ALTHOUGH a full-length study of art patronage in renaissance Venice remains to be written, one would not expect it to devote much space to the activities of the trade guilds, or arti. Any neglect would be understandable, for there can be little doubt that numerous other types of individual or corporate patron - government committees and magistracies, for example, or the regular and secular clergy, or the scuole grandi, or wealthy individual patricians and cittadini- played a more significant part than did the guilds in promoting the greatest works of Venetian painting, sculpture and architecture. These guilds made little or no contribution to the exterior embellishment of Venice's major civic monuments, and in this respect they also compare unfavourably with their Florentine counter-parts, which, as is well known, were responsible for super-vising several of the most important public commissions of the early renaissance.

ARCHITECTURAL theorists have always agreed that the Roman Doric column was originally baseless. However, in cases where baseless Doric columns have been used in England architectural historians have generally assumed that they must have been intended as Greek Doric. In fact the use of baseless Doric columns was not uncommon in eighteenth-century England before the first stirrings of the Greek Revival. Such columns can only be described as being of a baseless Roman Doric order.

THE publication of Vitruvius Britannicus was conceived in about 1713 in the swell of national confidence that culminated in the Treaty of Utrecht. Two years later it was brought almost to the point of publication, not, however, as a neo-Palladian architectural book by Colen Camp-bell, but rather as an anonymous printsellers' survey of the achievements of British architects, of the order of Jean Marot's surveys of French buildings or David Mortier's Nouveau Théåtre d'Italie of 1704. It was an architectural complement to the random collection of topographical views of country houses in Britannia Illustrata (1707 etc.), later known as Le Nouveau Théåtre de la Grande Bretagne.

WHAT exactly is Baccio Bandinelli's sculpture of Giovanni delle Bande Nere (1540-54) in Piazza San Lorenzo holding in his right hand (Fig.32)? Giovanni Cinelli, the first to try to identify the object, thought it was a bastone di comando since, after all, Giovanni delle Bande Nere had been a 'condottiere d'eserciti e capitano di molto valore'. Heikamp accepts Cinelli's identification, and Langedijk does not seem to question it. But while it would make sense for Giovanni to be holding a commander's baton, the object itself does not much look like one. According to contemporary visual sources, a bastone was a smooth, slender cylinder, flat at both ends. Giovanni does indeed hold such an object in another sculpture of him made by Bandinelli, in the Salone de'Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio. What he is holding on Piazza San Lorenzo, however, is quite different: both ends of the object are tapered, a deep groove runs round it near the middle, there appears to be a piece missing at the top, and in any case it is too substantial to be a commander's baton. It seems far more likely to be a lance with a broken shaft. The visual evidence is persuasive, but there is also another clue: it is said that the statue was derided by the Florentine popolo, who laughed that 'the general was sitting because he had grown tired of holding his heavy lance'. As we shall see, Giovanni was represented with a broken lance on other occasions.

IT is well known - though sometimes surprise is expressed - that the first picture Titian painted for Alfonso d'Este's Camerino, The Worship of Venus now in the Prado, Madrid, precisely re-produced the text of Philostratus, Imagines, I,vi. Contrary to general belief, the second picture Titian painted for Alfonso's Camerino, the Bacchus and Ariadne (Fig.35) now in the National Gallery, London, also precisely reproduced a classical text, Catullus, lxiv, 249-264. I should say that this text has been cited before, in what has been quite a long debate over the sources used in this picture, even though a consensus appears to have emerged that the most important was Ovid, Ars Amatoria, I,529f. But the text has to be considered in the form in which it appears in the edition and commentary by Battista Guarino (1434-1513), published by his son Alessandro in a printing of 11th May 1521 (Rusconi, Venice). This edition bears a papal cum privilegio of 6th June 1520, and a dedication (undated) to Battista's former pupil, Alfonso d'Este. The date of the papal privilegio - so conceivably of the dedication - coincides exactly with the deduced date of Titian's commission.

AGNOLO Bronzino's monumental Resurrection (Fig.36) in the choir of the SS. Annunziata in Florence is signed, dated, and documented, but the panel has received relatively little attention in the literature on Bronzino. In fact, the altar-piece contains a curious detail which appears to have escaped the notice of most Bronzino scholars. Directly below Christ's left foot, on a masonry block which forms part of the tomb, Bronzino painted a cartellino on which he represented two medallions, one of which contains the head of a young man in profile (Fig.41). The lower medallion is rendered in relief, as if it were a seal, and, on close inspection, it appears that the framed head is a negative impression of the lower device. The selection of the profile view in a circular frame suggests that the head may be an idealised portrait of the kind that customarily appears on the obverse of coins and medals.

ON 25th March 1648 Bernini presented to Pope Innocent X Pamphili his modello of the Four rivers fountain for the Piazza Navona. The pope was so delighted with the design that Bernini was redeemed from the official disfavour he had suffered since the death of his great patron, Pope Urban VIII.

THE unhappy vicissitudes of Barocci's Entombment of Christ in Senigallia have been well known ever since Pio Vecchioni published the documents of the confraternity that commissioned the painting.' These documents enable one to follow the history of the picture in great detail from its inception and the negotiation over price to its subsequent damage, restoration, and definitive reinstallation in the newly enlarged and remodelled church of S.Croce. They therefore fully confirmed Bellori's description of the near ruin of the painting in his vita of the artist. But at the same time the very circumstantiality of this story - down to the injuries caused by the urine of rats - has shifted the emphasis away from what Bellori said was the original source of the damage - the tracing of the picture by a temerarious copyist.