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THE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ

THE PUBLICATION of a Catalogue Raisonné of the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo will provide access for the first time to a major source of reference for the intellectual, cultural and scientific history of seventeenth-century Europe.  The drawings are catalogued by subject matter (rather than by artist) in an attempt to reconstruct the method of classification employed by Cassiano.  The objective is to identify the subject of each drawing and to describe the circumstances in which the drawing was made, wherever possible with reference to surviving contemporary documentation.

The Catalogue will be published in thirty-four separate volumes, divided into two series: Series A, which covers Antiquities and Architecture, and Series B, which deals with Natural History.  Each part in a series will be devoted to a particular area of the collection and the catalogues will be written by leading scholars in the relevant areas.

The published volumes will cover not just the major portion of the Paper Museum that is kept in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, but also the material now in the British Museum's Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, the British Library, the Library of the Sir John Soane's Museum, the Institut de France in Paris and a number of other public and private collections, thus bringing together again the contents of the original Paper Museum for the first time since its sale and dispersal.

Each volume consists of an introductory essay followed by a catalogue entry for each drawing; the latter provides full descriptions of the drawing and details of the media used, as well as of annotations, inscriptions, drawing-sheets, mount-sheets, watermarks, provenance and related literature. The volumes also include concordances, bibliographies, documentary appendices, watermark listings and indices.

A special feature of the Catalogue Raisonné is the corpus of illustrations: every item in the collection is reproduced, usually as a full-page colour plate, and selected comparative illustrations (in both colour and black and white) show extant monuments or decorations in situ as well as natural history specimens in their present, modern-day forms.

Scholarly  research has been conducted during the last decade with the generous support of Olivetti and the patronage of the British Academy, the Accademia dei Lincei and the Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres.  The Catalogue is now being published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program, The Monument Trust, The Royal Collection Trust and a number of other private and corporate sponsors.