Few seventeenth-century Italian painters can have exhibited the variety of mood and almost unbelievable stylistic range of the Genoese artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione; and nothing could have illustrated this more effectively than the apparently unbridgeable stylistic gulf which separates the two recently discovered and hitherto unpublished pictures to be presented here. 

FAME has not looked favourably on early seicento landscape specialists. Personalities of importance were forgotten as names of more prestigious history painters such as Annibale Carracci and Domenichino were attached to landscapes actually painted by artists who seldom or never executed 'grand manner' commissions. The recent rediscoveries of Filippo Napoletano and Pietro Paolo Bonzi, called Gobbo dei Carracci, are cases in point. Another is the Bolognese artist Giovanni Battista Viola, Bonzi's teacher, about whom little has been known despite Mancini's observation c.1620 that 'he lives in Rome and is very famous for his landscapes of which one sees many...' The purpose of this essay is to reestablish Viola's identity by bringing together a group of those pictures Mancini apparently knew, and thus to lay a foundation for future study of this neglected but significant landscape artist. 

THE special art created by painters active in Delft in the 1650s - notably Carel Fabritius, Johannes Vermeer, and Pieter de Hooch - raises many questions which have yet to be answered. The reasons for its sudden appearance, the problem of its sources, and the nature and meaning of the various artists' approach to the representation of reality are but a few of the most important issues. In addition, the career of individual painters needs clarification. Among these is Hendrick van der Burch, today only a dim figure in the so-called School of Delft. In the past, the facts of the painter's life have been misconstrued and his authentic oeuvre obscured with misattributions. 

Louis Le Vau's projects for the Louvre of the late 1650s involved the completion of the north and south wings in conformity with the external and internal facades of Lescot and Lemercier and the closing of the Cour Carree to the east with a doubled block dominated by a great central pavilion containing one of those enormous oval saloons of which he was so fond. Following the completion of the south wing in 1661 work began on the foundations of the east wing in accordance with Le Vau's third known project, but after their near completion a year later they were extended in accordance with a fourth revision. 

In October 1979 an exhibition at the Musee Conde at Chantilly under the title La Madona de Lorette. The exhibition was organised by the Louvre at the request of the Institut de France, the body which administers the Musee Conde, and opened by the Minister for Universites. Its aim was to present and document the Chantilly version of the composition, newly cleaned and identified as Raphael's original. This picture has hung, under an attribution to Penni, at Chantilly since the museum opened.

On 17th November 1647, Pietro da Cortona wrote from Rome to his patron Cardinal Francesco Barberini, informing him that 'io ora sto cominciando a fare i cartoni della cupola et anche della tribuna della Chiesa Nuova'. Cortona's frescoes in Sta Maria della Vallicella, Roma, covering the dome, pendentives, nave and tribune vaults, constitute his most important series of decorative paintings executed for a religious context. For the dome, the first part of the project to be completed, he painted a Glorification of the Holy Trinity with the Adoration of Instruments of the Passion. Work on the fresco itself began in the summer of 1648 and the finished decoration was formally unveiled on 26th May 1651, the festival of St Philip Neri. The remaining pendentive and ceiling areas were carried out subsequently over a period of several years. 

THE National Gallery of Scotland has acquired recently a small and hitherto unknown Landscape with the penitent Magdalen by Pietro da Cortona. Its provenance, prior to its appearance on the London art market (Colnaghi's), remains unknown, but there can be little doubt that it dates from the end of the period 1626-29 when Pietro da Cortona was working on a commission from Marcello Sacchetti, the wealthy leader of the Tuscan community in Rome, to decorate his villa at Castel Fusano, near Ostia.

In his catalogue raisonne of Claude's drawings Roethlisberger noted the relatively small number of surviving figure studies. The drawing attributed to Claude in this brief article was purchased in 1958 for the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester as by Claude and as depicting the Departure of the Angel from Tobit. Apparently this attribution found little sympathy in later years; but a recent comparison with a number of related drawings by Claude in the British Museum has demonstrated that the Whitworth drawing undoubtedly belongs to a group of figure studies for the painting Landscape with Jacob wrestling with an angel, executed in 1672 for Henri van Halmale (1624-76, and now in the Hermitage, Leningrad. 

An important, if unbeautiful, addition to our knowledge of the circle of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione appeared at Christie's East, New York, on 13th March. The painting in question is a large canvas (115.5 by 167.7 cm), bearing at lower centre the prominent signature of Benedetto's son and pupil: Gio: Fran: Castiglion/ 1660. An autograph inscription just below the signature, GENESIS CAP XXIIII, clearly identifies the story as that of Rebecca fetched by the servant of the patriarch Abraham, to be the wife of Isaac. (despite Francesco's indication, the painting was sold under the title Lot fleeing Sodom.)