November 2008

In this month's issue

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

Archive

But it is not only information about the museum’s books and drawings that will be available online via the Museum’s website. Under the direction of the Deputy Director, Helen Dorey, Cornelius Vermeule’s catalogue of Soane’s antiquities has now been edited and entirely transferred on to the museum’s database in readiness for its publication online. Existing good-quality black-and-white images of all the pieces in the collection have been digitised so that each entry can be accompanied by a photograph. A special section with information about the museum’s famous collection of Hogarth paintings was added to the website in 2007. All this new material has emphasised the need for us to redesign and upgrade the Museum’s website, an expensive project for which we are currently seeking funds.

The Soane Museum’s Damascene conversion to online catalogues has not, however, entirely stopped the production of scholarly books about the house and its collections. Where appropriate, these will continue to be produced. The museum’s temporary exhibitions continue to be commemorated by handsomely designed catalogues and these make information available about hitherto unexplored aspects of the collection.

Older publications are regularly revised and edited; the museum’s handbook, The New Description – first published in 1955 – was revised in 2007. A new and up-to-date illustrated book on the museum, written by me and illustrated with new photographs by Derry Moore, will be published by Merrell in early 2009. There are also plans for a revised edition of Joseph Links’s The Soane Canalettos to coincide with the loan from the Soane of Canaletto’s Riva degli Schiavoni to the exhibition ‘Views of Venice’ at the National Gallery, London.

Two long-awaited projects will come to fruition over the next year. First is the publication of Valentin Kockel’s catalogue of the cork models in Soane’s collection. Funded by the Headley Trust and illustrated with specially commissioned digital photography of all the models, it should be available in 2009. Dr John Taylor’s monograph on the sarcophagus of Seti I is also almost ready for publication – we await the inclusion of the new research and photography carried out in May 2008, when the sarcophagus was cleaned and consolidated. It is hoped that the catalogue of Soane’s gems (Fig. 3) – an important collection of some 300 ancient and modern intaglios and cameos, once the property of the Braschi (the family of Pius VI), and Mgr Capece Latro, Archbishop of Tarentum – will be the subject of a future issue of a specialist journal.