AMONG the unattributed architectural drawings housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum is a small but beautiful sheet (Fig.1) which appears to be a project for one of Jacopo Sansovino's most renowned buildings: the Log- getta in Piazza San Marco, Venice, designed in 1537 (Figs.3-4).'If this is indeed the case, the drawing would hold a position of some importance in Sansovino's œuvre since no other drawing certainly by him for a documented architectural project is known.2 As such the drawing would give us a hitherto unavailable insight into his work- ing methods and imagination, a better understanding of how this particular project evolved and a basis for the identification of further drawings by his hand.

ON 7th July 1624 the Roman engraver Francesco Villa- mena (Fig.28) died suddenly as he was passing by the church of S. Maria della Pace, leaving his thirty-year-old wife Caterina with the difficult burden of providing for their five young children. Francesco died intestate, which further compounded Caterina's problems. Just over a year after her husband's death Caterina remarried, offering as dowry to her new husband Luca Morletti her share (a sixth part) of Francesco's inheritance ; Luca Morletti, in turn, took appropriate legal steps to assume formal responsi- bility and tutelage of his new family and to settle their inheritance.

IN October 1685, from a temporary retreat on the Con- tinent, Lord Wharton - described by a contemporary as 'an old and expert Parliament man, of eminent Piety and Abilities, besides a great friend of the Protestant Religion and Interest of England' - composed a brief autobiogra- phy in Latin. In it he spoke of his relations with Charles II and his successor, the then Duke of York. 'My one fur- ther ambition,' he wrote 'was to have portraits of them and their Queens (as I have had of Charles I and his Queen) and with those they have presented me painted in full length and from the life by the best painters in Eng- land and perhaps in all Europe'.

THE British Museum was established by an Act of Parliament in 1753 as a hurried response to an unprecedented crisis. The Will of Sir Hans Sloane had stipulated that his library and collection were to be offered to the nation for the very low sum of £20,000. Sloane was a physician, the author of a Natural History of Jamaica, and his library and collection arose out of his medical interests. Besides his printed books and manuscripts, his collection included numerous dried plants and stuffed animals, as well as man- made objects, together forming what were then rather well termed 'natural and artificial curiosities'. To the Sloane collection, the 1753 Act added two collections of manuscripts, those of Sir Robert Cotton and of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and the printed books of Major Arthur Edwards. These collections established the character of the institution, which was divided into three departments, of manuscripts, printed books and natural history. Ironically, these are precisely the categories that are no longer part of the British Museum: the natural history collections departed to South Kensington in the 1880s, and the library was separated in 1973, and is soon to move to St Pancras.

HUGH MACANDREW, who died from cancer on 28th July 1993, epitomised the dedicated museum man, uncompromisingly devoted to the ideals of scholarship, quality and public educa- tion during a period when the conduct of art museums was undergoing rapid changes, changes to which he fell victim. His legacies are the sound acquisitions he made for the Ashmolean Museum and the National Gallery of Scotland, the scrupulous catalogues he produced or supervised of their collections and the elegant articles he published.

CECIL GOULD, who died after a mercifully short illness on 7th April, was a scholar associated particularly with high renais- sance Italian painting, but his scholarly and cultural interests were much wider - of, indeed, impressive width. He was keenly interested in sculpture and had considerable knowledge of archi- tecture, extending to that of the Middle East and India. His reading took in Gibbon and Saki and the novels of Ivy Compton- Burnett, one of his friends. Music always meant much to him; his profound, informed taste ranged from Bach to Britten, with a fondness for opera and a special fondness for Wagner.