"Luigi Lanzi was a learned churchman, a skilful antiquarian, a lover of painting and sculpture, a sensible critic, something of a poet, and in all those matters remarkably diligent and enthusiastic. He travelled, he examined, he collected, he studied, and he wrote; and early acquired the reputation of a candid judge of art, and a sagacious antiquarian. His admirable work has been recently translated into English by Mr. Thomas Roscoe, a gentleman whose varied knowledge in foreign literature entitles him to much respect. His name is sufficiently known to the public, not to need any great recommendation at our hands; but we must indeed say, that the translator has conferred a great benefit on that portion of his readers who are not professed Italian scholars. The work of Lanzi is full of difficulties, even to Italians themselves, on account of the terms of Art with which almost every page is full: it thus very much redounds to the credit of Mr. Roscoe, to have produced so excellent and faithful a translation, and written wherewithal with great elegance of diction. Of this our readers cannot fail to be at once convinced, when we inform them that he was materially assisted by his own respectable father; by Mr. W. H. Ottley; by Dr. Traill; and by Signor Panizzi, at present resident at Liverpool, one of the profoundest scholars and best of Italian critics."
The prior five volumes of this series are identified in the indexes with lower case Roman letters. At the time of posting, these volumes can be found in the Project Gutenberg collection as follows:
i--http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34479 ii--http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34585 iii--http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34645 iv--http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38967 v--http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39996
Although we verify the correctness of these URLs at the time of posting, they may not work, for various reasons, for various people, at various times.
In the first index, names beginning with "I" and "J" are alphabetized as though the I and J are the same letter, so that Ja... entries appear before Ib... and Jo... after In.... Names beginning with "U" and "V" are treated in the same manner.
Some dates of birth and death cited by the author are at variance from those reported by subsequent sources. Dates that are clearly typographical errors were adjusted, as listed below. Otherwise, dates were left as printed, even though the given dates lead to illogical results (e.g., see entries for Stephano and Alessandro Magnasco).