ART THEORISTS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. 2 vol.Review by: David AustinArt Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 18, No. 2(Fall 1999), pp. 49-50Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27949032 .

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information on the major artists, movements, critics, galleries, and

collectors of the twentieth century. Compiled by a team of unnamed

contributors, largely from England and France, the product pri

marily showcases art of North America and Europe. The CD-ROM

opens with a brief slide show that stops on one image. From this

screen you can use a timeline slider to continue running images; by

clicking and dragging the slider, any year between 1900 and 1995 can be selected and a picture from that year will appear.

The lynchpin of the program is a slide show that includes more than 3,500 images with hypertext links to over 2,500 entries; a list of the entries can be viewed at the publisher's Web site

[http://www.thameshudson.co.uk/art20/listent.htm]. Entries can

be accessed and marked from an alphabet. The user clicks on a let

ter that prompts a scrolling list of entries beginning with the chosen

letter; alternately, the scrolling list appears along with a box, in which the user can type a term. Multiple entries may be marked at

one time, an attractive feature of the program. The index screen fea

tures an array of images associated with entries in the displayed let

ter of the alphabet; clicking on any image or word takes the user to the associated entry. The search function performs both text and

caption searching. Besides the entry marking, Art20 boasts several other useful,

graphical features. Images may be enlarged and some have zoom,

video or sound associated with them. These features are indicated

in the caption and can be activated by clicking on the image or head

ing. Clicking again deactivates the function. The software includes

capabilities for cutting and pasting text into a notebook, arranging images side-by-side for comparison, and saving thumbnail images into a picture album. The user can mark entries and pages for quick retrieval at a future session. All of these elements work well and

are easy to use.

One of the unique and potentially unnerving features of this pro gram is its use of hidden menus. When the opening slide show

stops, for example, there are no visible instructions; move the cur

sor, however, and the menu offerings pop up. Without first reading the user manual, one might think there was an installation prob lem. One of the selections from the hidden menu is a user's guide, and this feature is the most frustrating component of Art 20. Al

though the guide describes and explains commands, none of them works from inside the user's guide and I was never able to exit it and

go back to the main program. There is also no evident way to exit

Art20 from inside the guide and the print manual provides no clues.

Fortunately, most of the instructions in the print manual are ade

quate, and it is short enough to read in a few minutes. Spending a

little time with the manual will also enable the user to fully appre ciate the features of the program. Libraries using CD-ROM towers

or servers will probably want to make instructions available for

users of this resource.

Without a doubt, the strength of this product lies in its images. Although thousands of colors are recommended, the images are

still impressive on a monitor running 256. The slide show can be left running on the screen and the variable speed can be set to suit

your taste. This is a stimulating feature since you can click on any

image with which you are unfamiliar. Text entries are not exhaus

tive, but contain a commendable amount of material and the type is clear and easy to read. Most of the entries, including text and

thumbnails, are covered in two or three screens, but famous artists

such as Matisse or Picasso have as many as sixteen. Most of the en

tries are brief and do not rely on unexplained jargon; the hypertext

links enhance and extend the information in any one entry. This title will be most useful for advanced high school stu

dents, undergraduates, and art devotees, and is a recommended

purchase for those audiences.

Linda Tompkins-Baldwin Baltimore Museum of Art

ART THEORISTS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE?Alexan

dria, VA: Chadwyck- Healey Ltd., 1998.?2 vol. on 1 CD-ROM.?

ISBN 0-85964-342-5: $6,300.00

System Requirements: Windows (3.1 or higher), 8Mb Ram, 10 Mb free hard disc space, SVGA card and monitor, quad-speed CD-ROM drive.

Is a single CD-ROM and its supporting material contained in a case the thickness of a single volume of The Dictionary of Art worth

$6,300.00? Art librarians and bibliographers may ask themselves this question when they consider reaching into the deepest pocket of their budgets. The question is not an easy one to answer.

