A NOTEWORTHY example of the unscrupulous dismembering of works of art and the disguised re-use of their disjecta membra is afforded by a small but important Christ the Saviour (27.5 by 22 cm), which has been for some years in a Swiss collection at Lugano (Figs 2, 4 and 5). The work has not been published, but in a private letter of 21st March 1953 Roberto Longhi attributed it to 'Cimabue, c. 1280', expressing the view that it had once been part of a 'triangular cusp' surmounting 'the centre panel of a small polyptych'. Leaving the attribution aside for the moment, Longhi in other words believed that the 'fragment' was part of a complex somewhat similar to the well-known Perugian polyptych by Vigoroso da Siena, apparently the sole Italian polyptych of around that date in which the triangular cusp of the centre panel represents Christ the Saviour in isolation. However, while the work in question is indeed a 'fragment', a more careful examination after the restoration of the painting two years ago, leads to a different conclusion about its original form and position. The work appears at some fairly recent date to have been not only removed from its original support and transferred on to a modern panel, but also (in addition to some minor restoration in areas of secondary importance) to have been enlarged on all four sides. This involved widening the border, making the background gold instead of silver, and continuing the lower part of the figure; here, as can clearly be seen from the ultra-violet photograph (Fig.4), both the drapery and much of the hand supporting the book are entirely forged. These additions to a substantially intact and orig-inal central nucleus were clearly intended to make a rectangle out of what was originally a circular, not a triangular format; the authentic part of the painting is inscribed in a circle with a diameter of about 21 cm.

A RECENTLY discovered marble statue of Bathsheba by Giambologna has been acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum (Fig.1). First mentioned tangentially in an entry in the catalogue of the exhibition, Giambologna, Sculptor to the Medici [1978] concerning a small fragmentary red wax sketch-model to which it is closely related (Fig.16), the marble had been discovered too late to be included in this comprehensive exhibition.1 Further research and first-hand study of the statue have provided convincing evidence that it is an autograph sculpture by Giambologna, probably from a relatively early date in his career. Its rediscovery is of the utmost importance in both aesthetic and art-historical terms.

JULIUS HELD has recently given a convincing enumeration of the negative arguments which make Rubens's presumed authorship of the Cardiff cartoons seem very unlikely. In his article on this subject he also saw - quite correctly - the same hand in both the Cardiff and Sarasota sets of Flemish seventeenth-century tapestry cartoons. The two sets indeed share a number of striking stylistic features: the exaggeration of pathos through abrupt gestures and terrified facial expressions; the apparent inability of the painter to integrate these Pathosformeln organically and smoothly into the composition as a whole; the characteristically angular and stiff folds of the drapery; the rendering of the clothed figures as Gewandfiguren, rather amorphous and 'blown up', with little suggestion of anatomy; a certain soulful expression in the faces; the consistently curv-ing and undulating hair, whose wind-blown appearance is not always justified by narrative function. Held also rightly stressed the remarkable likeness between the figures threatened with a sword in the so-called Romulus slaying Acron at Sarasota, reproduced as Fig.23 on p. 145 of the March 1983 issue, (which may in fact represent another theme, as I will suggest below) and the Turnus in the Cardiff Combat (Fig.38). The figures indeed seem, to use Held's words, to be mirror images of each other.

ON 14th December 1978 a fine and hitherto unpublished English medieval alabaster altar-piece was bought at Sotheby's by an anonymous English buyer. It was offered to the Norfolk Museums Service on long loan and is now displayed in the Keep of Norwich Castle Museum. The altar-piece consists of a large central panel of the Trinity flanked on either side by two panels of martyrdoms and a narrow panel of a standing martyred saint. Each of the seven panels is surmounted by a pierced alabaster canopy. The panels are in a late nineteenth-century gothic wooden framework (Fig.46).

THE composition of the panel here published (Fig.52) is famillar enough, for it is paralleled almost precisely in a marginally smaller picture in the National Gallery (Fig.53). The figura-tive group in the new panel is essentially the same, but altered in a number of subtle respects: the Madonna's head is cast more in profile and there are minor differences in the draperies; the kneeling man on the right is given a helm of more elaborate classical design and the hem of his robe is fringed; but the most telling change is in the foreshortened man above, whose left hand helps the black Magus to hold the chalice, which would appear to be supported by a single finger in the London version. The scale of the figures in relation to the setting is rather smaller and, as a result, the foreground is deeper and the perspective of the step upon which the Virgin is placed is altered. The tree of the London picture is supplanted by a wall and steps that block the left half of the background and help to focus the composition; and if the distant hill town with its tiered walls is transcribed almost precisely, the middle distance is expanded and a horse's head, held by the hand of the groom, introduced to add to the urgency of the motion expressed by the grouping of the Magi.

PALMERSTON declared that there were only three people who had ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein question, and that of these one was dead, another had gone mad, whilst he, the third, had forgotten. Mutual awareness between the former duchies and the rest of Europe does not seem to have increased, to judge by the critical fate of Francois-Xavier Fabre's Venus and Adonis (Fig.54). This painting has long been described as lost - most recently in the first of Phillippe Bordes's two fundamental articles on the artist in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE- despite its publication twenty-five years ago in the art-historical journal of the Land, in an article that admittedly betrayed no awareness of its significance. Yet ever since the first decade of the nineteenth century the picture had remained in situ, let into one of the walls of the kleiner Salon, or Adlerzimmer, of one of the most distinguished houses in Schleswig-Holstein, Schloss Emkendorf.