The Getty Provenance Index installed easily and without particular problems. The software required six megabytes of disk storage. The graphic interface is Spartan but nothing is missing. At the startup the user is prompted for a database selection among four options. An info function provides the relevant information about the nature of the databases. These databases are associated in pairs and are related to inventories and sales of works of art of the western civilization —especially paintings. Private and public art collectors will find this CD‐ROM to be an unprecedented resource and an irreplaceable source of relevant information.
The Getty Provenance Index contains four databases:
A) The Archival Documents contains descriptive information pertaining to primarily unpublished sixteenth‐ to nineteenth‐century documents that inventory private Spanish, Italian, and Netherlandish (i.e. Dutch) collections of art (especially paintings). Each document is assigned a unique Provenance Index inventory number (PI Inventory No.).
B) The Inventory Contents contains descriptive information (the name of the artist, the subject description in English, the room in which the work resided, etc.) about individual works of art (primarily paintings) from a portion of the Spanish, Italian, and Netherlandish documents recorded in the Archival Documents database.
C) Sale Catalogues contains descriptive information about British, French, and Netherlandish catalogues of sales (primarily auctions) that included paintings. Each catalogue is assigned a unique Provenance Index BBF number, which identifies both the sale in the Sale Catalogues database and its corresponding records in the Sale Contents database.
D) Sale Contents contains descriptive information about paintings sold at British, French, and Netherlandish auctions held from 1801 to 1825 in the British Isles and from 1801 to 1810 in France and the Netherlands. Each record in this database describes one lot in a sale catalogue.
The search engine is very powerful and the search syntax is complex. However the user does not have to learn any of the commands since the search string is automatically generated by selecting categories from a pull down window and selecting items from another window. The search can use either the Boolean operator AND or OR. The search interface allow for two modes: Indexes and History. A search history is preserved until a new search is selected.
The search results can be downloaded into a file or printed. The display function produces a list of items with the basic identification on single lines. Each of the items in the search results can be expanded into a full record page with very detailed information about all possible circumstances surrounding the object and its transaction. The results can be sorted. The items in the list can be selected and the categories custom‐defined. This index is the result of a painstaking process of data collection, verification, and uniformation by the team of the Getty Information Institute. The quality of the information contained is very high and the success in making it available to the public is highly remarkable.
The CD‐ROM comes with a 65 pages User’s Guide; the section related to technical requirements and functionality explanation is indeed small while the explanation of the genesis of the Index and of the quality and nature of the contained information is much larger (and more interesting). The product is targeted toward collectors and scholars and will not have a large market. I think that this Index provides a superb tool of research and I highly recommend it to museums and libraries as well as private collectors and dealers especially to those interested in paintings originating from Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.
