THE strength of Robert Adam's reputation as a furniture designer rests today at least as much on his drawings preserved in the Soane Museum (and on engravings of his works) as on such authentic pieces as have survived. Time and chance have dealt devastating blows to virtually all the magnificent London interiors and their related furnishings upon which his reputation was largely founded, and of the thirty-nine principal London commissions involving furniture, none today remains intact. Among the country houses for which he designed furniture, there are some preeminent survivors, but the dispersals or total losses of famous houses make a daunting list.

THE enormous respect (Tonks) had for Art, together with his delayed start on a professional career, was the basis of the doubts and uncertainties which were to assail him for the rest of his life. For him the production of a painting was a labour of love, requiring a strenuous effort of will and intelligence. He felt his position as an artist to be permanently in need of justification, and although in his teaching he professed clarity, economy of means and directness of approach, his own work often showed painful reworking and uncertainty.

A SARDONYX ringstone in a London private collection which is inscribed with the name of Pope Paul II (1464-71) recalls the famous gem cabinet of this aristocratic Venetian prelate and throws light on his patronage of contemporary gem engraving (Fig.40). Set in a substantial plain gold ring, the obverse is engraved with an intaglio double portrait of Saints Peter and Paul, their bearded heads shown in profile face to face, divided by a processional cross on a stand, and silhouetted against the pale upper layer of the sardonyx. Although the intaglio could have been used for the practical purpose of sealing the correspondence of the Pope, the cameo on the reverse signifies that it is his personal possession, being inscribed PAULUS II PONTIFEX MAXIMUS in white Roman capitals on a dark ground within a reserved border (Fig.41).

THE Santa Maria Maggiore altar-piece, the large double-sided polyptych commissioned in the late 1420s by Pope Martin V Colonna for his family chapel in the Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, is a well-known monument in the history of early renaissance painting. Most of the scholarly literature on the altar-piece has dealt with the role of Masaccio and Masolino in the execution of the work. It is not the intention here to add to the discussions of attribution, but rather to examine the iconography of the central panel of the back side of the altar-piece, the Assumption of the Virgin (Fig.39), and to show that a previously unnoticed detail of the painting may advance the debate about the identity of the Pope in the wing showing St Matthias now in the National Gallery, London (Fig.44).

SOME documents recently discovered in the Milanese archive help to shed light on Vincenzo Foppa's movements in the 1470s and demonstrate the high esteem in which he was held at the Sforza court.

AS Veronese's fame increased in his later years, the demand for his pictures spread beyond the confines of the Veneto to patrons and princes in other states. His paintings for the Emperor Rudolph II are well-known and much discussed, but his pictures for another prince, Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy (1562-1630), though highly regarded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have been relatively neglected in recent literature.

ALTHOUGH the Print Room at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, has an extremely rich and celebrated collection, for various historical reasons it is not strong in the British or, a fortiori, the Irish school. Going through one of its boxes of virtually unidentified drawings from these islands, I was interested and surprised to find two examples of the work of Roderic O'Conor (1860-1940).