The Italian Paintings before 1400
National Gallery Catalogues

The National Gallery houses one of the most important collections of early Italian paintings outside Italy, including works by Cimabue, Duccio, Ugolino di Nerio, Giotto, Bernardo Daddi and the Cioni brothers. Since these were last catalogued in 1988 there have been four exceptional new acquisitions: the thirteenth-century diptych now attributed to the Master of the Borgo Crucifix, The Virgin and Child by Cimabue, The Virgin and Child by the Clarisse Master and The Coronation of the Virgin by Bernardo Daddi.
ln 1989, following the systematic programme of examination jointly carried out by the National Gallery's curators, conservators and scientists, the National Gallery published Art in the Making: Italian Painting before 1400, which is acknowledged as a key source for information about the methods and materials of painting of this period. For the present volume, all but two works have been reexamined in the conservation studios, and this has revealed, through infrared reflectography., the significance of underdrawings in early Italian painting, together with other new information regarding technique.
ln reviewing and in some cases reattributing the works catalogued here, the author takes account of the considerable body of new research published over the last twenty years, including that on paintings and fragments of paintings in other collections which are related to panels in the National Gallery.

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.