Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Schools I Paintings
from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona, National Gallery Catalogues
(London: National Gallery Distributed by Yale University Press, 2004)
430pp., coloured and b&w illustrations
ISBN 1857099087
This is another candidate for the heavyweight Catalogue championship. The
Catalogue which it partially replaces, The Sixteenth-Century Italian Schools by
Cecil Gould (1975), was an unillustrated paperback of modest size, costing £3,
which the visitor could comfortably carry round in his or her hand.
Subsequently Dillian Gordon, revising Martin Davies’ The Early Italian Schools
Before 1400, produced in 1988 a chunky volume of 250 pages including twenty
four useful comparative monochrome plates. Her splendid catalogue, The
Fifteenth-Century Italian Schools (London: National Gallery Company, 2003), is
an enduring work of reference, but for use in the research library rather than
as the viewer’s vade mecum.
National Gallery cataloguing was revolutionized by Martin Davies,
whose Early Netherlandish Painting of 1945 was the first of four catalogues he
produced for the Gallery. Meticulous sifting of the evidence and dispassionate
judgement made them the envy of the world’s picture galleries, often emulated
but never surpassed as tools of research, a ‘new kind of weapon of
scholarship’ in Ellis Waterhouse’s vivid phrase.
The new volumes are very different. Penny’s includes, besides the
entries on forty-seven paintings, an Appendix of Collectors’ Biographies, an
ample bibliography, a list of changes of attribution (ten in number), an index
of inventory numbers and a comprehensive general index. This is a work of
substantial scholarship which will become an essential reference on the
paintings included. The standard entry now includes far more than either
Davies or Gould could have imagined, including an analysis of the painting
support, sections on materials and technique, condition and conservation
history besides welcome information on the pictures’ frames. Colour plates of
the paintings, together with details and photographs of museum objects
similar to those present in the paintings are reproduced for all entries. Each
catalogue entry is now an extended essay on the painter and the painting
under consideration, which begins to shift the focus from the painting to the
essayist. Martin Davies was often almost absurdly reticent in his authorial
persona: ‘the compiler’ was a characteristic locution, and the compiler wrote
in a style of gnomic concision. It has all changed here and the cataloguer has
become the protagonist, at times almost self-regardingly so. The Catalogue is
now a heavyweight work of scholarship aimed at the specialist and the
academic. It represents a significant change of policy and one which should be
accompanied by a visitor-friendly volume along the lines of the Alte
Pinakothek Munich’s Erläuterungen zu den Ausgestellten Gemälde, a
substantial summary paperback guide aimed at the serious visitor. This is not
at present the case.
The results are often splendid, with a new appreciation of the individual
painting stemming from the catalogue entry. Penny has had substantial
technical assistance from Jill Dunkerton, and the support of the unrivalled
National Gallery Conservation Department in many of the entries, always
readily acknowledged. The volume is a pleasure to consult, very well produced
and with only a sprinkling of typographical errors. It is a pity that in the Christ
Blessing No. 3087, where the frame has a real chance of being original, that a
modern label is still physically attached to it. But to end on a carping note
would be unfair. This is a fine catalogue of a significant part of a great national
collection.
Professor Julian Gardner, University of Warwick