THE Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence possesses two statuettes, of which the male one can be recognised from bearing and gesture as Christ blessing whilst the female by reason of its attributes of palm-frond and coronet, may probably be S. Reparata. This saint was the patron of the earlier cathedral, recently revealed by excavations under the floor of the present one. Agreement of size and proportion, technique and style, permit no doubt that the two figures belong together. 

LOMBARD sculpture of the renaissance presents vexing problems at the most elementary levels of study. The persistence of a collaborative tradition of producing sculpture in Milan and its province during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has made it unusually difficult for students to assess or even identify the styles of individual artists. Documents and visual evidence confirm that the sculptors whose names have come down to us as leading masters of the Lombard school were in fact the proprietors of large botteghe and that their signatures on monuments, more often than not, must be considered as having corporate rather than individual significance. 

IN October 1975, we found a piece of sculpture in an attic of the former Hospice of the Muneghette, near the Arsenal of Venice. The sculpture had been heavily painted and swathed in drapery and decorations, which gave it the appearance of a devotional work of humble origin or perhaps an extremely poor cast of another sculpture. Our motive for restoring the work lay at first in removing the drapery and studying the abrasions caused by the detachment of some layers of paint and gesso. We soon discovered that the singular nature of the sculpture was such as to rule out a simple work of popular manufacture. 

Despite its conspicuous location, the high altar of the Pantheon in Rome is little studied and its history much misunderstood. The facts, supported here by archival and photographic documentation, may now be stated clearly. The altar was designed and built by Alessandro Specchi, beginning in 1715 during the pontificate of Clement XI (1700-21). It was dedicated exactly ten years later by benedict XIII (1724-300. In the twentieth century during the Fascist era the altar was dismantled and rebuilt so that it hardly reflects Specchi's design which has remained, like the dates and circumstances of this papal commission, all but completely forgotten. A project for the altar is the first documented example of the drawing style of the architect Specchi (1668-1729) and provides a starting point for the consideration of other drawings associated with him. In addition, new documentation clarifies the history and dating of the over-life size statues of Saint Rasius and Saint Anastasius located next to the altar. 

THE discovery of the bill for the monuments to the second Duke and Duchess of Montagu in Warkton Church, Northamptonshire, has revealed the unexpected fact that Roubiliac was responsible for creating the setting for the monuments which have long been recognised as being amongst his greatest works. 

BY 1924, when the publishing house of A & C Black Ltd commissioned the journalist Isabel McAllister to write Alfred Gilbert's biography, his name had been almost forgotten in England. If the public remembered the seventy-year old artist at all, it was not only as the sculptor of the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus and the tomb of the Duke of Clarence at Windsor, but for the scandals and controversies that surrounded both monuments. Like his contemporaries James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Oscar Wilde (1856-1900), he departed in a blaze of publicity into self-imposed exile abroad. 

It is a stroke of rare good fortune to encounter one unique specimen of a lost art; to find two examples of such rarities at one stroke is fortune indeed. Yet the recent reorganisation of the small but fascinating museum of the Order of St John in Clerkenwell, London, has brought to light an object which combines two types of activity by known artists, fully documented, but hitherto believed completely lost. 

In his final years Filippo della Valle worked little. From the time of the Sampaio Monument in the Roman church of Sant'Antonio dei Portoghesi in 1756, until his death at the age of seventy in 1768 only one commission, that for the sculptures of Health and Fertility on the Trevi Fountain, has been known to occupy his considerable talents. Now two other works in Rome, stucco angels above the altar of the Chapel of St Christopher in Sant'Ignazio, can be added to his oeuvre. The Diario Ordinario of Chracas notes their unveiling, along with the rest of the newly fashioned chapel, in 19th Novemeber 1763, making these his last known works.

When news of the unexpected death of the twenty-two year old Marwood William Turner, on 10th October 1739 at Lyon while 'On his Travels towards Italy...In pursuit of knowledge and Improvement', reached England by the following month, Chomley Turner immediately launched a building and sculpture programme to immortalise his only son and heir. This produced two exceptionally interesting works of art. While the Turner Mausoleum at Kirkleatham in Yorkshire is recognised as one of James Gibbs' late masterpieces, little attention has been paid to the history of Marwood's monument within. 

The nucleus of the Anglo-Florentine community in the eighteenth century appears to have been very close knit. Horace Mann, Lord Tylney and Lord Cowper all remained in Italy for over twenty years. Their artistic counterparts, Thomas Patch and 'Francesco' Harwood, seem to have been equally enamoured with the town. But whereas Thomas Patch's highly original style is widely known today, Harwood's work remains relatively obscure.