The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume 2: Venice, 1540-1600
National Gallery Catalogues

This volume includes some of the greatest pictures in the National Gallery: Titian’s Vendramin Family venerating a Relic of the True Cross and The Death of Actaeon; Veronese’s Family of Darius and his four Allegories, and Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way. There are also new discoveries, such as the small painting by Veronese of The Rape of Europa, long considered a copy, whose quality is revealed by recent cleaning. The great Bassano family, who worked outside Venice but often in the service of the city and its art market, is also well represented. Veronese may be the artist whose entire range is best displayed, with paintings of all sizes and types from his youth to maturity. But the influence of Titian pervades the entire period covered in this catalogue, and for that reason his works after 1540 are included here; his earlier paintings will appear in another volume.

The catalogue can also serve as an introduction to all the major types of painting produced in the city: the altarpiece, the confraternity chapel decoration, the ceiling painting, paintings for the portego (the long central hall of a palace), the portrait, and even furniture painting. Many of these pictures have passed through some of the greatest collections in Europe – most notably those of Emperor Rudolph II, in Prague, of Queen Christina of Sweden and of the Duc d’Orléans – and the stories behind their provenance represent key episodes in the history of European taste. The author’s account of how these works were acquired makes this catalogue an important contribution to the history of collecting and to the history of the National Gallery itself.

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.