Joconde

Joconde is the central database created in 1975 and now available online, maintained by the French Ministry of Culture, for objects in the collections of the main french public and private museums listed as Musées de France, according to article L. 441-1 of the Code du patrimoine^[3].

"La Joconde" is the French name of the Mona Lisa, which like about half of the collections of the Louvre, is included in the database, as one of 295 items by (42 including 6 paintings), after, or connected with Leonardo da Vinci. By November 2012, Joconde contained over 475,000 object listings online and over 290,000 with images,^[4] from 366 collections in France,^[5] including 209,350 drawings, 63,547 paintings, 34,561 prints, 34,102 sculptures or 16,631 costumes and their accessories and is still expanding.

The database is not only dedicated to the information of the public but as well to the needs of the administrators and curators of the museums, thanks to the online presentation of professional tools to facilitate notably the museums collections cataloguing and state inventory (récolement). This explains the great precision of the listings. Since the museums participate on a voluntary basis to the regular enrichment of the database, some can present a large part of their collection, while others appear only because of the mere permanent deposits made by the first ones.

Live on the French Minitel system from 1992, the database went online to the World Wide Web in 1995. Originally just for objects from the fine arts and decorative arts, in 2004 Joconde was united with what had been separate databases for objects from archeology and ethnology. It comes under the "Direction des Musées de France" (DMF) section of the Ministry.

The Joconde listing details are highly structured, using a special vocabulary, which allows for very specific and accurate searches, helped as well by the index. For example the search by author (Auteur) with : (el greco ou velasquez ou zurbaran ou murillo ou goya) sauf (anonyme ou cercle de ou d'après ou école ou entourage ou genre de ou imitateur de ou imitation ou inspiré par ou manière de ou style ou suite de ou suiveur) gives only the works by or attributed to these main spanish paintors and their workshops, without the anonymous, copies, followers, schools, etc..., and refined with peinture as Domaine it gives only the paintings. If you replace, in the abovementioned expression, the artists names with $FILLED$ and add the name of a town or museum as Lieu de conservation, you obtain this time the paintings by, attributed to or from the workshops of all the artists kept in this town or museum. If you add again ITALIE as school (Ecole) and 13E SIECLE ou 14E SIECLE ou 15E SIECLE as date of creation, it gives the italian paintings of this period including the technique of FOND D'OR (gold background) for example. A search with brueg?el+ as author gives all the works associated with all the members of the Brueg(h)el family who are listed in the adjacent index. The use of capital letters is sometimes required, but can be checked with the index, or on the other hand the use of minuscules. Thus, a multicriteria search with Italie, or Brueghel instead of brueghel will not work. When the search bugs, because this has not been fully respected, it must be done again from the beginning.

Search results are displayed 100 to a page, with about 3 items in view at once on a typical PC screen. The full listing ("Notice complète"), which may occupy several screens, is reached by clicking down to a further level. From there, the search can be refined by clicking on affiner la recherche or on the descriptive mentions which are mostly hypertext, to obtain all the works of the same subject for example. The searches are kept in memory in the search windows and have consequently to be written cautiously. A small number of the best known objects have a prose commentary. Not all images are in colour, especially for the archaeological collections. When objects posterior to the 19th century have no image this is most often for copyright reasons.

• Joconde Home page (French)

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