THE exhibitions listed above are some of those which I was able to see during the anniversary year - a long year, as it turned out, owing to some difference of opinion as to whether it might be begun in January 1983 (as at Oxford and Washington) or prolonged as late as April 1984 (as in Florence and Rome). An important exhibition built round the Raphaels in Madrid has been delayed until October 1984, and yet another will open in September in the Vatican. I suppose that nobody will have seen them all; and it will not be easy to collect all their catalogues. Was any artist ever so exposed? In any case this review cannot do justice in detail or in fair measure to the group listed above; my remarks will be addressed mainly to topics and issues raised by the group as a whole, and first to their catalogues.

AMONG the projects planned by the Vatican Museums to celebrate the quincentenary of Raphael's birth, the restoration of the Coronation of Charlemagne in the Stanza dell' Incendio is the first to have been brought to completion (Figs.1 and 2).

THE building of Nonsuch began on 22nd April 1538, the thirtieth anniversary of Henry VIII's accession. The name first appears in the building accounts two months later, when the foundations were still going in. The structure was perhaps substantially complete by January 1541, but the work of decoration continued. By November 1545 the cost amounted to £24,536, half as much again as had been spent at Hampton Court during the same period. When Henry died on 28th January 1547, the palace was still unfinished, but what little remained to be done was completed by Henry Fitzalan, twelfth Earl of Arundel, after 1556. Nonsuch was demolished in 1682-83, and excavated in 1959.

AMONG the miracles and good works associated with St Leo I the Great (d.461), Jacobus de Voragine relates in the Golden Legend a story of carnal temptation and remorse. While Pope Leo was celebrating mass in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, a woman kissed his hand and aroused his desire. Stricken with shame, Leo I cut off his hand, only to have it restored by the Virgin, who appeared to him during his prayers. A fourteenth-century illuminator of the Golden Legend represented this curious episode as the pope first offering mass and then amputating his hand. By the late fifteenth century, however, Antoniazzo Romano, in a painting now in Dublin, elected to show an angel ministering to Leo I and, above, the Madonna invoking God the Father (Fig.39). The inscription on the parapet behind which the Virgin is depicted in the Dublin painting reads: IMAGO CORAM QUA ORANDO LEO PAPA SENSIT SIBI MANUM RESTITUTAM. Not found in any known text, it recalls the miraculous restoration of the hand, but emphasises the image or apparition of the Virgin. The inscription is true to the pictorial imagery, for the artist too has focussed on the likeness of the Virgin rather than on the illustration of an episodic narrative. This iconography, although still faithful to the Golden Legend, nevertheless reveals conventions peculiar to the early renaissance in Rome and demonstrates unexpected sources. 

ON 10th April 1981 a painting 'attributed to Giorgio da Castel-franco' was auctioned at Christie's in London. In the nineteenth century the picture had belonged to Alexander Baring, first Lord Ashburton (d.1848), and it passed from his heirs into the collection of Lord Spencer Compton, grandson of Lady Ashburton, and his heirs. The composition, entitled Idyll: a young mother and a halberdier in a wooded landscape, was not unknown to connoisseurs. It had been exhibited in the nineteenth century as a work by Giorgione, presumably on the basis of its association with that master's Tempesta (Fig.41). In this century Bernard Berenson first proposed an attribution to Titian in 1932, an opinion advanced more recently by Konrad Oberhuber. The panel has been assigned variously to Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma il Vecchio and the circle of Giorgione.

THIS study by Raphael (Fig.49) is one of the most imposing of a number of very interesting drawings in the possession of a North American collector, who for obvious reasons in these days of crime wishes to remain anonymous. I cannot claim to have been the first to recognise the master's hand, as the attribution goes back to the drawing's first recorded owner, William Russell, who died in 1884. When I was given the opportunity to look at the collection, for which I should like to thank the owner, it was thought to be an old copy after Marcantonio's engraving.

THIS note is concerned with the attribution and purpose of a drawing of the Virgin and Child, St Jerome and St Francis (Fig.53), now in the British Museum. Traditionally given to Parmigianino when in the collections of Antonio Maria Zanetti and Sir Thomas Lawrence, it has recently been catalogued as Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli; but in fact the old attribution - as so often - is in fact correct. The drawing, an exceptionally beautiful example of Parmigianino's manner after 1530, which reflects his familiarity with the art of the chiaroscuro woodcut, has the additional interest of being one of his first thoughts for his most celebrated work, the Madonna of the long neck.

As the Castle Ashby Pan and Echo departed for the United States, another, hitherto unknown, work by Dosso Dossi (Fig.57) came to light in the Midlands, which adds to our knowledge of the Ferrarese master's early career, and raises the vexed question of his drawings.

A drawing first exhibited at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1958, and then at the Petit Palais in 1965, has escaped the attention of students of Medici artistic patronage in the latter half of the sixteenth century (Fig.59). In the first instance a brief catalogue entry attributed the drawing to Friedrich Sustris, and described it as representing the Fates. In 1965, however, a more detailed discussion of the sheet was undertaken by Carlos van Hasselt, who grouped it with works by anonymous Netherlandish painters.