IN considering the oeuvre of Agostino Tassi (1580/85 - c.1644) we shall find that the least known period of his activity is that of his youth, which appears, according to the sources (Mancini, Passeri, Soprani), to have been spent mainly in Tuscany and Genoa. The works he painted there, which consisted mostly of decorations on the facades of buildings and some interiors of Genoese villas, are all lost. 

AS the most productive in the field of seventeenth-century Bolognese ceiling decoration, Angelo Michele Colonna (1604-1687) has not been the subject of a general essay for a great many years. Increasing efforts at lifting the veil obscuring the work of the Bolognese decorative school have, however, been made from several sides in recent times, and a fuller picture of these ceiling frescoists is beginning to emerge. 

ONE of the most celebrated collections in sixteenth-century Venice was that of Gabriel Vendramin, who is remembered today principally because he was the first recorded owner of Giorgione's Tempesta. Our knowledge of what his collection contained has until now been based on Marcantonio Michiel's tantalisingly laconic notes of 1530 and a later inventory compiled some fifteen years after Gabriel's death on the instructions of his heirs. This article is prompted by the discovery of a further inventory of the collection made in 1601, together with a collection of documents from other sources.

IN the Florentine State Archives, among correspondence addressed in the 1476 to an obscure magistracy named the Cinque delle Fortezze, there is a letter dated 10th February 1476 and signed by one Antonio Manetti, who was vicario or governor of the town of San Giovanni in the upper Val d'Arno. Despite a certain embarrassment of riches - there are two or three Antonio Manettis whose stories intertwine in the art-historical literature - our Manetti was indubitably Antonio di Tuccio di Marabottino (1423-97), the Florentine aristocrat and scholar who for six months from 1st December 1475 onwards governed that key fortress, whence indeed he wrote his only known letters, three in all, including the celebrated one concerning the 'repatriation' of Dante's bones.

FILIPPO NAPOLETANO was famous in his lifetime as a landscape painter and collector. His Museum and his Art attracted such discriminating connoisseurs as Cassiano del Pozzo. Baglione admired his 'bellisime bizzerrie' and regretted that Filippo had spent so much time and energy in creating and displaying a collection that was sold off piecemeal, immediately after his death. While modern interest in Filippo's style has resulted in several articles and many important new attributions, the contents of his much admired museo have hitherto remained a mystery. 

THAT artists in the Renaissance made use of the remains of Roman and Greco-Roman sculpture is evident; but though some obvious models appear it is often difficult to pin down specific borrowings. This is natural, since the later artist was not out to produce a copy but would rather take up and use in his own way anything which he felt might help him to express something of his own. The case I am raising here I do not think is proven; but I believe that Giovanni Bellini, in the head of the right-hand saint in the beautiful little Cornbury Park altar-piece recently acquired for Birmingham, shows that he had pondered a noble type which is extant at the present day in a great many marbles of the imperial period, the portrait of Demosthenes'.

WRITING about two full-length portraits exhibited at Ljubljana in I960, and correctly attributing them to Andrea Celesti, Alberto Rizzi made a dangerously unqualified statement that the two pictures in question were the only portraits by the artist.'