IN 1783 Thomas Pennant published The Journey from Chester to London in the belief that 'the ground which is described in the following sheets, has been for some centuries passed over by the incurious Traveller; and has had the hard fortune of being constantly execrated for its dullness'. In the course of his journey, Pennant stopped at Combe Abbey, near Coventry, the seat of 'a jovial English baron', Lord Craven. Looking at the paintings hanging in the house, Pennant singled out for praise full-length portraits of the Winter King and Queen, Frederik V Elector Palatine and his wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of James I. The full-length of the Winter Queen was presumably the portrait of her by Honthorst, painted in 1642, now in the national Portrait Gallery (on loan from the National Gallery). 'The young Craven', he noted, 'was among her warmest devotees, and continued the attachment to the last moment of her life; possessed her deserved confidence, directed all her affairs, and gave a most distinguishing proof of his esteem by building for her use, at his estate in Berkshire, a magnificent palace'. Pennant went on to admire the collection of 'portraits of men of eminence in Germany [which] were brought over by the Queen of Bohemia, and by her bequeathed by will to Lord Craven'. The last two painting which caught Pennant's eye at Combe were: 'Two fine paintings by Rembrandt, of two philosophers; each with a noble pupil: one in Turkish dress; the other in an ermine rove. These young figures are called Prince Rupert and Price Maurice. The time of the residence of their mother [the Winter Queen] in Holland, agrees entirely with that of Rembrandt in Amsterdam, which makes the conjecture probable'.

AT Canepina, a fascinating village amidst a grove of old chestnut trees in an out-of-the-way corner of the Monti Cimini, south of Viterbo, lurks a distinguished seventeenth-century portrait bust carved in white marble (Figs.17-19). Conserved in the church of the Madonna del Carmine, according to the inscription under its niche, it represents Angelo Menicucci, the Carmelite monk who had embellished the church and erected the monastery at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

IN a recent article on Verrocchio's early paintings, Konrad Oberhuber discussed a Madonna and Child in the Louvre, which he attributed to Verrocchio and which he dated 1468-69 'at the latest' (Fig. 22). He noted that the window, with its coloured marble columns, and the landscape beyond were influences by Memlinc's work. In fact, the columns and the landscape (Fig. 24) were copied directly from the Portrait of a young man in the Lehman Collection, which is always attributed to Memlinc (Figs. 23, 25).

AS in the case of Correggio, Vasari excludes the possibility that Girolamo da Carpi was directly acquainted with the great Roman works of Raphael and Michelangelo: he states that Girolamo 'often lamented that he had consumed his youth and his best years in Ferrara and Bologna, and not at Rome or some other place, where he would undoubtedly have made greater progress.' However, the many reminiscences of Raphaelesque motifs pointed out by modern critics can surely not be attributed solely to the mediation of Garofalo, in whose studio Girolamo was a pupil from 1520 onwards.

WHEN I wrote in this Magazine about Bernardo Castello's late frescos, there was nothing known about his son, Valerio Castello (1624-59), to substantiate the accounts by Soprani and Ratti that Valerio 'searched the house avidly for Bernado's drawings and copied all the ones he succeeded in finding'. Drawings by Valerio are relatively rare in contrast to the sizable drawing œuvre of his father, and only recently has the drawing corpus of Valerio been tentatively expanded to include some more finished drawings and prints.

PALOMINO, writing in his life of Velázquez of the artist's second voyage to Rome, tells how, in order to get his hand in tackling the major commission for a portrait of Pope Innocent X, he painted a head, using as his model his mulatto slave, Juan de Pareja. Palomino has no doubts about Pareja's status, and his short biography of Pareja himself is almost entirely concerned with his position as a slave: because of it, Velázquez would not allow him to paint, fot the master respected his art too highly to allow a slave to practise it, and Paloino incluses a reminder that the ancients had reserves such liberal arts for free men; however he tells us, Pareja did paint without his master's knowledge, and he devised a strategem whereby Philip IV, when visitng Velázquez's studio, saw one of Pareja's pictures, and thereupon insisted that the talented slave be given his freedom,

THE profound impact of Pietro de Cortona on late baroque painting in Florence is well known, as recounted by the story of Francesco Curradi's and Matteo Rosselli's outburst of astonished admiration at the unveiling of Cortona's frescoes in the Sala della Stufa. Cortonismo became firmly entrenched as the official Medici style, not only by virtue of the noble examples of Cortona's frescoes in the Palazzo Pitti, but also by the Medici's prolonged patronage of Ciro Ferri, Cortona's artistic heir.

IT is well-known that the use of contemporary source material has both advantages and disadvantages for the historian. Myths have an unfortunate habit of persisting, and what follows is intended to qualify an assertion I made a few years ago about James Bolivar Manson and the C. Frank Stoop bequest. In my book English Art 1870-1940, I discuss the early history of the Tate Gallery and refer to Manson's conduct as Director from from 1930-38, noting, in particular, his lack of sympathy for post-impressionism and the Ecole de Paris artists such as Rouault, Matisse, and Picasso. I also mentioned his alleged refusal to accept the Stoop bequest.