BY the middle of the quattrocento the main chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena had acquired a programme of imagery appropriate to a focal place in the city's profuse veneration of the Virgin. A succession of artists and artisans working over half a century in a variety of media endowed the chapel with a densely decorative and accretive environment. For the most part, their works survive in the original location and have long been known in art-historical literature. In the late seventeenth century, however, the first altar and altar-piece were replaced by a sixteenth-century altar, panel, and architectural niche, thereby dissipating the late Gothic and early renaissance ambience of the chapel.

THE Cleveland Museum, Ohio, recently published an important new acquisition: a small reliquary of Sienese origin. The centre is missing. It is, however, possible to relate this reliquary with the beautiful panel of gilded glass in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which, for the reasons argued below, is set in a frame which is not the original.

AN intermittent feature of positivist art-history to which, from a positivist point of view, objection might be made, is what may be called the fallacy of first recorded appearances. Equipped with evidence which permits a firm dating to be made of a work or a motif, it is easy to assume that the matter is closed with and to omit the risk of reconstructing, if only problematically, the situation which may have both object and evidence produced, neither of which, incidentally, need be representative.

IN the years around 1514-16, when Baldassare Castiglione was the ambassador in Rome of the Court of Urbino, he sat for a portrait by his friend Raphael.' Since 1793 the Castiglione portrait has hung in the Louvre. It has now been in France for over 300 years.

BETWEEN the years 1520 and 1524 Correggio painted an extensive ensemble of frescoes in the Benedictine church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma. The principal elements are the semi-dome of the apse, the cupola with its pendentives and supporting arches and the frieze which runs the entire length of the nave. Since their recent, exemplary cleaning, completed in 1962, these frescoes have been the subject of detailed study. There have also been careful analyses of the iconography of the decoration of the main parts of the church. One does well, therefore, to be cautious in observing that one of the figures in the ensemble seems to have been consistently wrongly identified. Yet such indeed appears to be the case.

IN his sixth discourse, delivered in December 1774, Sir Joshua Reynolds described Jan Steen as 'one of the most diligent and accurate observers of what passed in those scenes which he frequented, and praised his 'great power in expressing the character and passions of those vulgar people, which were the subjects of [his] study and attention'. Reynolds continued: 'I can easily imagine, that if this extraordinary man had had the good fortune to have been born in Italy instead of Holland, had he lived in Rome instead of Leyden…'

A painting by Aelbert Cuyp of two shepherds teasing a goat, with a view of Dordrecht in the background, last seen in a sale in 1934, has come to light in a Dutch private collection. Stephen Reiss included it in his book on the artist as No.52, 'Cuyp studio, 1645-50', its whereabouts being then unknown. Examination of the picture itself has established that it has a provenance from the middle of the nineteenth century. I also believe it to be an original painting by Aelbert.