WHEN plans to adapt the Galerie du Louvre for the display of paintings were agreed in 1782, it was soon realised that it would have to be illuminated from above. However, it was not until the Republic had been established that it fell to Hubert Robert, who had been curator of the King's paintings, to produce a project in which part of the roof vault was to be replaced by skylights. Galleries specifically designed for the display of paintings came to the fore in the first half of the nineteenth century. Side lighting having the obvious disadvantages of limiting hanging space and of unwanted reflections, a number of designs for top and clerestory lighting were adopted. Some like Sir John Soane's Dulwich Picture Gallery, completed in 1814 and Leo von Klenze's Alte Pinakothek of 1832 have remained virtually unchanged to this day. Private collectors also built such picture galleries and Waagen writes in 1857 of Lord Normanton's newly built gallery at Somerley that 'the lighting from above is so happily calculated that every picture receives a clear and gentle light'.

PRUD'HON was in Rome from early January 1785 to the autumn of 1788. During this time he consolidated his knowledge of the principles of classical art, which he had learned from his teacher in Dijon, Francois Devosge. This period is often passed over rather rapidly, as a time when he produced the required copy of Pietro da Cortona's Triumph of Religion from the ceiling in the Barberini Palace, but which he otherwise idled away, looking at the treasures of Rome, without actively working from them. It is perfectly true that, in comparison with the amount of work produced in Rome by David, Gros, Ingres or Flaxman, for example, Prud'hon's output is small. It is also true that Prud'hon himself encourages an impression of inertia and fainéantisme on his part. Only a few months after his arrival in Rome he wrote to his friend Fauconnier along these lines.

IN 1974 the British Museum acquired in the London art market a porphyry head, identified as the portrait of a Roman Tetrarch (Figs 35, 36, 37 and 38), which at the time seemed to be a great rarity. It was alleged to have been for some years in a private collection in Switzerland. In 1976 the head was the subject of the fourth Burlington Lecture at the British Museum, the text of which was published in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE. The head was subsequently also published in the present writer's Greek and Roman Art in the British Museum and featured in the exhibition, Late Antique and Early Christian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1977-78.

IT is generally held that fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century depictions of the risen Christ hovering above the tomb are to be found only in Italy. Such, at any rate, was H. Schrade's contention, and it is a view which has been perpetuated, in condensed form, by a number of subsequent authors. Schrade stated that the earliest example of this type is a panel by an anonymous artist, possibly from Giotto's circle, which shows Christ suspended in a luminous cloud above a closed sarcophagus. Aurenhammer is the only authority to accept the very early dating of this panel, 'immediately after Taddeo Gaddi'. M. Meiss and G. Schiller, on the other hand, regard the well-known fresco by Andrea da Firenze in the Spanish Chapel in Florence (1366) as the earliest example of the 'new' type, and accordingly give the panel a later date.

WHEN in 1958 the Baltimore Museum purchased its first, and to date only, painting by Nicolas Poussin, Moses sweetening the bitter waters of Marah (Fig.47), special care was exercised to establish its authenticity. The documentary evidence of its history revealed that the picture had for almost two hundred years been ascribed to Poussin, during which time it had been owned by the same family and remained at the same location; and its purchase in 1755 seems to have been recommended by no less a connoisseur than Sir Joshua Reynolds. Anthony Blunt argues that ownership of the Baltimore painting can perhaps be traced back to the great garden designer André LeNòtre, and suggests that this is the painting listed as 'Frappement de Rocher' in LeNòtre's inventory. (The title Moses striking the rock has indeed often been mistakenly given in Poussin literature to the Baltimore picture.)

RECENT articles and exhibitions have focussed attention on the major fresco cycles and easel paintings of Gaspard Dughet. Little, however, is known about the artist's minor undertakings, which, biographers inform us, consisted in painting land-scape backgrounds for figure painters (in oil and fresco), painting backgrounds to fountains, as well as decorating movable objects such as stage sets (for the Collegio Romano), bed-screens, and musical instruments. These secondary works required a minimum of time, effort and ingenuity, but provided the artist with a quick source of money upon which his livelihood depended.

THE largest single element in Pl. I of Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, 1753 (Fig.59) is an écorché leg with, superimposed, a triangle and the number 66 (Fig.60). In the text the drawing of the leg is compared unfavourably with the 'serpentine forms' of that numbered 65: it is described as being 'treated in a more dry, stiff, and what the painters call, sticky manner, than the nature of flesh is ever capable of appearing in, unless when its moisture is dryed away: it must be allowed, that the parts of this figure are of as right dimensions, and as truly situated, as in the former; it wants only the true twist of the lines to give it taste.'

GOYA'S three circular allegorical tempera-on-canvas paintings of Commerce, Agriculture and Industry, executed for Manuel Godoy's Madrid palace, were transferred to the Prado Museum directly from their original locations fifty-one years ago. Through display in the museum and in numerous published photographic reproductions, they have become familiar images, framed by simple carved and gilded mouldings. While there has never been any doubt as to their provenance, a good deal of confusion has existed concerning their positions within the palace. Traditionally, they were believed to have been located on the ceiling of Godoy's library, but as recently as 1970 it was asserted that they had decorated the grand staircase. Consequently, a group of recently rediscovered photographs taken by José Moreno showing the paintings in situ is of great significance in serving to clarify these points (Figs.63- 66). Moreno's photographs in addition unexpectedly expose a novel and revealing vision of Goya's tondos in their original decorative as well as architectural setting. Furthermore, the photos, studied in conjunction with supporting documentary evidence concerning the renovation of Godoy's palace, permit the proposal of a new, slightly later date for the tondos then has been assigned to them in the past.