OF the seven poesie painted by Titian for Philip II of Spain, none has had a more disturbed history than the Perseus and Andromeda now in the Wallace Collection. The recent cleaning of this great picture revealed how much it had previously suffered and inevitably posed the question how and why had such negligence occurred? While the basic provenance has been published by Wethey, this note fills out his account beyond the necessary limits of an oeuvre-catalogue and adds points which seem of interest. It cannot, alas, put an end to all speculation concerning the first half of the seventeenth century.

THE decision to proceed with the cleaning of Titian's Perseus and Andromeda, taken by the Trustees of the Wallace Collection and by its Director John Ingamells, followed a lengthy period of examination of the painting at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge. In the course of this investigation and the subsequent cleaning and restoration, new material emerged allowing some discussion of Titian's painting procedure.

ONE of Cellini's most familiar works is the great bronze relief in the Louvre known as the Nymph of Fontainebleau. It is familiar first because it was commissioned for the principal entrance to the palace, the Porte Dorée, second because the artist himself left an account of the circumstances in which it was produced, and third because, despite damage inflicted on it in 1793 and two subsequent restorations, its content, the nymph with her right arm resting on a stag, the hinds drinking from the spring, and the hounds on the right facing their quarry opposite, is evocative and poetical.

IN 1927, Leo Planiscig published his huge monograph on Andrea Riccio, consisting of 504 pages, with 586 illustrations and an oeuvre-catalogue listing 258 different models. No other renaissance bronzist has ever had so compendious a work dedicated to him. It has, however, become obvious in the years which have followed that Planiscig's monograph was grossly over-inclusive. Reckoning with- out the powerful influence which the extraordinary artistic personality of Riccio exercised over his contemporaries and followers, Planiscig produced in effect a survey, not of the work of a single artist, but of a whole north Italian school of bronzists, which flourished throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century. As we are now coming to realise, Planiscig included in Riccio's oeuvre much of the production of the large family foundry headed by Severo Calzetta of Ravenna, some of the work of Agostino Zoppo, and probably much of the production of Riccio's immediate successor in Padua, Desiderio da Firenze, together with all kinds of derivative pieces by bronzists whose names we may never know.

THE renaissance sense of who was responsible for works of art and their quality is agile and elusive: renaissance observers can glide between a sense of the patron as author and a sense of the artist as author in a way that is hard to follow. There is no good reason to suppose that this was equivocation. It seems more likely that the sense of human cause in such matters as the making of buildings, sculpture and pictures was structurally a little different from ours. Since this would be involved in the reckoning of both patrons and artists, it seems a proper object of enquiry, and the discussion of causality in Rudolph Agricola's De inventione dialectica, I, xiv-xvi, offers help with one part of it.

KEIN barockes Elfenbein überbringt dem Jubilar Glückwünsche, Fortuna selbst! Die ausgensprochen stämmige, voluminöse, reizvoll konturierte, mit fast graziler Gestik das flatternde Tuch haltende und auf der rollenden Kugel wohl ausponderierte Lindenholzfigur der Skuplturegalerie Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin ist wohlbekannt.

SINCE the Arts Council exhibition on Giambologna held in 1978, two decorative bronze castings have come to light which clearly emanate from his workshop.' A table-fountain and a sword hilt, they appear respectively to be the work of his close collaborators for bronze sculpture, the Susini and Pietro Tacca.

OF all the sculptures by Francesco Mochi, the marble statue of St Veronica in the crossing of St Peter's is by far the best known. The payments published by Pollak document its creation, from the decision of 10th December 1629 that Mochi should make the stucco model, for which he received the final payment on 15th March 1632, through the delays in obtaining a suitable block of marble, the successive payments to the sculptor while the work was in progress, and the carriage of the three sections of the statue to St Peter's in the summer of 1639, to the plea for a full payment on 12th March 1640, repeated in 1642, and the final settling of the account of 3300 scudi on 8th March 1646.

THE role of Velázquez as connoisseur of sculpture, antique and modem, as well as painting, as expert in the display of works of art, and as adviser on all artistic matters, is fairly well documented. But the records are widely dispersed, his dicta are rare and not all of them are to be found in the literature on the artist.

IST Puget als Bildhauer weltweit bekannt, so ist sein Schaffen als Architekt, Zeichner und Maler erst unzureichend erforscht; Monographien zu deisen Domänen stehen noch aus. Zum Oeuvre des Malers wollen die folgenden Zeilen einen Beitrag liefern; zugleich sei damit Terence Hodgkinson für wertvolle Hinweise gedankt.

A LARGE painting by Boucher in the museum at Nancy depicts a cloud-borne naked goddess, one of his most piquantly pretty girls, gazing down at a young man, no god probably but a mortal, who gazes fondly back.

AU cours de mes recherches à Rome, il y a une vingtaine d'années, pour reconstituer la carrière en la ville éternelle du sculpteur français René-Michel, dit Michel-Ange Slodtz, je fus amené à faire l'hypothèse d'une attribution à cet artiste d'un buste en platre conservé à la villa Médicis et représentant un ancien directeur de l'Académie royale de France à Rome, le peintre Jean-François de Troy. Le platre apparaissait déjà dans les collections du Palais Mancini, siège de l'Académie, sous l'Ancien Régime. Ma tentative s'appuyait sur la considération que, plutot que de la main des jeunes sculpteurs alors pensionnaires, Saly ou Vassé, l'oeuvre pourrait etre due au ciseau d'un artiste français qui, bien que menant une carrière de sculpteur indépendant à Rome, avait gardé des relations suivies avec l'etablissement français. De Troy avait ainsi servi d'intermédiaire entre la Direction des Batiments du Roi et Slodtz pour la mission de ce dernier à Carrare où il choisit les marbres des Chevaux de Marly. De Troy professait d'ailleurs pour Slodtz de l'admiration et de l'amitié. Je ne voyais pas de raisons stylistiques s'opposant à cette attribution, tout en reconnaissant que le buste n'avait pas 'la puissance et la belle venue des bustes antérieurs'.