THE lower church of San Clemente in Rome, abandoned c. 1100 A.D. and forgotten until its existence was rediscovered by archeological excavation in the mid-nineteenth century, constitutes one of the most important of the early medieval monuments in the city because of the wealth of mural painting which has survived, albeit in varying states of preservation. One of the most controversial of these paintings is that which has become popularly known as the Particular Judgement, discovered on a wall between two pillars of the colonnade which divided the narthex from the atrium. 

IN 1532 the Paduan connoisseur Maracantonio Michiel recorded in the Venetian collection on Andrea Odoni a fragmentary antique piece - the headless, armless figure of a woman - which had once been part of the workshop apparatus of Tullio Lombardo: 'ritratta da lui più volte in più sue opere.' As Tullio Lombardo's style has come to receive greater definition, this passage has been relied upon to help explain the intimate contact with the Antique observable in the work that marks Tullio Lombardo's maturity as an artist, the tomb of Doge Andrea Vendramin in SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice. However, no work by Tulio, or by his brother Antonio - who was at one point closely associated with him - or by the workshop has up to now been bought forward as closely reflecting a known antique piece. 

TWO or three years after the opening of the seventeenth century, Elsheimer depicted, in seven small panels of a domestic altar-piece, St Helena's search for and finding of the True Cross. After its purchase in 1619 by the Grand Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany nothing more was heard of it publicly until 1938 when the Duke of Norfolk put the central and largest picture, The Glorification of the Cross, into a sale at Christie's. It was then clear that the tabernacle has been taken to pieces and its original frame lost. 

IN an appendix to the first volume of his monograph on Adam Elsheimer, Henrich Weizsäcker mentioned a painting of a Roman Landscape which he saw, after the proofs of his book had already been passed, at the Gallery Stern in Düsseldorf. The work was more fully described and illustrated in the second volume of the monograph, published posthumously in 1952. Weizsaicker noted its quality in spite of evident damages and thought that it might have been painted by Elsheimer's pupil and patron Hendrick Goudt, in adaptation of the Landscape with Latona and the Lycian Peasants, of which the original had not been traced, but which was known through an etching by Hollar of 1649 when the work was in the Arundel collection.

THE most remarkable contribution to our understanding of early quattrocento painting in Perugia is the proposed identification of the author of a Madonna and Child in the Victoria and Albert Museum, signed PEREGRINUS PINSIT MCC(C)CXXVIII, with the Perugian Pellegrino di Giovanni di Antonio. The identification was first proposed by A. Parronchi and it has now been persuasively endorsed by F. Russell. Before this Pellgrino's name was familiar only to careful readers of U. Gnoli's essential digest of documents relating ti artists active in Umbria.

DANIELE da Volterra's Descent from the Cross in the Orsini Chapel, SS. Trinitt dei Monti, Rome, has traditionally been cited as a precedent for Jacopino del Conte's altar-piece of the Descent from the Cross in the Oratory of S. Giovanni Decollato. New evidence, in fact, indicates that Daniele himself preceded Jacopino as the patrons' choice of artist for the altar-piece.  

THE avid collecting of Roman coins and the knowledge of them by Pietro Barbo, the Medici, and Niccolo Niccoli, among others, during the fifteenth century in Italy, is well documented. By 1455 antique coins were in great demand in Rome. So much so that Carlo de' Medici wrote to his brother Giovanni complaining of their scarcity, which he attributed primarily to the acquisitive mania of Pietro Barbo, later Pope Paul II. To mention a few of the eminent artists who used coins as a source one may cite Pisanello, Ghiberti, Jacopo Bellini, and Mantegna. By the mid-fifteenth century even Florentine manuscript illuminators had introduced copies of antique coins into their borders: a practice that would become commonplace by the end of the century.

WE know from Girolamo Borsieri that Scipione Toso was among the promising Milanese collectors in the early seventeenth century. In fact, Borsieri's book of 1619 is our source for information on what must have been a splendid burst of activity in the first thirty years of the 1600s in Lombardy. Alas, however, Borsieri's notes are of the briefest; the reconstruction of these collections of then contemporary art is extremely difficult. Furthermore, Milanese archives have so far yielded relatively little about Toso. We know that he was the son of Gabriele, a lawyer who was appointed to the Milanese Sessanta del Consiglio generale in 1582.