Image is a fundamental part of travel description, offering visual support to the text, but also granting access to new interpretations. Ireland inspired a considerable number of writers and artists who visited the Island from the late Middle Ages to the mid-19th century. What anthropological, natural and architectural elements were deemed worthy of interest for the foreign travellers to Ireland? Can we find uses of travel images that go beyond the simple illustration, offering symbolic and ideological content?
An important number of these images, engravings, paintings, and photographs are either very little known or even unknown to the public.
The creation of the ‘Ireland Illustrated’ database facilitates the investigation on travel images on a great number of fields. The images will be digitised and analysed in a database that will be made available online for academics and the wider public.