The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings: With French Paintings before 1600
National Gallery Catalogues

The National Gallery possesses an important collection of paintings by sixteenth-century Netherlandish artists including Joachim Beuckelaer, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jean Gossart and Quinten Massys. They are grouped here with a small number of French paintings, some by artists who came from the Low Countries (Corneille de Lyon, probably Jean Hey and perhaps the Master of Saint Giles).

Lorne Campbell’s catalogue is a model of scholarship; he has examined all the pictures with Gallery conservators and scientists, carefully described them and rigorously researched their histories, subjects and styles. New discoveries about artists’ techniques and practices have led to many reattributions, and the rescue from anonymity of over twenty paintings. The identities of several patrons are established or suggested, while an introductory essay explains how contemporaries regarded these paintings. Generously illustrated, with many details and technical photographs, and beautifully produced, this comprehensive catalogue will be essential reading for scholars, while also introducing general readers to a vital part of the Gallery’s collection.

These catalogue entries are the result of a pilot project to set up a process that takes the desktop publishing files that were sent to press, converts them to a more flexible digital format, and transforms them into web pages and other formats. This is a complicated process, as we are dealing with large and complex texts: these five trial entries alone come to 111,250 words.

We have tried to stay as close to the original texts and arrangements as possible, whilst also creating online entries that are self-contained: everything you need to understand the entry should be in that page, so sections like bibliographies, lists of abbreviations, glossaries, appendices and the explanation of how the catalogue works have been brought into the entry webpage from elsewhere in the catalogue. Because of the conventions followed in the original texts regarding references, we have had to assemble bibliographies from various sources: this is why entries may be formatted differently, or be briefer or more discursive than you might expect. We are investigating how we might improve this in the future.

Editorially, we have corrected obvious typos. We have also acquired new versions of the various images, which means that the credit lines have had to be updated to match the image suppliers' current requirements. Current collection images are temporary derivatives, which we hope to replace with a more refined system allowing access to higher-resolution or zoomable version in due course. Images, which often fell in the middle of running text in order to sit well on the page, have been moved to the next paragraph break after their original position - with the exception of the main image of the painting in catalogue, which has been moved to the head of the entry. (This explains why the page numbering may indicate empty pages.) Otherwise, we have not updated the texts to reflect current opinion: they reflect the state of knowledge at the time they were written. However, we are investigating ways in which curators can add a supplementary update.

Following assessment of this pilot, we hope to continue work on more entries, and to further develop our online publishing pipeline. In the meantime we hope you find them useful, and would welcome any feedback you might have.