ONE suspects that many who have visited the National Gallery of Scotland either overlooked Tintoretto's Deposition of Christ or gave it only a cursory glance before passing on. Dimly visible below layers of discoloured varnish and overpaint (Fig. 11) and hung in an undistinguished frame, it was perhaps the least appreciated of all the great pictures from the Duke of Sutherland's collection which have been on loan since 1946. With the help of a generous grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund the Gallery was able to acquire this and three other Sutherland pictures from the Ellesmere Trustees in April last year. To those who knew the Tintoretto the idea of being able to have it cleaned offered a thrilling prospect. This was also the occasion, however, to reconsider the picture's early history, and to submit its physical structure and the pigments used by the artist to a careful scientific scrutiny. The results have been rewarding. For example, they suggest that Tintoretto maintained close contacts with the world of textiles both through his patrons and certainly through his use of lake pigments, which were by-products of the cloth-dyeing industry. This gives us a fresh insight on this extraordinary painter, whose distinctive use of colour was apparently firmly grounded on his deep knowledge of the developing technology of the dyer's craft. Our investigations also suggest that the Deposition was painted considerably earlier than has hitherto been supposed.

ALTHOUGH for most of us the Salon of 1819 immediately calls to mind Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, the Parisian art world of that year paid more attention to another painting, Girodet-Trioson's now barely remembered and even more rarely seen Pygmalion and Galatea (Fig. 14). Indeed, the painting by Girodet so completely dominated critical discussion when it appeared that one suspects its audience had been well prepared for its reception. Girodet was of course one of the leading lights of French painting in the early years of the Restoration, and of David's major students, he was perhaps the most politically sympathetic to the reactionary régime. However, what really justified so much public attention was that the painting contained an allegory of conservative artistic doctrine opposed to the burgeoning new ideas of the younger and generally politically liberal romatics, like Gericault. Girodet's classicising representation of the visionary relationship between an artist and his artwork was universally understood and praised as an aesthetic manifesto of a new and reinvigorated classicism. I would call it a 'romantic' classicism, that is, a neo-classicism that had co-opted the concepts of the visionary, of genius, and of inspiration used to criticise conventional academic values. Girodet's source for these ideas was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

OWING to the documentary discoveries of Paola della Pergola and the conclusive arguments of Federico Zeri, it has been possible to reconstruct a predella on a eucharistic theme by Ercole de' Roberti. Three panels certainly belong together: a Last supper and a Gathering of manna in the London National Gallery (Figs.28 and 30), and an Abraham and Melchizedek, which is lost but recorded in a copy (Fig.29). All three works have the same height, the two end panels are equal in length, all three are eucharistic in theme, they appeared together in a 1592 inventory of the goods of Lucrezia d'Este, and copies were made of each in the sixteenth century. Although the predella has been satisfyingly reconstructed, no one has yet connected these pieces with any other painting.

THE decoration of the Farnese Gallery ceiling, carried out be-tween 1597 and 1600, was a landmark in the development of ceiling painting, and was described in detail by Giovanni Pietro Bellori, the Roman biographer, in 1672. As is well known, the programme illustrates the universal dominion of love, through stories from antique mythology. The driving force behind the scheme was Odoardo Farnese (1573-1626), who in 1591 had been appointed a cardinal at the age of seventeen. The fundamental studies on the gallery are those by Tietze, Mahon, Martin, Dempsey and Posner.

IT is a foolhardy undertaking for a self-confessed non-expert to venture into the swamps of Rubens connoisseurship. The phalanxes on either side are always poised for battle, and short of engaging a sensitive and expert medium to communicate with the artist himself in the Elysian Fields and ask him what in fact he did or did not draw or paint, there will probably never be unanimity among those who concern themselves with his work. However, I feel confident enough in my own mind and eye to publish here a previously unknown and unusual drawing, which I believe to be by the young Rubens, a supposition for which I have had the support of several colleagues who have seen the original (Fig.35).

THE famous Diana fountain in Bushy Park (Fig.42) reached its present site in 1713, set up high on a rusticated stone base in the centre of the circular pond. Its scrolled stone pedestal was made c.1690 by Edward Pearce, when it was erected in the Privy Garden at Hampton Court; but the bronze parts - the crowning figure, the fish-holding putti, the shells and the mermaids astride dolphins - had been at Hampton Court since 1656, when the fountain to which they belonged had been moved there from Somerset House on the orders of Cromwell. This fountain is itemised in the inventory taken in 1659 of Cromwell's goods at Hampton Court.