The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume 1: Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona
National Gallery Catalogues

All the artists catalogued in this volume were active in Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona in the sixteenth century, cities characterised as much by the artistic interaction between them as by the influence of Venice. They include such well-known names as Lorenzo Lotto, Moretto and Moroni, as well as less familiar ones such as Bartolomeo Veneto and Calisto Piazza. 

The comprehensive entry for each picture covers technique and materials, conservation and condition, subject and iconography. A brief but informative account of the original patronage of the painting is followed by a discussion of changing tastes, and of how the picture has been interpreted and esteemed (or neglected) during subsequent centuries. More than a third of the paintings catalogued here are portraits, and these entries include valuable sections on contemporary dress, furnishings and accessories. Some of the paintings, such as Lotto's celebrated Portrait of a Woman inspired by Lucretia and Moroni's portrait of a tailor, have long been highly regarded, but this catalogue sheds new light on exactly what is represented in these familiar but enigmatic images. 

Detailed descriptions of frames and framing reflect the growing interest in this field among both curators and the general public. An extended appendix provides fascinating entries on some of the great collectors and collections of the past. Biographies of the artists provide valuable information for the researcher, especially where the artist is little known, while for the general reader and scholar alike, these sketches of the artist's character and career are a useful aid to a fuller understanding of his work.

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.