THE most significant unresolved issue in renaissance connoisseurship is still no doubt the definition of the ouevre of Giorgione. In recent decades there has been substantial progress in other longstanding problems such as the relationship between Masaccio and Masolino, but the range of scholarly disagreement over what Giorgione painted remains enormous. With uncertainty about such basic works as the S. Rocco Christ Carrying the cross, Louvre Fete Champetre, Glasgow Adultress and a score of lesser paintings, we can hardly be said to understand fully the origins and early development of the high renaissance in Venice. Considering the remarkable paucity of contemporary documents for Giorgione's life and works, the few extant paintings from his short career and the early confusion of the sources, the Giorgione problem(s) are not likely to be solved by a stroke of art - historical ingenuity. It is, therefore, essential that we nibble away at the formidable barriers to our understanding of the personality of Giorgione wherever possible. The present study attempts to do this by offering a variety of evidence for removing one relatively minor, but nonetheless standard, item from the Giorgione corpus. 

ALTHOUGH there can be no doubt that Leonardo was a keen student of Flemish painting, it would be a mistake to suppose that every Flemish aspect of his art derived directly from a Flemish source. By the mid 1470s many Flemish motifs had been absorbed into the vocabulary of Tuscan painters, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Verrocchio were all responsive to northern art. Botticelli copied the lake and rocks from the Stigmatisation of St Francis by Hubert or Jan van Eyck in his longitudinal Adoration of the Magi. The young Leonardo was acutely observant to the works of Botticelli and Lippi, but naturally his greatest debt was to his master, Andrea Verrocchio. While in Andrea's workshop he was in all likelihood introduced to the Van Eyck Stigmatisation, since in the Baptism from San Salvi the stratified rocks of the right bank of the Jordan are modelled - though less exactly than in the case of Botticelli's Adoration - according to the Eyckian pattern. 

WE put forward in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE (1979, p.444), the observation that Bruegel often completed with miniatures the empty lower margins of manuscripts already illuminated by his friend Gulio Clovio, such as the Townley Lectionary in the New York Public Library, the Gulio Clovio manuscript in the Sir John Soane Museum, London, and the Hours of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

A PROBLEM that has interested me for some time is the determination of the usual age during the renaissance when an aspiring painted entered into the workshop of a master, to learn the trade. While no comprehensive information has been collected, a few examples of a very early apprenticeship are, apparently, documented. The most spectacular case concerns Jacapo Carucci called Pontormo, who was assumed by some to have been a member of Mariotto Albertinelli's bottega at the age of nine. 

AS early as 1924 it was suggested that the subject Baldovinetti's female portrait in the National Gallery, London, is of Francesca degli Stati. In 1866, however, it was purchased for the gallery as a portrait of Countess Palma of Urbino. Today it is labelled simply a 'portrait of a lady in yellow'. Who is, in fact, the subject of this exquisite profile portrait? While its author is firmly identified as Baldovinetti (1425-1499), certainty about the sitter's name still eludes us. Thanks, however, to some new evidence, the early identification of Francesca degli Stati can, it is suggested, to be confirmed. 

PIERO della Francesca played a crucial role in the growth of interest in Flemish painting that was so notable in both Venice and Florence in the early 1470s. The recent cleaning of St Jerome of 1450 in Berlin-Dahlem, which reveals it as fully autograph, and Fazio's description in 1456 of a now lost Van Eyck then in Urbino, clarify the development of his landscape painting from the tradition embodied in the work of Domenico Veneziano to an understanding of Van Eyck. Piero's development is of special interest, since his landscapes had an almost immediate impact on his contemporaries in both Ferrara and Florence.

Francisco de Holanda's visit to Venice may be presumed with reasonable probability to have taken place during the year 1540. While there he made a number of drawings, of which six survive in his sketchbook, As Antigualhas, showing the Torre dell'Orologio, the Colleoni statue, the Arsenal, the Loggetta, the four bronze horses on the west front and an aedicula on the south side of St Mark's. He also executed a miniature water-colour portrait of the doge Pietro Lando who reigned from 1538 to 1545. The largest and most interesting of his Venetian drawings is that of the Logetta. During a visit from Holanda tells us that he met Serlio. He did not, however, meet Jacapo Sansovino, whom he fails to mention, wither as sculptor or architect, in his treatise Da pintura antigua - which is surprising in view of the interest he evidently took in the Loggetta.