Note to the Reader - Rieke van Leeuwen
This publication is dedicated to the first part of Gerson's chapter on Germany (the 17th century), p. 197-298. The second part (the 18th and 19th centuries, p. 299-350) is published in October 2018.
To illustrate and annotate Gerson’s chapter on Germany we started with an analysis of all the artists, art dealers and collectors mentioned by him, entering or supplementing information on them in RKDartists. By doing literature research as well as data research into RKDartists, we now have more than 2,000 artists, art dealers and collectors in our database of people who are part of the German project (click here). This number could grow in the future.
The second route we took was to find all the art works mentioned in Gerson’s publication (c. 700), as well as art works that are not mentioned but that meet the research criteria. The number of art works currently described in the database RKDimages, including paintings, drawings and prints, is over 10,000 (click here).
The information in the databases forms the foundation for the annotated and illustrated Gerson online. The illustrations and facts concerning works of art are directly retrieved from RKDimages and shown in the digital publication and are linked to records concerning artists and collectors in the database RKDartists. Therefore, the information in the databases functions as an extension of the documentary apparatus of the publication. To avoid redundancy, only the most relevant literature regarding artists is included in the notes.
Two kinds of notes are found in the translated Gerson text: notes by Gerson himself as they occur in the German text of 1942/1983, which are flagged by [Gerson 1942/1983], and ones preceded by [Van Leeuwen 2017] or [Van Leeuwen 2018]. The literature for both kinds of notes is standardized and abbreviated. All the abbreviations may be found in the bibliography, which has been edited by Ellinoor Bergvelt. It will be possible to append more articles to this publication in the future. After all, the great advantage of a digital publication is that it can always be altered and amplified. Every emendation will be included in the colophon along with its date.
This digital publication does not feature page numbers. To quote from this publication, we suggest references to its section numbers (see also Colophon).