SOME seven years ago Benedict Nicholson and Keith Roberts first told me of their idea of this series of annual lectures each devoted to the discussion of a single portrait. After the bereavement which THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE suffered through the sudden death of Benedict Nicholson, it was Keith Roberts who invited me to give this lecture and even agreed to bend the rules slightly to accommodate a portrait trailing a large question-mark behind it. It is characteristic of the kind of friend he was that he immediately took a lively interest - only a few weeks before his sad and unexpected death he brought me the catalogue of an exhibition which, as he rightly thought, would come in useful for me, the exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery of works by Tom Phillips. 

ONE of the oldest, and at the same time, best quality works of the Italian Trecento in Czechoslovakia is a small tabernacle in the Moravian Gallery in Brno, which has never been published. The small work was given to the Picture Gallery of the former Regional Museum just before the end of the last century by Count J. J. Liechtenstein. Thanks to this art-loving patron, the Brno Museum acquired several other valuable Italian paintings, to which attention was drawn, some time ago, in an article by W. Suida. 

William Blundell Spence, painter, author, collector and marchand amateur, was a contemporary and life-long friend of Sir James Hudson and Sir Henry Layard though he belonged, mentally to an earlier generation of Anglo-Italians. Spence was largely brought up in Italy - in the Italuy of Stendhol's La Chartreuse de Parme - and he remained attached by many personal ties to that fancy-dress world of small royal counts even after it had all vanished into limbo in 1860. So he was already something of an anachronism by the time Hudson and Layard settled in Italy on their retirement: and when he dies in 1900 Spence was remembered mainly as a picturesque local survival. 

ALFRED MICHIELS, in a survey compiled as long ago as 1869 but still most useful, gave some account of the lack of appreciation from which the works of Abraham Janssens (1576-1632) then suffer. 'For a complete appreciation, he affirms, it would perhaps be necessary to have seen his Resurrection of Lazarus, in the possession of the Elector Palatine, since this was regarded as his principal work, the Burial of Christ, the Virgin and Child with Saints, to be seen and admired in the Church of the Grand Carmes at Antwerp (both Campo Weyermann and Descaps are enthusiastic in their praise of these two canvases).

THE Florentine Grand-ducal cabinet of cameos and intaglios continued a Medici tradition of gem collecting established in the fifteenth century. The gems of Lorenzo il Magnifico, some of which he inherited from his father and his grandfather, took pride of place in the Palace in Via Larga. His collection was large, and certain objects in it were of especial renown, such as the spectacular Tazza Farnese. The Tazza, along with a number of Lorenzo's gems, was taken from Florence by Margherita d'Austria when she fled following the death in 1537 of Alessandro de' Medici, first Duke of Florence. 

UNTIL about twenty years ago, the drawings of most Spanish baroque painters were almost unknown. Velasquez, Ribera and Murillo, for example, were said to draw rarely or not at all. Not so with Alonso Cano (1601-1667), for, from his own time until the present, his drawings have been praised and treasured. Nevertheless, even today Cano the draughtsman is known mainly in one dimension: as creator of carefully planned and finished drawings. 

ON 28th July 1289, fifteen days before the first recorded payment for a fresco in Siena's communal palace, the government paid for decorations in the chapel of the Nine. This document, published here for the first time, reveals that the council room and the chapel were decorated simultaneously: 'Item quince libre soldos...'