L’Encyclopedie « - Altair4 Multimedia S.r.l.

Entire corpus of the planches of the Encyclopédie by Diderot and Alembert on CD-Rom. The work consists of two principal, interconnected sections: a collection of the planches, the precise, indexed collection of all the plates, and a gallery of the era, an area of easy access to the work with animated contextualization of the content of the plates. The colour images have been obtained from an original copy of the Encyclopédie using a sophisticated digitalization system, using cold light in order not to damage the books. Music from the time of the Encyclopédie (six of the selected excerpts were actually composed by musicians close to the Encyclopaedists), specially recorded by the “Il Ruggiero” instrumental group using period instruments, has been chosen as the soundtrack for the pictures. The design for Newton’s cenotaph by Etienne Louis Boullée, the architect of the circle of Encyclopaedists, and a truly emblematic monument to reason, has been chosen as a powerful symbol for the CD-Rom interface. Newton’s cenotaph has been reconstructed in 3D from the original drawings by Boullée preserved in the National Library in Paris.