Courbet enjoyed painting his friends: it was a testament of friendship, and one that made them for posterity denizens of the painter's world. He began by painting the compainions of his Ornans boyhood and his Paris student years - Cuenot, Marlet, Promayet; Ansout and Van Wisselingh. Then, when he moved into the Parisian literary bohemia in 1848 Courbet portrayed his new friends - Champfleury, Baudelaire, Trapadoux.

'La sculpture au siècle de Rubens' (15th July -2nd October 1977) opened just too late for notice, beyond a mention, in the first section of this review (September 1977, P.627). To mount, as the chief contribution of Brussels to the Rubens celebrations, an exhibition on this theme was a conspicuously original undertaking. It proved to be one of the most worthwhile of the year, reflecting the signal advances in scholarship led by Elizabeth Dhanens, supported by H. M. J. Nieuwdorp and by their associates in the selection and cataloguing

It has long been recognized that, before travelling to North Africa in 1832, Delacroix derived knowledge of Islamic civilization indirectly from books, miniatures, prints, costumes and various artifacts that were available to him in Paris, either through friends or relatives who had travelled in the East, or in public collections. But precise identification of pictorial sources consulted or copied by him in this early period are exceedingly rare.

In her fascinating essay on Mantegna's Parnassus in the Louvre, Phyllis Williams Lehmann confessed herself unable to find a specific source for the figure of Mars (fig. 26). 'Indeed', she states, 'it is doubtful that any single monumental source lies behind it'. The object of this note is to show that there was a single monumental source; one that Mantegna employed in another context besides the Parnassus.

The cross currents of Italian art are endlessly fascinating but many of their eddies remain almost uncharted. The significance of the rôle of Donatello at Padua or Leonado at Milan is obvious enough but we have less clear a picture of the extent of Perugino's influence in Northern Italy. Yet without his example the classicism of Francia and Costa at Bologna would have been an isolated phenomenon; and one only has to see how Campi copied the altar-piece of 1494 at Cremona, how Aspertini and Gaudenzio Ferrari reacted a few years later to the Pavia polyptych to sense the geographical dimension of Perugino's demesne.

Inigo Jones and John Webb were wrong when they conceived Stonehenge as a Roman temple dedicated to Coelus. But what Jones wrote of it in The Most Notable Antiquity of Great Britain . . . called Stone-Heng in 1655, and what Webb said at much greater length ten years later in A Vindication of Stone-Heng Restored, was far more interesting for what it revealed of both architects' attitudes to classical composition - to what Jones termed 'Architectonicall Scheam' and Webb 'Architectonic Scheme'.

Veronese's allegorical cycle of four paintings (Figs.34-37) in the National Gallery has received much attention in the literature in recent years. Despite careful analysis of the manifest symbols in these works, the interpretations and arrangements so far proposed are unconvincing and incompatible. Close inspection of the four compositions, however, reveals clear links between them which suggest a plausible allegorical meaning.

Sadly abortive as the Sotheby Parke Bernet sale of May 1977, at the Palazzo Serristori in Florence turned out to be, it did afford a public viewing of a few interesting seventeenth and eighteenth-century paintings. Among these were three portraits of Antonio Serristori, son of Nera Vecchietti and the Luigi Serristori who was one of the Tuscan noblemen who had attended Maria de' Medici on her journey to France.

The competition set in our December 1977 issue elicited five letters, all with correct solutions: from Miss Sybille Pantazzi, Librarian at the Art Gallery of Ontario; Ronald Pickvance, Department of Fine Art, University of Glasgow; Professor Marcia Allentuck, F.R.S.A., New York; Basil Gray, formerly of the British Museum; and John Gere, Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.  On the last day of January the five envelopes were shuffled and opened.

Like so many people who have brought freshness into art, Charles E. Slatkin came to it indirectly. A native New Yorker, he studied at Columbia University and the University of Alabama, where he taught English Literature. In the early 1940's he entered the Education Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to head the school-museum programme of visual education which arranged exhibitions drawn from New York's museums in the city high schools.