Istituto centrale per la grafica di Roma

Thousands of drawings, prints, matrices, photographs and artist videos: the heritage of the Central Institute for Graphics is considerable both in quantity and in variety and quality.

Drawings and prints
Most of the ICG prints and drawings come from the Drawings and Prints Cabinet: about 23,500 drawings and 110,000 prints, representative of the European engraving scene from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. To this collection is added that of drawings and prints that belonged to the National Chalcography: about 1600 drawings, 28,000 prints drawn in the Stamperia by the branches of the Chalcography itself, 10,000 prints sold or donated by numerous artists, mostly made outdoors. The Chalcography collections are also interesting from a technical point of view: numerous preparatory drawings for the engravings, as well as many prints documenting the different states of the matrices or their restoration.

Matrices
The collection of matrices, inherited from the National Chalcography, includes over 23400 matrices in copper, zinc, lead, steel, brass, wood, linoleum and cardboard. It is the most consistent and representative collection of this kind in the world.
All the major engravers from the sixteenth century to the present day are present.
All the metal matrices are kept in the Calcoteca premises, specially designed for their conservation.

Photos
The photographic heritage currently amounts to about 16,000 images, including negatives, positives, daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, autochromies and other photographic reproduction techniques. The material mainly present in the Institute starts with photographs of urban and artistic subjects from the 1870s and reaches the great contemporary photographers.

Multimedia works
Since its creation in the late 1970s, the collection of multimedia works of the Central Institute for Graphics has seen its heritage grow steadily. Over time, a series of works associated with graphics have been added to the initial artist videos to be multiple, even if not two-dimensional.

Library heritage
The ICG library is heir to the libraries of the National Cabinet of Prints (1895) and of Chalcography (1905), and over the years it has enormously increased its patrimony: the more than 25,000 volumes present range from the eighteenth-century sales catalogs of Stamperia De Rossi to essays, monographs, dictionaries, encyclopedias on engraving and the history of art collected from the nineteenth century to today.