enabling interdisciplinary collaboration, supporting the recruitment and training of early-career researchers, developing sustainable open-access research infrastructures, and creating digital resources that benefit both the scholarly community and society at large.Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Sonia Cavicchioli
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Filologia Classica e Italianistica
Coordinator:
Università degli Studi di PADOVA(Italy)
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 51.995,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
17/10/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
