ON 21st February 1627, Rinaldo Ariosti, the agent of the Duke of Modena in Bologna, wrote a letter to his master in which he refers to a Bacchus and Ariadne by Guido Reni then on the market, owned by Rinaldi, a reference undoubtedly to the poet Cesare Rinaldi. In all likelihood that painting is to be identified with the painting now in the Los Angeles County Museum that came from the collection of Viscount Scarsdale, Kedleston Hall, which is the subject of this article (Figs 2, 3 and 4); I say in all likelihood, because Malvasia, Reni's principal biographer in the seventeenth century, cited several paintings of this subject, but makes no mention of Rinaldi's painting. The situation is further complicated because a more famous, larger, treatment of the theme with a very different composition was in subsequent centuries confused with our composition (see note 6 below).

THE purpose of this article is to publish and study a number of works by Algardi; all the works are at present in the Hermitage Museum, and, with one exception, all come from the well-known collection of Abate Filippo Farsetti (1704-74).

STUDENTS brought up, as I was, on Schubring's Klassiker der Kunst volume on Donatello will recall, on p.130, a photograph of a pigmented stucco relief of the Virgin and Child with two cherubim (Fig.23). It shows the Virgin turned three-quarters to the left holding the Child in her right arm. Over her head she wears an orphrey or scapular decorated with four-winged cherubim, which falls down over her left shoulder and appears once more under her right wrist. The relief has an arched top, and to right and left of the main figure, above the level of the shoulders, there appear two cherub heads. When Schubring reproduced it, the surface evidently was a good deal damaged, and there was no means of determining whether it was a nineteenth-century fabrication or a fifteenth-century squeeze from some superior relief. Among its many disconcerting features were the thin, schematic folds on the Virgin's sleeve and the ambiguous pose of the Child, with strands of hair painted on its fore-head and knees pressed against the Virgin's wrist. The location of the relief is described under the plate as 'Florenz, Privatbesitz.' No note on it appears in the text, but a note on the following plate, of the so-called Davillier Madonna in the Louvre, describes it as 'sehr verwandt der Stuck-Madonna bei Bardini (S.130)'. We must therefore suppose that in 1907 the stucco was owned by Bardini.

THE sketch shown here in Fig.28 has recently been uncovered on the verso of a well-known drawing in the Uffizi in Florence (366 E), which depicts a woman in antique dress with a vessel in her hand (Fig.27). This discovery raises a number of issues and requires that we reconsider not only Pintoricchio's and Perugino's drawing styles, but also our understanding of Raphael's artistic beginnings.

RECENTLY the two writers, although working from different standpoints, have both been called on to re-open the vexed problem of the identity of various sitters in Holbein's portraiture. One of the most important of these problems is that of Anne Boleyn. The Queen, who, even her worst enemy had to admit, had 'sense, wit and courage', has recently been reinstated in her rightful place as a key figure in the politics and patronage of the decade 1526-36. So whether Holbein did or did not draw her, and if so when, is a question with major consequences for our understanding of the crucial early years of his English career.

THE recent Largillierre exhibition in Montreal provided a stimulus to reconsider the well known, but less studied Louis XIV and his heirs in the Wallace Collection (Fig.39). Although this note is primarily concerned with attribution, any discussion of the picture also depends upon the identification of the group, with which we must start.

JOHN Auldjo (1805-86) was one of the more perceptive visitors to Naples in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. His studies of Vesuvius, which secured his election to the Royal Society in 1840, led this Canadian of Scottish extraction to settle in the city for a number of years, and it was there that he met such distinguished fellow travellers as Scott and Lytton. The frequency with which his collector's mark appears on drawings by lesser Neapolitans of the settecento implies a visual taste that was in the 1830s very far from being fashionable; and the catalogue of the collection formed by Auldjo and his father Thomas Richardson Auldjo, which was sold in 1859, confirms that he also bought a considerable number of pictures and more specifically oil sketches by Neapolitan artists.