PERHAPS BECAUSE THEY are so preoccupied with understanding the past, art historians have been relatively slow to adapt to the changes being wrought on their discipline by automation and to take full advantage of the benefits that it offers. But digital transition is still in its early stages and most researchers have been participants for hardly twenty-five years, too short a time to begin building more than a few of the long-term projects that are now feasible. However, a few such enterprises have already become part of the vocabulary of research and others are being launched – sometimes with minimal publicity – whose impact will certainly be significant. One of the most ambitious of these and worthy of special attention is dedicated to Italian paintings in France. This is the Répertoire des tableaux italiens dans les collections publiques françaises (XIIIe–XIXe siècles) (RETIF), the first tranche of which, consisting of Brittany, Poitou-Charente and Centre, was mounted on the website of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) two years ago, followed by a second batch in March this year, which includes the Pays-de-Loire and Nord Pas-de-Calais. The number of paintings so far included amounts to hardly 2,000, but the number is expected to grow to approximately 13,000 and even now it is possible to see that, if it can continue as it has begun, the results will be impressive.

In addition to basic information, an abbreviated provenance is given for each painting as well as a brief bibliography and, most important, an image, something a book cannot easily rival. The illustrations are often not of high quality, many – especially those of churches – being amateur photographs taken by members of the group compiling the Répertoire.

The conception and execution of the project is due primarily to Michel Laclotte, former director of the Musée du Louvre and now Vice President of the Comité scientifique of INHA. Laclotte began his professional career with a thesis on early Florentine and Sienese paintings in regional French museums, and so this latest project is a continuation of the work he began more than half a century ago, though on a truly grand scale. He now has the help of a small team at INHA as well as the advice of numerous scholars, mostly French and Italian, to whose opinions Laclotte has ready access. The extent of the project will eventually exceed any similar national inventory that has preceded it.

Indeed, the French have been the quickest and most efficient in building such large automated projects, a reflection of the marked centralisation in that country. The huge online data­bases Joconde (which includes the possessions of the French national museums), Mobilier-Palissy and Architecture-Mérimée (the last two produced by the department of Architecture et Patrimoine) are testaments to their industry. In Britain, a national online survey of paintings is still being developed, and in the United States individual museums are left to their own devices, with very mixed results and minimal consistency.

The Italian project follows close on the heels of a similar one, the Répertoire des peintures françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles en Allemagne (REPFALL), initiated and overseen by Pierre Rosenberg, which was accompanied by an exhibition held in Paris, Munich and Bonn, and culminated in a book that lists and reproduces all the French paintings of the Baroque and Rococo periods in German museums, including as well an abbreviated bibliography and provenance in addition to the essential information.1 Although necessarily smaller – it lists around 2,000 paintings – and freed of the necessity of searching for unknown pictures in churches, that project was nevertheless similarly ambitious, and, taken together, the two databases provide a standard to which others can aspire. They also indicate the increasingly international character that such projects require: RETIF eschews the French form of Italian names – Carrache for Carracci, for instance – and the French/German project provides both.

RETIF will necessarily overlap with Joconde and other French projects, but it is inevitably bringing to light a large number of previously unknown paintings, among which one might mention a new Lotto of St Jerome in the museum in Varzy, an unknown cassone with the Story of Romulus and Remus by Matteo di Giovanni in Libourne, a Coronation of the Virgin by Antonio Vivarini in a church in the Alpine village of Alos, and many others that will appear region by region in the following months.

Ambitious projects on this scale usually come about through the persistence of one dedicated person, and it would be difficult to find someone with the same governmental clout and connoisseurial experience to equal Laclotte. Like other institutions designed with academic standards, the administration of INHA is expected to change on a regular basis and new administrators may have different priorities. This can make long-term projects vulnerable. Even much wealthier institutions, such as the Getty Research Institute in California, where one might have expected ambitious projects to have a secure footing, are dropping their support for initiatives that need more than short-term financial planning, including the Bibliography for the History of Art (BHA) and most of the projects under the Getty Provenance Index.

Another – generally unacknowledged – drawback associated with such online efforts is their anonymity, which is sometimes overcome by publishing the principal results in books or journals, thereby giving the author appropriate recognition. As the size of such projects expands, however, this becomes increasingly difficult, and compilers can no longer assume that an online project will ever take any other form. Even when RETIF is concluded a few years from now, it expects to be able to keep the bibliographical and provenance parts of the database up to date, a plan that will require firm commitment. We hope that INHA and its future administrators will live up to these high expectations and continue to provide us with such marvellously rich material.