Although Desiderio da Settignano is one of the most admired Florentine sculptors of the Quattrocento, he is also one of the least documented. Few significant facts are known concerning his life and works,' none of his extant sculptures may be precisely dated, nor has any been securely documented to a specific patron. New documents published here (see the Appendix below) establish a commencement date and patron for Desiderio's wooden statue of Mary Magdalen in S. Trinita, Florence (Figs. 4, 5, 6 and 7), and mention his production of a terracotta bust of Christ. This archival material also discloses the involvement of an unexpected and important figure - Annalena Malatesta, founder of the Florentine convent which bears her name. In addition, findings from the statue's recent restoration prompt a reconsideration of contemporary claims that this work was finished by another sculptor.

In May 1988 I recognised the relief of a nude woman with a ram in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich (Inv. 2867; Fig. 13) as a late work by Antonio Minello. Endorsing my discovery, Dr Peter Volk, the museum's curator of sculpture, changed the label of the relief to Antonio Minello, Venice, ca. 1525', leaving me to justify the reattribution to a wider public. Not long afterward, there came to my attention, in a private collection in New York, an unpublished Bust of a young woman attributable to the same hand and span of years (Fig.21). Each of these works significantly enhances our understanding of Paduan and Venetian sculpture at a moment of particular efflorescence in the third decade of the sixteenth century.

On 3lst June 1559 Henry II of France was mortally wounded in a tournament held in Paris to celebrate the peace treaty of Le Cateau-Cambresis and died ten days later.' His distraught consort, Catherine de Medicis, immediately set about organising a number of projects to commemorate her husband and the Valois dynasty. These included the creation of the Valois tombs at St Denis,2 and the erection of an equestrian statue of the king.3 The queen's largely Italian choice of sculptors was characteristic of the direction of her artistic patronage.

Wile the workshop practices of portrait painters in eighteenth-century England have received some attention, little has been written about the procedures employed by portrait sculptors or about how these conditioned the use of conventions and the representation of individual likeness.' By examining a problematic series of busts commissioned for the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, this article will outline the diverse practices involved in the production of portrait sculpture in mid-eighteenth-century England and suggest the implications these may have for understanding the operation of the sculpture trade as well as the transactions between sculptor and sitter.

Rodin was almost sixty years old at the time of his first one- man exhibition, held in Brussels in 1899, an event he contemplated with hesitation and anxiety. He had originally planned a joint show there with Puvis de Chavannes, intended to be a repetition of one held three years earlier at the Musee Rath in Geneva where he had exhibited a number of important sculptures alongside paintings by Puvis and Carriere. Both artists were friends of Rodin as members of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts.' The first substantial presentation of his works had been at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1889, when they were shown with paintings by Claude Monet on the occasion of the Paris World Exhibition that same year.