L’Institut royal du Patrimoine artistique / het Koninlijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium (IRPA-KIK) (Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage), Brussels
Pierre-Yves Kairis, head of section in the Documentation Department, Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Brussels

IRPA-KIK is part of the group of so-called Belgian “scientific federal institutions” in Brussels. It was founded in 1948 as one of the first interdisciplinary centers for studying and conserving the artistic heritage. In our institute, chemists, physicians, conservators-restorers, art historians and photographers work together with a single aim, namely to examine and protect cultural artifacts in Belgium in a variety of ways. Some of these are specific to art historians, for instance the establishment of a photographic inventory of works of art and research on Belgian art. The Photographic Archives contains close to 1,000,000 photographs of the Belgian cultural heritage, each photograph stored with its negative. We also introduced annual seminars on art history, each concerning a single aspect of Belgian art. Furthermore, we developed tools for art historians with the web portal BALAT (Belgian Art Links and Tools). It includes the important online Dictionary of Belgian Painters as well as a list of Belgian researchers and institutions specialized in the history of art. Our institute also comprises the famous center devoted to the Flemish Primitives, which publishes the Corpus of Fifteenth-Century Painting in the Southern Netherlands and the Principality of Liège. In the past decade, IRPA-KIK has developed numerous activities in the field of art history, different aspects of which will be presented at the market of ideas session.

Pierre-Yves Kairis is a CODART member since 2008.