Isabella di Lenardo is a researcher and lecturer specialising in the History of Art and Architecture, Digital Humanities, and Digital Urban History. Her work investigates the relationships between architecture, images, urban space, and cultural memory, combining historical interpretation with computational methods for analysing visual, spatial, and archival sources.

Trained initially in archaeology and subsequently in the History of Art and Architecture, she specialises in the early modern period, with particular emphasis on Venice and on the circulation of artworks, artists, figurative models, and architectural knowledge between Italy and Northern Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. She holds a PhD in Theories and History of Art. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2013, examined the artistic, social, and economic forces shaping the production, trade, and circulation of art between major Italian centres and the Flemish cultural sphere.

Since 2012, she has developed research at the intersection of urban and architectural history, visual culture, and digital methodologies. She collaborated with pioneering initiatives such as Visualizing Venice, jointly developed by the University Institute of Architecture in Venice, the University of Padua, and Duke University. Within this context, she contributed to the first comprehensive three-dimensional survey of the entire city of Venice and initiated the systematic study of the city’s architectural façades. This research explored how large-scale 3D documentation could support the analysis of Venice’s built fabric, architectural transformations, and visual and spatial history.

In 2014, she joined the Digital Humanities Laboratory at EPFL as a scientist. Her research has since addressed the digital reconstruction of cities and buildings, the analysis of historical maps and cadastral records, and the computational study of artworks and visual archives. A central concern throughout this work has been the relationship between representations and material environments: how images, maps, photographs, and digital models shape the ways in which architecture is documented, interpreted, and historically reconstructed.

At EPFL, she led the Replica project in collaboration with the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. The project involved the digitisation and computational analysis of a major historical photographic collection and the development of a search engine for identifying visual similarities, recurrences, and genealogical relationships among images. In this context, she coordinated interdisciplinary teams of researchers, students, engineers, professionals, and curators, while developing new approaches to the study of photographic archives and the visual transmission of artworks and architectural forms.

Between 2018 and 2020, she was a project leader and Principal Investigator at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, where she initiated and directed the "Richelieu District" urban reconstruction project. The project reconstructed the long-term evolution of a central Parisian district by bringing together historical maps, archival records, information on buildings and institutions, and digital spatial analysis. It examined the district as an evolving cultural and architectural environment shaped by the interactions among urban form, institutions, collections, and social practices.

She is Co-Principal Investigator of the SNSF project Parcels of Venice, which reconstructs the informational, social, and morphological evolution of urban property in Venice between 1700 and 1808. By extracting and connecting thousands of cadastral records, the project investigates changes in property ownership, building functions, land division, and urban morphology before and after the fall of the Venetian Republic. Its results contribute to a broader reflection on how cadastral and cartographic sources can be used to reconstruct the architectural history of cities and analyse transformations of the built environment across time.

Beginning in 2016, Isabella di Lenardo was among the initiators of Time Machine: Big Data of the Past for the Future of Europe. The initiative aimed to develop advanced digitisation and artificial-intelligence technologies for exploring Europe’s cultural heritage and transforming large collections of historical documents, images, maps, and objects into connected and reusable research resources. She contributed to building a network involving 180 institutions across 32 countries and subsequently became the European coordinator of the Local Time Machines network.

This work has continued through the development of the Time Atlas, a geohistorical research environment that connects heterogeneous cultural-heritage sources and positions them in space and time. Rather than treating digital models as neutral reproductions of the past, her research examines their epistemological foundations: the selection and interpretation of evidence, the representation of uncertainty, the construction of historical hypotheses, and the relationship between archival traces, visual representations, architectural objects, and urban environments.

Her current research also investigates the categories through which the History of Art and Architecture constructs and transmits knowledge. Through the computational analysis of art-historical databases and photographic archives, she studies how concepts such as attribution, authorship, workshop production, copies, and visual influence are encoded in information systems. Her forthcoming research on the “hidden grammar” of the discipline examines how database structures translate—and potentially transform—the interpretative conventions of art-historical scholarship.

Throughout her career, Isabella di Lenardo has coordinated international and interdisciplinary teams bringing together historians of art and architecture, archaeologists, architects, computer scientists, engineers, designers, archivists, curators, public institutions, foundations, and companies. She regularly acts as an intellectual and methodological intermediary between the humanities, computational research, and cultural institutions.

