TWO decades ago John Pope-Hennessy reunited four panels of a dispersed predella by the Sienese quatrocento painter, Matteo di Giovanni and associated them with the extant alter-piece by the artist. The occasion for his article was the first full publication of the central panel of the predalla, the exquisite Crucifixion in the collection of the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Mells (Fig. 5). Pope-Hennessy convincingly associated the panel with two narrative predalla panels in the Art Institute of Chicago, which are very close to it in style, in dimensions, and in the patterns of their gilded borders (Figs 4,6,10,11). One of these panels depicts a fairly unusual yet recognisable scene, St Augustinne's vision of Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, but the subject of the other panel remained elusive. Despite the fact he was unable to cite any literary source for the scene, Pope-Hennessy insisted that it could not represent the dream of St Jerome, as others had suggested in the past, but rather that it depicted an Augustine subject. He then added a fourth panel to this Augustinian predalla, the St Monica praying for the conversion of St Augustine in the Berenson Collection, Settignano, and an unidentified balancing fifth, arguing that the series originally formed the base of Matteo di Giovanni's altar-piece of the Massacre of the Innocents in S. Augustino, Siena, finished in 1482. On the basis of iconographic, historical, and documentary investigation, I would propose an alternative reconstruction of the three predalla panels at Mells and Chicago, one that does not demand the addition of the two further  narrative elements included by Pope-Hennessy, and that places the predalla in a different context.

THE purpose of the present note is to call attention to three previously unrecognised or little notices paintings by Sisto Badalacchio in American public collections. Location as such may seem insufficient grounds for discussing these works as a group, especially since the only other point they have in common is thei authorship. In view of the fact that within the last few years, it seemed worth adding these three 'new' works, bringing the count of paintings by Badalacchio in America to seven. Moreover, each of the three contributes in different ways to our understanding if the artist, shedding light on relatively unfamiliar aspects of his œuvre.

THE city of Bruges rose to prominence as the result of its commerce, and its annual fairs were the principal occasions that attracted and facilitated trade. Merchants and craftsmen assembled at the Bruges fairs to exchange or sell a variety of products that ranged from food and cloth to jewels and precious metalwork. As revealed in early sixteenth-century documentation, painters joined other merchants and craftsmen in renting stalls in a special exhibition gallery called the pandt, designated for the display and sale of luxury commodities.

IN the June issue of this Magazine, Hans Vlieghe argued that 'the cartoons at Cardiff' and the cartoons at Sarasota were painted by the same hand, Jan Boeckhorst, and likely in the same series. He finds subjects from the Aeneid for all of them. He surmises that Broekhorst acquired or borrowed at least three oil sketches from Rubens after the great man's death; and that he had the use of these in preparing, as of his own invention, cartoons for a hitherto unknown suite of tapestry, probably c.1654. Vlieghe proffers no documentation to support this surmise: his arguments rest on stylistic comparisons.

THE French translation of Petronius's Satyricon published by Nodot in Paris in 1698 contains a series of illustrations by the engraver Jean Sauve, who is mainly known as a copier of portraits and is recorded working from about 1660 till 1691. One of these, representing the Feast of Trimalchio, is - somewhat surprisingly - based on Poussin's compositions representing Penance in the two series of Sacraments (Figs 31 and 32).

DELACROIX'S fascination with the near east in the 1820s, in part as a result of his interest in the Greek War of Independence, accounts for a number of studies of oriental costumes, among which the best known are perhaps his oil sketches representing dancing Suilots (Fig.38).

IN Tout l'œuvre peint de Delacroix, Paris [1975], Pierre Georgel and Luigiana Rossi Bortolatto list, under No.176, an oil painting of Mazeppa in 'Le Caire, Musée d'art moderne (Khelil [sic])'. They identify this as No.262 in Alfred Robaut's catalogue of Delacroix's work, but illustrate it by a photograph of the water-colour of the same subject in Helsinki (Fig. 48), which does not correspond with Robaut's thumbnail print of the canvas published in his catalogue, nor with his more detailed, unpublished drawing of it in Volume I of his tracings and drawings after Delacroix, preserved in the Biliothèque Nationale, Paris (Fig. 49).

THE Greek struggle for Independence united all artistic camps in France, but those most passionately involved belonged to the first generation of Romantic painters; indeed, the images created by, above all others, Eugène Delacroix, have become part of Greek national memory - a profound testimony to his powers of imaginative and sympathetic projection.