At the heart of the project is its scholarly database recording antique works of art and architecture known in the Renaissance in relation with the early modern sources documenting them.
The project was initiated by the art historians Fritz Saxl and Richard Krautheimer and the archaeologist Karl Leo Heinrich Lehmann who sought after a reliable research tool for a better understanding of the afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance.
Saxl and Krautheimer hired the American archaeologist Phyllis Pray Bober to help with the realization of this idea by developing an index card system.
[3][4] In addition to information on dating, authorship, iconography, etc., the ancient monuments were recorded together with the corresponding Renaissance documents and sorted alphabetically and by genre.
[5] One of the most important publications that arose within the Census project was Bober's and Rubinstein's Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources, first published in 1986.
Since 1981, the first Census database was designed and created within the newly launched Art History Information Program of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
[3][4] After a productive decade of data entry both in London and in Rome, a newly developed retrieval system for the Census database was publicly introduced at the Warburg Institute in 1992.
[8] In 1995, after Horst Bredekamp had successfully campaigned for the project's integration into the art history department of the Humboldt University, the Census moved to Berlin.
This allowed for data entry using several personal computers within a local area network, and, in 1998, for the first time publication of the database as a PC application distributed on CD-ROM (later on DVD), supplemented by annual updates.
As a result of this project, a SPARQL endpoint was made available and exports of the RDF / XML files are deposited regularly on the Humboldt University's e-doc server.
Between 2015 and 2022, the Census database expanded to include material contributed by the project Jacopo Strada's Magnum ac Novum Opus: A Sixteenth-Century Numismatic Corpus, based at the Forschungszentrum Gotha of the Universität Erfurt.
The book series Cyriacus – Studien zur Rezeption der Antike was edited by Arnold Nesselrath while Director of the Census.