She has taught university courses in urban history since 2010 and at EPFL since 2014. Her teaching includes Digital Urban History   and AI for Urban History, alongside courses and invited teaching in Digital Humanities and the computational History of Art and Architecture at universities internationally. Her teaching encourages students to combine the critical interpretation of images, buildings, maps, and historical documents with practical experimentation in digital methods, while remaining attentive to the historiographical and epistemological implications of technological tools.

Digital urban history, 4D reconstruction and computational cartography: integrated workflows for georeferencing and aligning cadastral/cartographic sources, HTR/OCR and toponym extraction, map segmentation and semantic linking to ingest multilayered historical maps into HGIS/4D models. These pipelines enable systematic monitoring of urban transformation across time, support parcel-level and city-scale analyses, and produce interoperable, provenance-aware datasets for comparative historical inquiry.

Computational enrichment of cultural heritage: I develop algorithmic pipelines (HTR/OCR, semantic annotation, 3D photogrammetry, and visual-similarity models) that transform primary archival materials into interoperable, provenance-aware research objects. These digital augmentations increase interpretive density, enabling multilayered querying, large-scale comparative analysis, and linked-open-data interoperability, while supporting ethical stewardship, wider accessibility and participatory curation of heritage resources.

Digital art history and computational study of image circulation: quantitative and computational approaches to large image and archival corpora that map networks of actors (patrons, dealers, collectors, ateliers) and trace the geo-temporal diffusion of visual forms. Using image-similarity models, network analysis, prosopographic linkage and spatio-temporal mapping, this axis reconceptualises centre/periphery dynamics and uncovers understudied agents and pathways of transmission while combining close visual reading with scalable, reproducible pattern-detection.

100 Years of the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation at ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, Sep 4 -5. 

 

La mesure des images : approches computationnelles en histoire et théorie des arts”, DHNord 2020 (on line) https://www.meshs.fr/page/dhnord2020fr, November 2020

 

Intelligence artificielle et institutions patrimoniales : enjeux, défis et opportunités, Journée de l’Association des diplômés et des étudiants de master de l’École nationale des chartes (Ademec), École nationale des Chartes et Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Sep. 2019

http://www.chartes.psl.eu/fr/intelligence-artificielle-institutions-patrimoniales, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndT3NLPeQFM

 

Faut-il vider les Bibliotheques et les Musées?, Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres
et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique avec le parrainage du Collège de France, (with Frèdéric Kaplan) Bruxelles, Oct. 2019 https://lacademie.tv/conferences/les-musees-dans-l-ere-des-repliques-authentiques-et-des-mondes-miroirs

Semaine académique du partenariat entre l’Université de WUDA et École nationale des chartes (Enc), Paris, Octobre 2019

 

Launch of the Center in Digital Humanities EPFL and UNIL, Lausanne, Octobre 2019 

 

Warburg Institute - London, Jan. 2019, (with Frédéric Kaplan)

 

Journées de la recherche de l'IGN (Institut National de l’Information Geographique et Forestière), Cité Descartes, Marne la Vallée, Apr. 2019 – Paris, Apr. 2019, (with Frédéric Kaplan), http://recherche.ign.fr/jr/jr19/resumes/DiLenardo.pdf

 

European Union and members of the European Archives Group in Malta (EBNA Meeting), Malta, Apr. 2017, (with Frédéric Kaplan)

 

European circulation of people, goods and patterns: The Venice Time Machine methodology” CREATE Conference, An e-humanities perspective –University of Amsterdam, Oct. 2016, (with Frédéric Kaplan)

 

Cloud Collections. Aspects juridiques, scientifiques et techniques de la numérisation de l’art  Neuchâtel, November 2015 

 

 

DigiHistCH24, curated by Joelle Prunel, Burkhardt, Baudry, Basel, Switzerland,

Feb. 11. 2025

DigiHistCH24, curated by Joelle Prunel, Burkhardt, Baudry, Basel, Switzerland,

Feb. 11. 2025 (with Rémi Petitpierre)

 

Build your 4D Time Machine Atlas workshop series

Time Machine Organisation (online). Role: workshop presentation. (Organised by Time Machine Organisation).

 

Annual Conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance (ADHO)2024, Washington, DC, USA, 6–10 August 2024. 

