KEITH ANDREWS, writing in this Magazine ten years ago, pointed to the importance of every concrete piece of evidence concerning the largely undocumented work of Adam Elsheimer. The six inventories published below date from 1619 to 1639, and this makes them particularly important, for the earliest dates to only nine years after his death. With the exception of those pictures included in the inventory of the artist's studio made in 1610, and those that belonged to his colleagues Bril and Goudt, or to prominent early collectors such as Cosimo II, Charles I, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and the Duke of Buckingham, or to Peter Paul Rubens, his most devoted admirer, few works now attributed to Elsheimer have a provenance that can be traced beyond the late eighteenth century.

THE unattractive personality and appearance of Charles II of Spain did not apparently militate against the production by his court painters of large numbers of official portraits of him at most stages of his life of almost thirty-nine years, and many are still in existence both in Spain and other countries of Europe. But what has been until now strangely missing is a portrait of him in infancy - surprising when we remember how keen his father, Philip IV, had been to get Velázquez to return quickly from his first visit to Italy thirty years before, in order to portray Philip's first-born son Baltasar Carlos (who unfortunately for Spain and the House of Austria was to die before his seventeenth birthday).

IN the first half of the fifteenth century, the Florentine Guelf party commissioned two important additions to its fourteenth-century palace in Via delle Terme. The earlier of these, a wing of three rooms on the piano nobile, with an attic space above and shops on the ground storey, has received only scanty attention by architectural historians. It has, moreover, tended to be con-fused or combined with the later, more famous but unfinished palace addition, the sala grande, whose upper storey was alleged by Brunelleschi's biographer, Antonio Manetti, to have been designed by Filippo, together with the completion of two rooms in the earlier wing, the androne and the udienza (Text Figs.A, B, Fig. 14). Because of the attribution to Brunelleschi, the sala grande has been repeatedly studied. The loss of the majority of Parte Guelfa documents, however, has meant that the facts surrounding the commission and date of inception of the sala grande have remained obscure, with suggestions for Brunelleschi's intervention ranging from the beginning to the end of his architectural career. The documents published below in the Appendix now enable us to distinguish the two Parte projects more clearly. They provide a terminus ante quem of late July 1426 for the earlier quattrocento palace wing, and a date of 16th March 1430 for the start of work connected with the sala grande. The information they contain strengthens the probability that Brunelleschi became involved with the sala grande before 1434, and substantially supports Manetti's account of the circumstances surrounding the commission for the sala grande, as well as elucidating some of the difficulties the Parte encountered in its attempt to complete this project.

IT would seem that one of Leonardo da Vinci's architectural designs not hitherto known to have been given structural form in an actual building was in fact realised in Portugal about ten years after his death. The design (Fig. 17-) is for a small square fort with two massive round towers (torrioni) at opposite corners, and it occurs in the notebook known as Ms. 'B' (Institut de France), in which he was making entries between 1487 and 1490.

FEW pictures yield a more nostalgic insight of suburban London in the late eighteenth century than the view of the Villa, North End, now in the Mellon Collection at Yale (Fig.21). The house was owned by the actor Samuel Foote and was indeed his counterpart to the celebrated villa of his rival David Garrick. Foote died in 1777 and his possessions were sold in a series of three sales in the following January by Christie and Ansell, the first of whose catalogues offers a remarkably full account of the contents of the villa. The furnishings of every room from the servants' bedrooms to the Back Kitchen and Dairy are meticulously itemised, and we learn for example that the curtains of the Drawing Room and the Dining Parlour, no doubt those lit by the bay windows on the right, were of blue morine with matching Venetian sun blinds. The Coach House contained a 'Crane neck coach lined with brown cloth' and a 'ditto town chariot' with its harness, and the Hay Loft above the Great Stable a ton of potatoes, saddlery and dragnets. Foote's livestock consisted of three cows, 'about 25 pair of pigeons' and a large mastiff- none of which alas appear in the picture - and the garden furniture included four 'semi-circular Chinese painted garden seat(s)' and two 'green rustic settees': one of the former can be seen beside the pond and another on the further bank. There were few pictures in the house and the total sum these raised was substantially below the forty-one guineas fetched by the hay in the Rick Yard.

A PREVIOUSLY unrecorded drawing by Millais (Fig. 19), dating from 1848 and illustrating The Tempest, Act I, scene ii, has recently been presented to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, by Miss Sylvia Crawshay. It pre-dates stylistically not only the first of his drawings bound up with the foundation of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood in that year, but also the oil painting of the subject which he undertook in 1849 (Makins Collection; recently at the Tate Gallery, The Pre-Raphaelites, No.24).