Dear Visitor,

Prof. Erling S. Skaug died on March 7th, 2022 at age 83. His significant legacy in trecento research will live on, but he was not able to realize his plans to publish an update to his 1994 work "Punch Marks - from Giotto to Fra Angelico".

This website will remain online for the foreseeable future, to honour his work.
The e-mail address below is functional, but there's currently no expert available and associated with this site to answer very specific art historical questions.

Introduction

This website is dedicated to topics related to punchmarks as criteria for the classification of early Italian paintings in terms of attribution, chronology, and workshop relationships. Comments will also be given to the role of gold tooling as an integral part of pictorial aesthetics in medieval painting.

This site, established in December 2008, will be developed gradually as a reference source for sphragiology (Gr. sphragis = stamp, cf. the existing term "sphragistics" for the particular study of seals).

                                                       Left: The classic reference publication, Vols. I-II (1994)

                                                       Below: Recent publication (2013).

For all other publications, see Bibliography

Editor: Erling S. Skaug, professor emeritus, University of Oslo (Norway).

For inquiries: e-mail ess1348 [at] xs4all.nl