SAN DIEGO, CA.- The San Diego Museum of Art is the recipient of a $75,000 Access to Artistic Excellence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest annual funder of the arts in the United States. It is also the only museum in the San Diego region receiving an award of this magnitude in this grant cycle.

The grant will support the research, writing, and publication of The San Diego Museum of Art’s first comprehensive scholarly catalogue of Italian and Spanish paintings produced before 1800 in the Museum’s permanent collection.

Written by John Marciari, Curator of European Art and Head of Provenance Research at The San Diego Museum of Art, the catalogue will include comprehensive entries on the approximately 70 works in this collection with details of technique and materials, provenance, patronage, attribution, date, subject and iconography, conservation history, and previous bibliography.

The work is intended to make the Museum’s collection of Italian and Spanish paintings better known to a broader audience while also providing curators and scholars with much new information on specific works.

Among highlights of the Museum’s Italian collection are works by Giotto, Fra Angelico, Cosme Tura, Luca Signorelli, Paolo Veronese, Canaletto, and Francesco Guardi. Spanish masterpieces include major works by Bermejo, El Greco, Sanchez Cotán, Zurbarán, and Goya.

The publication will also incorporate digitization and online access to the catalogue—an important element of the Museum’s strategic plan to document its permanent collection—and is projected for publication in 2012-2013.

In its second round of FY2010 grants, the National Endowment for the Arts has distributed $97,632,100 through 1,323 grants to nonprofit national, regional, state, and local organizations.

A total of 950 grants have been awarded this cycle totaling $27,457,500 in the Access to Artistic Excellence category.