'It would not be untrue to say that to the general public in Great Britain modern German art is unknown.'

THESE words with their classic British circumspection were written in 1938, the first sentence of Herbert Read's Introduction to a Pelican Special written by Peter Thoene, which was published to coincide with 'the London opening of the famous Munich exhibition of "degenerate" German art'. Such a statement is still largely true today. Until recently the national museums hardly collected German art and temporary exhibitions have focussed on specific movements or individuals rather than on any broad overview. The organisers of the current exhibition of expressionist and post-expressionist painting and sculpture at the Royal Academy should, therefore, be congratulated for collecting together in Britain an unprecedentedly wide-ranging selection of work made since 1905. This starting date marks the formation, in Dresden, of Die Brücke [The Bridge], an idealistic guild of young artists who, inspired by Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch and Whitman, broke the rigid yoke of middle-class convention and painted like 'savages' in an attempt to express authentic emotion.

AS the artistic representation of living things had been forbidden by the Prophet, painting in the Muslim world of necessity avoided grand public statements and was confined rather to small portable forms such as manuscripts and albums, executed under the patronage of those potentates educated enough to have developed their aesthetic sensibilities and powerful enough to brave the wrath of the pious. This private nature of the art made it totally dependent on the patronage of kings and princes, and by and large the finest work was commissioned by the most discerning and refined of patrons, in whose manuscript ateliers great painters could add their work to that of their artistic peers, the calligraphers, illuminators, gilders and binders. The product was that most exquisite of literary creations, the Persian illuminated manuscript. The great-est patrons not only supported their artists in all their necessities, but actively shaped their work to their own taste.

THE topic of rococo book illustration seems so contradictory as to be self-destructing. For the rococo is a style of decoration, external and ornamental; book illustration is primarily internal and essential, a pictorial translation of a verbal text. Can these different functions be combined? Then too, in general the rococo as decoration has been only grudgingly extended to the other arts. Some critics, on the other hand, seek to expand the definition beyond the decorative and visual arts. They find it in the comedies of Marivaux and even the poetry of Voltaire, who has been awarded the startling label of Rokokomensch.

THE Gospel Book of Henry the Lion is the most sumptuous manuscript produced in the twelfth-century scriptorium at Helmarshausen. It is prefaced by a dedicatory poem (fol.4v) praising the patrons, Duke Henry and his wife Matilda, and adding that, through Abbot Conrad II (c.1170-89), they commissioned the book from Helmarshausen. The poem closes with an invocation: 'Peter, this book is the work of thy monk Herimann.' Regrettably, Herimann did not specify what he meant by labor est Herimanni. One could wish that he had explicitly added pictor et scriptor, as for example Enielbert did in the twelfth-century Springiersbach Homiliary. The ambiguous term labor could mean that Herimann was in charge of a group of scribes and artists who executed the work; on the other hand, it could imply that he was the scribe, or the artist, or both.

WHENJoanna of Austria, bride of Francesco de' Medici, arrived at Florence on 16th December 1565, fourteen ephemeral monuments devised by Vincenzo Borghini and executed by the Ac-cademia del Disegno were erected in her honour. Several drawings by Vasari, along with sketches from Borghini's note-book, provide an overall impression of the structures which decorated the city. Regrettably, however, few visual records of the paintings which actually adorned these monuments have survived. So far two studies by Bronzino for the façade of the Palazzo Ricasoli have been identified, as well as drawings by Tommaso Manzuoli and Frederik Sustris for the Duomo and the Medici monument, respectively. To these we may now add a drawing sold at Christie's in July 1973, at the time attributed to Sodoma (Fig.79). This sketch is unique in two respects: not only is it the sole remnant of the cycle of chiaroscuro paintings at the Porta al Prato celebrating Tuscan achievement, but it is also the first drawing which may be securely attributed to Giovanni Maria Butteri, a young member of Bronzino's studio who was employed by Allori on the 1565 apparato.

JOHN Clephane is an unfamiliar figure. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography is of a telegraphic brevity and refers exclusively to his fitfully pursued medical career. There is no reference to his visits to Italy as bearleader in turn of the 2nd Lord Mansel, of John Bouverie and of Lord Coote, who succeeded his father as 2nd Earl of Mountrath whileon the Grand Tour. But Clephane's papers, preserved in the Rose of Kilravock archives, show that for half a decade he was the intermediary between a number of English patrons, of whom John Blackwood was the most influential, and the artistic world in Rome.

THE Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has recently acquired an early 'cubist' painting by Lyonel Feininger, Gelmeroda II (Fig.82). The painting shows the church (with its distinctive spire) and the square of Gelmeroda (a small village near Wei-mar), with a group of worshippers gathering for a service. It was painted in 1913, two years after Feininger's first confrontation with cubist painting (especially that of Robert Delaunay) at the Salon des Artistes Independants, Paris. The painting is the second of a series of at least ten pictures of this church that Feininger painted between 1913 and 1936. It established a particular kind of balanced and monumental composition, based on a harmony of horizontals and verticals, that was to run throughout Feininger's output, interspersed with more dynamic and diagonally-based compositions.

THE upside-down compositions of Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) have baffled many people since their first appearance in 1969. Seen in the context of his earlier work, however, and understood metaphorically rather than literally or as a gimmick to attract attention, I believe their meaning is not so difficult to grasp.