Consider the publisher's statement that no single institution,

university or museum, holds all forty-three texts recorded in digi tal form on the CD-ROM. The collection of treatises define key de

velopments in European history between 1470 and 1770; while these texts are not solely specific to the study of art history, art scholars

will find much relevant here, including the canon of classical ar

chitecture as represented in the writings of Vitruvius, Alberti, Pal

ladio, and Vignola, guides to painting and sculpture by Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and others, and Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. The list of institutions cited as owners of these rare editions reads like a who's who of venerable humanities

collections, including the Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian

Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Cicognara Collection of

the Vatican Library. On this side of the Atlantic, the Fine Arts Li

brary of Harvard University is credited with one title. The unnamed editors or team of information specialists (cer

tainly there had to be more than one, and there were probably sev

eral) went to great lengths to provide the greatest number of the best editions of works by Italian Renaissance art theorists. They pre ferred first or earliest known edition, including notes, but exclud

ing editorial matter outside the period, in an attempt to keep the

copy as intellectually uncluttered as possible. If a nearly contem

porary English translation of the work exists, it too has been

included. In a few cases, such as the more generally sought-after works of Vasari, early twentieth-century English language versions

are included as well.

The software program developed to provide access to the rich

materials contained in Art Theorists of the Italian Renaissance (ATIR) is sophisticated, but happily it is quick and easy to install. Many of the software options, such as tiling or cascading and resizing of

windows will be familiar to moderately facile computer users. A standard search screen offers access by keyword, title, author,

genre, language, and /or date of edition. The command mode of

fers still greater flexibility and the experienced searcher may take full advantage of the complete array of Boolean operators. Re

sponse time in either mode is fast. All searches for a session are

saved and can be reviewed and reselected in different combinations.

All options and many helpful searching techniques are fully de scribed in the user manual.

Within the scope of the licensing agreement the user may save to hard or floppy disk and/or print any of the material from the CD-ROM. The software which controls the printing of text and im

Volume 18, Number 2 ? 1999 ? Art Documentation 49

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 15:57:04 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

ages allows for some customization, such as registration at either 300

or 600 dots per inch. Using ordinary paper, this reviewer printed at both levels and found little difference, but suspects that a finer

grade of paper and enlargement of the image or a detail of an image

may make a critical distinction.

The manual refers to SGML markup of the documents, but that

is an understatement. The documents contained in ATIR have been

encoded in their digital versions, perhaps as a part of the Human ities Text Encoding Initiative. Text encoding enables access in a

more specific manner than keyword searching and provides the means to search through lengthy, multi-volume or multi-text re

sources. In this case, words and phrases within elements and at

tributes may be searched through the command line if appropriate tags are incorporated. For example, "ombre in <poem> or <note>"

will return poems or notes which contain the shadowy word, but not

where it appears in the body or heading of text. For any interactive or hypermedia computer program, the problem still remains that human intervention occurred between the source and the user. It

is not quite the same as going to the original document because someone else has already made decisions as to users' interests.

To answer the question I posed at the start of this review, I doubt that $6,300 would purchase all the sources available on this

CD-ROM, even if they were available. The texts and illustrations as seen on the computer screen or printed out on paper are crisp and easy to view. Software programmers for the product wrote

one of the most sophisticated and successful search engines I have

seen, and the manual is clearly written. What may ultimately help a library decide on the purchase of ATIR are some basic questions: Do I have that amount of money in my budget? Do my patrons re

quire such material? If so, are the patrons sufficiently computer lit erate to take full advantage of the offerings of this product?

David Austin

University of Illinois at Chicago

THE DUNBIER SYSTEM & ENCompass 22,000 ARTIST DIREC

TORY, Version 2.0.1 / Roger Dunbier.-Scottsdale, AZ: ENCom

pass Fine Art (5424 N. 74th Street, Scottsdale, AZ 85250), 1999.-1 CD ROM and 1 vol. (pa.). ?$490.00 + annual updates @$190.00.

System Requirements: Windows or Macintosh.

The Dunbier System is more than an index to auction catalogs; it allows subscribers to calculate prices for works of art. The late

Roger Dunbier, creator of the system, had a Ph.D. in Economic Ge

ography from Oxford University and a background in real estate.

