IN THE Department of Manuscripts in the State Lenin Library in Moscow is an album, numbered 1678, containing a collection of miniatures cut from various manuscripts, the majority (of rather mediocre quality) from French fourteenth-century Missals. The four miniatures published here are from an Anglo-French Apocalypse. They are typical of the Early Gothic Apocalypses that were widespread in England and northern France in the thirteenth century. 

THE well-known account of an altar-piece in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, which Vasari added to his biography of Masaccio for the second edition of the Lives, has gradually proved to be a less fanciful distortion than might at first appear: 'He also made panels in tempera which have been lost or destroyed in the troubled times of Rome; one being in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in a little chapel near the Sacristy, wherein are four saints, so well wrought that they appear to be in relief, and in the midst of them is S. Maria della Neve, with the portrait from nature of Pope Martin, who is tracing out the foundations of that church with a hoe, and beside him is the Emperor Sigismund II. Michelangelo and I were one day examining this work, when he praised it much, and then added that these men were alive in Masaccio's time.'

IT IS a commonplace that the English made a decisive and continuous contribution to the revival of interest in early Italian painting. Hugford was among the earliest to forge and Patch systematically to record early Tuscan frescoes, while the Earl-Bishop was perhaps the first to aspire to form a collection representative of Italian painting from Ciambue to the masters of his own generation - an aspiration which many museum directors still share today. The taste and achievement of such individuals as Roscos, Fox-Strangways, Sanford and Landor in the first third of the nineteenth century can still be studied in the surviving portions of the collections they formed, while the Gambier-Parry bequest to the Courtauld Institute preserves one of the greatest pictures and works of art, though only at the cost of uprooting these from Highnam and banishing much of the collection to the storeroom. 

SINCE 1930, when Toesca recognised the common authorship of a handful of miniatures, the painter of these has acknowledges as one of the most spirited illuminators of the early fifteenth century in Northern Italy. His oeuvre has been expanded in recent years, and the provenance of a miniature of Pentecost from the Wildenstein Collection has established that he worked at San Michele on Murano. Padovani has plausibly credited him with the illuminations of major manuscripts at Berlin and Florence and the authorship of a number of stray miniatures. 

CONJECTURES concerning a direct or indirect literary source for Giotto's fresco programme in the Arena Chapel have teased the mind of students of the trecento. No specific text has been found which matches detail for detail the chapel scenes of the lives of the Virgin and Christ. Much research has been done on the cycle and its artist, and the suggestion has frequently been made that Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend served as the guide for the particulars of the scenes. An examination of some of the paintings, however, reveals several intriguing correspondences with another of the popular religious texts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Meditations on the Life of Christ. Written by a Franciscan for a Poor Clare as an aid in her contemplation, the text, like the Golden Legend, frequently fills in narrative details not contained in the gospels. 

THE interest of early quattrocento artists in the antique proverbially found its expression first and most strongly in architecture and sculpture, and it is in these fields that links between antique and 'all'antica' can be most clearly analysed. Painters were slower to betray such an interest and it has reasonably been maintained that until the time of Mantegna their work owed distinctly less to the antique. Further, such references to the antique in their work as have been detected are virtually confined to presumed models in other media, i.e. sculpture, architecture and literature. It is true that some mid-century and later decorative schemes have been thought to have been inspired by Roman painted models, but it has to be admitted that the type of model suggested cannot be shown to have been available before the excavations of the eighteenth century. 

GIVEN the rarity of Flemish fifteenth-century drawings, and the even greater rarity of preparatory drawings for known and documented compositions, I should like to call attention to a small silverpoint sketch in the Stadelsches Institut in Frankfurt long attributed to Gerard David. On the recto of the small study are depicted the heads of a young woman and a slightly older man. On the verso of this sheet is a standing, bearded man wearing a turban and a long mantle, the folds of which are more clearly defined than the lightly sketched head and hands of the figure. 

On 18th August 1527, Francis I, King of France, concluded a 'treaty of perpetual peace' with King Henry VIII, and, consistent with the idea of art as an instrument of public policy, had illuminated copies of the treaty sent to England. The most elaborate of the three now in the Museum of the Public Records Office in London is probably the copy presented to the English King himself.