The Fondazione Federico Zeri (Università di Bologna) has contributed more than 28,000 photographs of 16th century Italian paintings to the Artstor Digital Library. With support from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and Artstor, the Foundation has digitized these photographs from the archive of Federico Zeri (1921-1998).

A ground-breaking scholar of Renaissance art, Zeri focused on the exhaustive and detailed documentation of the vast corpus of artistic output of his field. To this end, he amassed  the “fototeca Zeri,” one of the most comprehensive archives on Italian painting. Over the course of his distinguished career, Zeri collected thousands of photographs from museums, private collectors, auction houses, photographers, and restorers, also acquiring entire archives compiled by other scholars. The archive features extensive photographic campaigns devoted to individual works of art, including details, and valuable documentation of restoration processes. Many works that are now missing or have been damaged are exclusively documented in the Zeri archive, which also contains elusive provenance records making it an essential reference resource for researchers of Italian painting.

In 1999, the Università di Bologna established the Fondazione Federico Zeri as a center for advanced research in humanistic studies specializing in the history of art. Federico Zeri bequeathed his house in Mentana, Italy to the university. His bequest included an art library of more than 85,000 volumes and an archive of approximately 290,000 photographs.