Sources, Attributes and Their Limits

The List Lives on the Entry

A page-long roll of impressive references proves nothing about the panel you are actually looking at. So the references here sit on the entry itself, linked, beside the fields they support.

Where that list is present, a value can be walked back to the record it came from with nobody's word taken in between — including ours.

Where it is absent, nothing is being kept from you and nothing has been verified: the sourcing pass has not reached that entry yet. Most of the collection is still unsourced. Read an entry with no Sources section as an unchecked copy of a record we found.

What We Read

All of it public, machine-readable and free for you to check against. What we do not read: unpublished archives, correspondence, dissertations, subscription journals. Nobody is interviewed. No museum is a partner — we take the catalogue records they publish openly, like anybody else with a browser.

Museum collection records

Open catalogue APIs. They supply the title under which an institution files a picture, which is where a saint's name comes from when it comes at all — and where its absence comes from too.

Wikidata

Statements for date, material and depicted figure, each with an identifier of its own that can be opened and read.

Getty Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)

Artist identity, name variants and life dates. It keeps one painter from splitting into two entries. It has nothing to say about whether a wheel belongs to Catherine of Alexandria.

Wikipedia

Background and reception, used as a lead toward a primary record. A hagiographic claim traced no further than a Wikipedia paragraph has not been traced.

What None of These Settle

None of them tell you which saint is on the panel. Naming a figure from a wheel, a gridiron, a tower or a sheaf of arrows belongs to hagiographic literature — the Acta Sanctorum, the Legenda Aurea and the scholarship built on top of them. We consult none of it, and no entry here should be read as an argument about who somebody is. Where a museum names the saint, we repeat the museum. Where it declines to, so do we.

Feast days, patronages and the cult attached to a figure are the same case: absent from our records, and not to be inferred from anything printed on an entry.

Two Records, One Field

When a museum and an authority file disagree about a date or a set of measurements, the entry shows one value and one source, never a comparison. The queue of collections is fixed and the first answer wins; the alternatives are dropped, not filed. Seeing which institution you are trusting is the whole of what we offer, and it is enough to go check the other one.

The Prose Is Not a Citation

Narrative paragraphs on an entry are drafted by a language model from the sources listed on that entry. They are not an authority and have no business in a bibliography as scholarship. Quoting a fact means citing the record we link to; quoting our summary means citing the entry and saying plainly what it is.

The reasoning behind that split is set out in the editorial policy.

How to Cite an Entry

Every work has a companion citation page that builds the reference for you in APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard. From any artwork page the citation link leads to its address under /cite/{artist}/{title}.

Two things worth knowing while you do it. Each work has a permanent Master ID, so an entry stays the same object even after a title spelling or a URL slug is corrected. And entries whose facts have been checked print the date of that check — the honest "last updated" for a reference. Most entries have none; where there is none, use your own access date.

For the site as a whole: Saints Oil Paintings, saintspaintings.com.