 

18th ICA Conference on Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage, Bologna, Italy, Oct. 23 2024 (with Beatrice Vaienti and Frédéric Kaplan)

 

18th ICA Conference on Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage, Bologna, Italy, Oct. 23 2024 (with Raimund Shnurer)

 

CIHA World Congress, Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art, — Materiality in History of Architecture and Urban Planning: evolutions of techniques, perceptions and analyses, Lyon, France, 26 June 2024 (with Paul Guhennec)

 

5th Conference of the European Society of Historical Demography — The Challenge of Comparing Across Space and Time, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Aug. 30 – Oct. 2, 2023 (with Rémi Petitpierre and Lucas Rappo)

 

Annual Conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance (ADHO) 2023, Graz, Austria, June 2024 (with Paul Guhennec)

 

Festival de l’Histoire de l’Art 12eme édition, Ce que l’oeil numérique fait aux images, en honneur de l’apparition du volume, Société et Représentations, Nᵒ 55, Château de Fontainebleau, Jun. 2023

 

Workshop on Research and Education in Urban History in the Age of Digital

Libraries, (UHDL) 2023, (Controversial Cities session), Munich, 27–29 March 2023

 

6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities, Seattle, WA, USA,  (1 Nov 2022)

 

EPFL / Digital Humanities Laboratory seminar series (various internal presentations). Role: invited seminar / internal talk. (EPFL).

 

Annual Conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance (ADHO), Utrecht, July 2019 (with Albane Descombes) https://dataverse.nl/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.34894/MNF5VQ

 

Annual Conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance (ADHO), Utrecht, July 2019 (with Sophia Ares Oliveira)

 

Symposium in  collaboration with Getty Research Institute Los Angeles, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), Paris, (June 2019)

Richelieu. Histoire du quartier

Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) Paris, Oct. 2018

 

European Association of Urban History (EAUH) – Rome, Sep. 2018 (with Bastien Tourenc), https://eauh2018.ccmgs.it/users/index.php?pagename=cms&name=sessiontracks&trackname=new-technologies-and-methods-for-historical-cadastral-studies

 

Bibliothèque Nationale de France – Atelier Corpus Data BNF – Paris, Nov.  2017, Invited Speaker, https://bnf.hypotheses.org/2299

German Center for Art History - Paris Mai. 2017, Invited Speaker

 

Institut National de l’Information Géographique et Forestière (IGN)– Paris, June 2017,  (with Frédéric Kaplan), Invited Speaker

 

Dariah Teach, Université de Lausanne - Lausanne, Mar. 2017, (with Frédéric Kaplan), Invited Speaker

 

CREATE, An e-humanities perspective – Amsterdam, Oct. 2016,  (with Frédéric Kaplan) 

 

Annual Conference of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Boston, Mar. 2016 

 

Annual Conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance (ADHO) – Sydney, Jun. 2015, (with Frédéric Kaplan)

 

Cloud Collections. Aspects juridiques, scientifiques et techniques de la numérisation de l’art  Neuchâtel, March 2015 

 

Annual meeting conference of Renaissance Society of America (RSA) – Berlin, March 2014 

 

Conference on Cultural Heritage, “Can the European cities be considered as a Cultural Heritage ? Per una storia della città europea come Cultural Heritage” – Politecnico di Torino, Turin, June 2013  

 

Symposium at Kasteel Well (Nederland), for the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek: Artists on the Move: Migrating artists from the Low Countries, 1400-1750, Well-Limbourg (The Netherlands), December 2012

 

“Digital Urban History – La storia della città (raccontata) all’epoca della rivoluzione informatica”, Politecnico di Turin, March 2012  

 

La chiesa di San Bartolomeo e la comunità tedesca, Studium Generale Marcianum; Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani (Deutsche Studienzentrum in Venedig) – Venice, November 2011

 

International conference for Foundation Ermitage Italia (FEI): Alle origini dei Generi Pittorici fra l’Italia e l’Europa attorno al 1600 – Ferrara, September 2011  

 

Flanders and Italy in the XVI Century”. V Convegno AISU, Fuori dall’ordinario: la città di fronte a catastrofi ed eventi eccezionali, Rome, September 2011

Lesson for the Istituto Universitario Olandese di Storia dell’Arte di Firenze/ Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut – Florence, June 2011 

 

Conference to the Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic: Hans von Aachen and new research in the transfer of artistic ideas into Central Europe – Prague, September 2010 

 