The son of an artist, raised in the company of artists, he applied his statistical and marketplace expertise to the art market. In The

Dunbier System he strove for a "comprehensive, reliable" system

whereby "independent unbiased estimates of value could be es

tablished," ostensibly creating a system of comparables for the art

market, mirroring the way real estate is priced. The product is lim ited to two-dimensional American art; prints and multiples in any

medium are excluded.

The system comes with an almost 300 page directory of artists in the database entitled ENCompass 22,000 Artists. Each artist is list ed on a single line followed by brief information about the artist and figures generated by The Dunbier System, the number of known titles mentioning the artist, and the price range and "Price Rank"

(out of 15,000 artists in the System, 1 being the highest) of the artist's work. For those who frequent auctions and galleries, the directory

provides a handy price range for an individual artist.

Several "slices/' or custom subsets, of the database are available.

Some are already defined (e.g., "Women Painters - Top 1,000 Price

Ranked," "California Artists - Top 1,000 Price Ranked,"), others can

be made on request. The "slices" use the full system interface.

The Dunbier System determines market value by analyzing art

literature and auction sales and ranking artists accordingly. As

Dunbier said "Our hypothesis is that prices conform to the magni tude of the literature, indeed follow to a considerable degree the

published word." Lists of comparable artists can be created, de

termined either by Dunbier ranking, geography, or other criteria. Sets can be easily sorted in almost every field, a feature I par

ticularly enjoyed. The database consists of artist files, each com

posed of five screens: "Introduction," "Auction/Books," "Graphs," "Price Calculation," and "Biography." The "Introduction" screen

includes the number of citations grouped by decade, the various

rankings of the artists, and whether their work is going up in price, down in price, or staying steady. On the "Auction/Books" screen,

auction catalog book, and periodical citations are listed.

"Graphs"charts how the artist has sold at auction. The "Biogra

phy" screen includes a brief biography for a (currently) limited number of artists. The "Price Calculation" screen (only available

for 15,000 of the 22,000 artists in the database) provides a form that

generates an estimated value for an artwork in hand.

The heart of The Dunbier System is the "Price Calculation" screen. At the bottom of this form is a "baseline price," determined by a combination of factors (literature momentum, prices realized at auc

tion, and overall Dunbier Rank). Literature momentum is key to the

price calculation and the overall ranking of an artist. The decade by decade change in the literature undergone by an artist is called "lit erature momentum." Increasing citations over time create positive

momentum, boosting an artist's marketplace value; conversely, a

decrease in the number of citations negatively affects price. The

ENCompass staff gathers citations primarily from the Dunbier Li

brary, a 5,500 volume collection of reference books, monographs, and

exhibition catalogs as well as hundreds of auction catalogs and sub

scriptions to ten art periodicals. Each title is analyzed and entered

into the database. Uniquely, when citations are added to The Dun

bier System the analysis includes the contents of the work; this is

weighted in the system as a "P/A" value (the "number of Pages per Artist" in that particular title). A book that substantially discusses ten artists and is 300 pages long, for instance, would list a "P/A" value of thirty for each artist (since 300/10 = 30).

The overall Dunbier rank is a figure reflecting the artist's rela

tive value compared to the other 15,000 artists ranked in the database.

Recent prices at auction, total number of references and literature

momentum are all used to determine the Dunbier rank.

On the remainder of the Price Calculation form is a list of stan dard features which will generally raise or lower the value of a

given art work (e.g., oils sell for more than watercolors); individu

al variances are accounted for when known. These standard fea

tures are combined with "salient features" -

characteristics of an

artist's work that will either boost or detract from the overall value

(e.g., O'Keeffe's flowers sell better than her cityscapes). The system was installed on a PowerMac G3 running OS 8.1

with 64 MB RAM. Installation did not follow the instructions exactly but was fast and trouble-free. Installation on a Windows 95 ma

chine was more problematic; at first the security software caused a

conflict generating, of all things, a Macintosh error message. Also

50 Art documentation ? Volume 18, Number 2 ? 1999

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 15:57:04 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions