MARCANTONIO MICHIEL was still a boy when Francesco Negro in his Periarchon held up the Bellini brothers as exemplars to Venetian patrician youth and recommended painting as a useful and moral activity. 

NO ONE has described more eloquently than Giles Robertson the ways in which Netherlandish art influenced fifteenth-century Venetian painters. No study, however, has been made of the Netherlandish pictures which were available as examples to the renaissance artists of the Veneto; and until the study is undertaken, the extent and importance of Netherlandish influence cannot be very accurately assessed. 

UP to the 1870s which saw the emergence of a class of persons who were to be called 'art historians' it was widely believed 9at any rate in England that it was painters who were the most reliable 'experts' about the authenticity of 'old masters'. In various lawsuits mentioned in Farington's Diary, it is always painters who are called in to give evidence for or against the genuineness of old pictures.  

THE subject of a panel by Cima, now in a private collection in Zurich, has not hitherto been satisfactorily identified. In the Burlington House exhibition of 1930 it was called Jason at the Court of Aetes; in the Cima exhibition at Treviso in 1962 it was described in more general terms as Embassy to a Sultan. But since then, the Brera Gallery in Milan has acquired a panel representing Theseus and the Minotaur that seems unquestionably to be a companion piece to the Zurich panel, and the two works may be recognised as fragments of the same dismembered cassone.