Annual meeting conference of Renaissance Society of America (RSA) – Venice April 2010

 

Organizer      Richelieu. Histoire du quartier : état des lieux

Series of lectures as part of the research program “History of the Richelieu District,” National Institute of Art History (INHA)

Steffan Hogg, La documentation visuelle de mon livre ». Walter Benjamin et ses recherches iconographiques dans le Cabinet des Estampes pour le Livre des passages, German Center for Art History, Paris, Mai 2019

Corinne Le Bitouzé (BnF) : Les collections de mode du département des Estampes et de la photographie de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, Corinne Le Bitouzé, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), site Richelieu, 24 mai 2019

Néguine Mathieux (Musée du Louvre) : De l’archéologie aux archives : des sources pour un quartier disparu, le quartier du Louvre, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), April 2019

 

Olivier Poncet (École nationale des chartes) : Wall Street sur Seine ? L’attraction de la finance au quartier Richelieu (XVIIe-XIXe siècle), Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), April 2019

Conference Organizer      Time Machine Conference”, EPFL, Lausanne Oct. 2018 

 

Session organizer / chair       New Technologies and Methods for Historical Cadastral Studies (1500-1950)

European Association of Urban History (EAUH ) – Rome, September 2018 (with Frédéric Kaplan)

 

Session organizer / chair      Images on the Move: The Weaving of Circulations and Transfers during the Renaissance through Digital Analysis

Annual Conference of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) – Boston, March 2016 

 

Session organizer / chair      Le porte dopo le porte. Varchi, barriere, caselli daziari: le chiavi dell'accesso e dell'approvvigionamento urbano

European Association of Urban History (EAUH ) – Padova, September 2015 (with Vittorio Zucconi)

 

Associazione italiana storia urbana (AISU), Visibile invisibile, percepire la città tra descrizioni e omissioni – Catania, September 2013  

 

Conference Organizer La chiesa di San Bartolomeo e la comunità tedesca, Studium Generale Marcianum; Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani (Deutsche Studienzentrum in Venedig) – Venice, November 2011 (With Gianmario Guidarelli and Natalino Bonazza)

FNS GRANT_NUMBER: 185060

The Parcels of Venice project created one of the most comprehensive geohistorical computational model of city of Venice by extracting and aligning cadastral data, with a diachronic model of the city and its population. Built on a robust “informational skeleton” of 19th cadastral sources, the project integrated additional datasets from the 16th to the 18th centuries, as well as a medieval Venice dataset.
Two public platforms were developed: The Time  Atlas (https://timeatlas.eu/), for the general public to connect places with archival documents, and a Visual Analytics Dashboard for researchers to explore thematic maps, analyze property distribution, ownership patterns, and institutional change, and test historical hypotheses. The project also introduced key processing pipelines for cadastral maps and registers, enabling both Venice-specific and cross-national applications. 
The resulting datasets, covering cadastral surveys from 1582 to 1808, land registers, ownership records, commercial directories, and historical toponyms, are available on parcelsofvenice.epfl.ch and timeatlas.eu, with open access on Zenodo planned for 2025. Through workshops and community-building initiatives, the project has laid the foundation for a growing network of scholars, heritage institutions, and digital humanists using its methods and data to explore historical urban morphology at unprecedented scale and detail.

 AI for Urban History, URB 409, course explores how AI and LLMs can be used to analyze historical urban data. Students study city evolution (1700-now) through hands-on projects, producing a web interface and a visual booklet based on sources like maps, directories, and cadastral records.

The Digital Urban History course is part of a new range of interdisciplinary and collaborative courses open to UNIL and EPFL students.
This course aims to develop interdisciplinary skills by combining the fields of expertise of history and digital studies.
It mainly focuses on theoretical and practical learning of digital methods applied to the analysis of past cities.
The course explores the digitization of historical cartography and information modeling of historical data concerning the city.
The use and extraction of cadastral, demographic, and iconographic sources but also various sources that tell the story from other perspectives such as historical press, trade almanacs, and more.
The course has a theoretical part in which various case studies are analyzed across Europe.
Students work on data extracted from ongoing urban analysis projects.
Since 2020 they develop projects on Lausanne and the surrounding area. The site is analyzed in its evolution over time under multiple aspects: the morphological evolution of the city, population history, cultural heritage history, aspects related to uninhabited space and ecology, textual sources such as the press or some literary sources. All the projects are published online.