A LARGE painting by Giambattista has passed recently into the Prado from the collection of the Marques de Casa Riera in Madrid. 

ONE of the most enduring myths regarding Guido Reni is that his late style represents a decline of his creative powers. The commonly cited weakness of his late work is attributed variously to his obsessive gambling, which caused him to produce works unworthy of his talents to pay his debts, or to his psychological decline which caused him to lose interest in his metier. The former idea appears already in the seventeenth century, whereas the latter is an invention of modern criticism.

IN the seventeenth century, L. Beger wrote with an exaggeration characteristic of Baroque scholars: 'gems head the list of all the remains of antiquity'. It could not be that this area of art was neglected by Rubens, who was known as a man of wide interests, and P. Gassendi described his great contemporary as 'a most experiences connoisseur of all antiquities, but first of all of cameos'. Rubens himself, in a letter to Clause Peiresc, admitted: 'nothing has ever delighted me more than gems'.

THE Chapel of Wardour Castle, Wiltshire, built by the 8th Lord Arundell, is a remarkable tribute both to his Roman Catholic zeal and his artistic patronage, since he employed not only James Paine and, later, Sir John Soane as his architects, but commissioned contributions from Giacomo Quarenghi, Luigi Valadier and Giuseppe Cades, using as his agent in Rome Father John Thorpe, S. J. The story of the building of this sumptuous chapel is recounted by Alistair Rowan in an article in Country Life which was published soon after it was restored. 

IN a recent article it was argued that the portraits of Erasmus and of Pieter Gillis now in the possession of H.M. the Queen at Hampton Court and of the Earl of Radnor at Longford Castle respectively are those painted by Quentin Matsys at Antwerp in 1517 as a diptych and sent to Thomas More in the same year. The postscript corrects and augments information given in that article about the measurements and the make-up of each component of the diptych, adds a significant fact about Eraasmus's appearance and supplies further details of the provenance of the Gillis.

A COPY of Thomas Wright's Life of Richard Wilson, London acquired in 1975 by Nottingham University Library contains a number of hitherto unnoticed manuscript anecdotes concerning Wilson, pencilled in the margins. Three of the four considerable annotations are signed F. C. Pack, the fourth G. Arnald. In addition, there ate five study-sketches in pencil, mainly of clouds over the sea. These sketches can safely be attributed to George Arnald. 

THE Department of Prints and Drawings in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, owns about 200 drawings by the painter Johan Mandelberg (1730-86), who was Swedish by birth but, as from 1754, wholly in Danish service. Some seventy or eighty of these drawings are of Italian subjects.