Two recent collection catalogues, both investigating early modern European paintings, provide an index of the state of the art for scholarship on individual museum objects. Both are splendidly produced and result from years of patient research. Both admirably adduce the latest technical investigation from the conservation laboratory and integrate it with other findings. In one case, London’s National Gallery, the credited single curatorial author, Lorne Campbell, clearly builds on the splendid precedent of the former curator, Martin Davies (to whose memory the catalogue is dedicated). In the other case, a previously unsystematic and diverse but important collection has finally received the attention it deserves—from a team of specialists whose expertise ranges across the following countries: France, Central Europe, the Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain. For the material overlapping with Campbell’s Flemish fifteenth century, the specialist enlisted was well-versed in this collection. Martha Wolff, now curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, was formerly an Assistant Curator at the Metropolitan Museum and later co-author (with John Hand) of the definitive collection catalogue (1986) of this “early Netherlandish” period from the National Gallery, Washington, which set previous standards for these works to follow. The scope and depth of scholarship by Campbell (and...