The state of regional museums in Britain has often figured on this Editorial page. It might be thought that there is at present little more to be said on the subject beyond repeating how dire the situation is in many of these institutions. We have commented on their fluctuating reputations; have kept a watchful eye on their symptoms; recorded the various injections of help through government funding; praised where we can, blamed where we ought; but inevitably we have had little to offer in the way of advice or cure.

Michelangelo was an artist with an eye for the monumental, even to the extent of allegedly dreaming of sculpting an entire mountain, and it is therefore appropriate that the scale of the task confronting his biographers should be no less colossal. In their case it is a mountain not of marble but of paper that they need to shape and master: it consists of well over a thousand letters written by or sent to Michelangelo over his eighty-eight year lifetime (a small number of which evaded inclusion in Paola Barocchi’s and Renzo Ristori’s five-volume collected correspondence); over three hundred printed pages of financial ricordi; diverse artistic contracts; and notification of the transfer of funds between his bank accounts in Florence to Rome that generally presaged his move from one city to the other. 

A discussion of surviving examples of the iconography of Edward II as a saint.