Materials

These are the pictures the Church has told its stories with for seven hundred years. We print them the way they deserve: from the museum's own photograph wherever there is one, whole, on cotton paper from a mill older than the Baroque, in pigment ink made to outlast the wall it hangs on.

The picture

Every work in the catalogue is a masterwork of the Catholic tradition in a public collection — the National Gallery of Art, the Cleveland Museum, the Prado, the Louvre, the National Gallery in London. The file we print is the museum's own photograph of the painting wherever the museum releases one, and the finest photograph of it in the public domain where it does not — always at the full resolution published. Where a museum caps a single download, we assemble the picture from its native tiles until we hold the whole thing: the Washington van Eyck Annunciation comes to us at 15,339 by 40,461 pixels, and prints from every one of them.

The whole painting is printed, edge to edge. The sheet is chosen to fit the picture, never the other way round, and a size is offered only when the file can carry it — which is why some works stop at 18×24 and others run to 40×60. Each product page names the collection and the file its print comes from.

The paper

Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 308 gsm. One hundred per cent cotton, acid- and lignin-free, made to the ISO 9706 permanence standard — museum quality, in the mill's own words, for the highest age resistance. It is a heavy, matte, white sheet with a soft felt surface that takes dark passages and gold alike without glare.

Hahnemühle has made paper in the Solling uplands of Lower Saxony since 1584 — writing paper first, then the papers artists draw, paint and print on. Photo Rag is its cotton paper for pigment printing, and it is the one we use for every work at every size.

The ink

Pigment ink. Pigment lies on the cotton as fine mineral particles bound to the fibre, which is why it is the archival choice for a print on paper; dye soaks in and fades. The process is the one the trade calls giclée: a wide-format pigment printer laying the image down at fine resolution on the cotton sheet, one print at a time.

Made to order, unframed

Nothing is printed until it is bought. Each print is made for its buyer, inspected, and sent unframed — flat in a rigid board mailer up to 18×24, rolled in a heavy tube above that — in seven standard sizes from 8×10 to 40×60, so it goes into a good frame from any framer without trimming. Shipping is in the price; returns explains what happens if it arrives damaged.

What it is for

Giotto and Duccio, van Eyck and Memling, Caravaggio and Zurbarán painted these pictures so that the Gospel could be seen. Under each work we print the passage it illustrates, in the Douay-Rheims, and a short reading of what you are looking at, with its sources named. The paper and the ink are chosen so that the picture can hang in a home for a lifetime and be handed on. That is the whole of what we are trying to do.