IF in Piero della Francesca's Flagellation the three men in the foreground had been shown confronting Pilate, their identification would have been an easy problem to discuss. In Giotto's Mocking of Jesus, Barna da Siena's Flagellation, and another Flagellation of 1402, a detached fresco from the Nerli Chapel in the Carmine, Pilate is consistently on the right engaged in a discussion with three men. The question that should have been asked long ago is whether the three men in Piero's painting, Pilate's distance from them notwithstanding, belong to the same iconographical strain as the possibly equivalent figures in these other works. The text that offers a positive answer to this is the Gospel of St John: 'Then led they Jesus from Caiaphas unto the hall of judgment: and it was early; and they themselves went not into the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover.'

It was only in 1973 when a scholar of Leonardo, Carlo Pedretti of the Department of Art, University of California, wrote to me, 'the problem of Leonardo's botanical illustrations is still to be assessed properly,' that I realised so little attention has been given to the master's plant studies after almost five hundred years. Several books trace the life story of Leonardo (1452-1519) in so far as we know about this extraordinary fifteenth-century artist and inventor. Kenneth Clark's account Leonardo da Vinci [1959] is still one of the most concise and sensitive in English. It is Leonardo's drawings which to quote Clark, 'bring us closer to the sources of his genius than the wrecks of his great formal achievements in painting'. 

IT is well known that in the medieval city the practice of painting, like all other crafts, tended to be an inherited occupation rather than a vocational one.' This pattern of inheritance and the tendency of the communal societas to restrict new-comers by limitations on apprentices and sanctions against trading by non-members of the Guild, much as the commune itself restricted the privileges of foreigners, led to the dominance of a small group of men over the arte and close personal relationships between them. This is obviously an important factor in the creation of regional schools with distinct and to some extent homogeneous styles, within which art historians have traditionally organised the art works of a given period. This concept has recently been questioned, and rather fruitfully, by Rainieri Varese in his discussion of Ferrarese painting in the Trecento.

AFTER his rather precipitate departure from Florence in May 1859, Spence settled down quietly in London with his family and continued to deal, as he did every summer, from his studio in Newman Street. He even managed to import some pictures from Italy - for his forebodings about the active steps the new government would take to stop the export of works of art seem to have been unjustified, at any rate for the moment. However, he took the precaution of exporting through Rome where, of course, there had been no change of administration. Reports from Italy were increasingly reassuring and he would probably have returned in the autumn had not his father fallen seriously ill. He therefore stayed on through the winter. Early in the new year his father died and Spence came into a small fortune - over £3,000 a year. This changed his financial circumstances quite dramatically. On returning to Florence he immediately bought the Villa Medici at Fiesole and embarked on a correspondingly spacious and lavish mode of living. 

IN his unpublished Essay on Landscape Painting, the poet John Clare recognised a kindred spirit in the water-colours of de Wint when he wrote that 'admirers of nature will admire his paintings - for they are her autographs and not a painters studys from the antique'. And it is true that Peter de Wint's place in the history of British Art rests almost exclusively on his water-colour landscapes that are 'so thoroughly characteristic of the scenery of our island and its ways of life'.

JOHN MURDOCH (THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE [May 1978], wrote of a problem 'of perennial and pressing interest to connoisseurs of seventeenth-century miniatures': how many Crosses worked as miniature painters? He offered the hypothesis, based on the evidence of style and signatures, that Peter and 'Lawrence' Cross were the same man. I have now approached the problem from the biographical point of view, through a study of contemporary documents; and my conclusion is the same: that there was only one Cross miniaturist. It was Peter who died in 1724, and I have found no evidence for the existence of any Lawrence. 

'If little is recorded of the facts of Rowlandson's life,' the late Paul Oppe observed, 'the reason is, no doubt, that so long as they were readily ascertainable they were either too well known or too little worth knowing.'" Rowlandson's biography has always been hampered by the scarcity of documentary sources: only three letters written by him have hitherto come to light, all within the past thirty years. The appearance of two new letters that illuminate his career as a student and later as a busy professional should therefore be welcome to scholars and keen admirers of his work.