The Fifteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume 1
National Gallery Catalogues

The National Gallery holdings of Italian paintings are both deep and wide-ranging. This new, richly illustrated catalogue deals with artists the bulk of whose work falls within the first half of the fifteenth century, around 1400–1460, predominantly in Tuscany. Yet within this relatively narrow chronological and geographical confine we find some of the most influential and innovative painters of the Italian Renaissance, including Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Pisanello and Uccello. The examples of their work represented here, the extent of the discoveries that have been made, and are still to be made, about their origins, and the scholarship brought to bear on them, emphasise the richness and the importance of this area of the Gallery’s collection.

Since the publication in 1961 of Martin Davies’s catalogue of the earlier Italian Schools, much new evidence has become available – through both scientific and archival investigations. Discoveries have been made and new theories advanced, not only about the identity of the artists but about the nature of their subject-matter and the original settings of their work. Among the new findings published here are the discovery of a concealed signature on an Annunciation by the Florentine painter Zanobi Strozzi and the identification of the missing predella panel from the Trinity altarpiece, begun by Pesellino and completed by Filippo Lippi. An essay by Susanna Avery-Quash traces the growth of interest in early Italian paintings in Britain.

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.