'MY GOD, how like it is to a young Mohark warrior!' Benjamin West's famous exclamation on first seeing the Apollo Belvedere is almost too good to be true. It comes pat on Wincklemann's remark apropos 'the great and manly contour' of ancient Greek statues - look at the swift Indian who pursues the deer on foot: how fleeting are his humours, how pliant and quick his nerves and muscles, how buoyant the whole frame of his body.' The story of the nearly blind Cardinal Alessandro Albani asking whether West was black or white and then feeling his face - perhaps to discover if he was beardless like an Indian - might seem to be no more than ben trovato, but Anton Raphael Mengs is said to have been 'as much struck as every other person, with the extraordinary circumstance of an American coming to study the fine arts.'

WATTEAU'S Les charmes de la vie (Wallace Collection A157, Fig.7) shows the theorbo player preparing to accompany a charming guitarist. Mirimonde has told us that he will not succeed in his suit and that the relaxed standing figure on the left, who has already played his continuo accompaniment and now rests his hand nonchalantly on the guitarist's chair, has nothing to fear from his rival. It is a haunting picture with its rich and delicately touched costumes, the melancholy central figure and elegant, inconsequential subject.

FEW drawings are known from the middle period of Stubb's life, and the present whereabouts of many drawings in the 1807 sale are unknown. Besides the study for his self-portrait of 1782, the lemur drawings of c. 1773 seem to be the only examples between those for his 1766 Anatomy of the Horse and those for the Comparative Anatomical Exposition. It is good therefore to add one other drawing of another subject, dating also from 1773.

THE sitter for the striking portrait by James Northcote (1746-18310 in the Manchester City Art Gallery, signed and dated 1826 has never been identified (Fig. 18). Northcote, best known as the biographer of Sir Joshua Reynolds, was aged eighty when he painted this black man, who looks askance with a startled, wary expression.

IN 1784 Thomas Banks exhibited at the Royal Academy a colossal plaster statue entitled Achilles, Enraged for the Loss of Briseis, Retires to the Sea-shore and Complains to Thetis, A Model. Known as the Complaining, Enraged, Frantic, Wounded or Mourning Achilles, it will hereafter be referred to by the last title, this being the one most commonly used.

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE for January and June 1982 discussed Joseph Rykwert's The First Moderns and the influence of freemasonry on Neo-Palladianism. Professor Rykwert believes freemasonry to have acted as a major stimulus, Mr John Harris that it was never more than a peripheral influence. I suspect that the truth lies in a compromise with a leaning towards the Professor, and a case in point is Westminster Bridge, a Palladian edifice profoundly affected by freemasonry.

THE Berlin Kunstbibliothek has recently acquired an important eighteenth-century architectural drawing by Ferdinando Fuga (1699-1792) representing a design for the Trevi Fountain in Rome (Fig. 20). The drawing is signed and dated 1723, and thus provides a valuable fixed point of reference for the history of the Trevi and sheds new light on Fuga's early career, about which little is known.

THE career of Ferdinando Fuga is linked at its beginning for a short period and at its end for many decades to the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. Fuga's early Neapolitan visit and the construction of the Cellamare chapel during the second half of the 1720s are relatively well-documented. Less well known is his Palermitan sojourn. 

ONE of the most beautiful of François Boucher's smaller mythological canvases is the Jupiter in the guise of Diana and the nymph Callisto (Fig. 23), signed and dated 1759, which for more than five decades has been one of the most popular paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.