Relationship Mapping for Art Education and Research

Introduction The catalogue raisonné, or reasoned catalogue, has long been a standard tool for representing large art collections. A typical catalogue raisonné includes images of artworks along with descriptive metadata, commentary, and background information (often a biography of the artist) about the collection. More recently, technological and infrastructural advances (in particular, cheaper secondary memory, increased network bandwidth, computational power, and digitization technology) have enabled development of the digital catalogue raisonné. Some of these catalogues have been developed primarily to support the construction of print-based catalogues (Lanzelotte, et al., 1993; Gladney, et al. 1998), while others are intended for online use (for example, The Vincent van Gogh Gallery and Gemini G.E.L.). The Picasso Project (Mallen, 2006) has developed a digital catalogue raisonné containing 11,000 of Picasso's artworks, along with 7,000 biographical entries. It is the most complete and up-to-date collection of Picasso's prodigious body of work.