THE theory that the Gothic style was created by the Arabs was first made widely known by Sir Christopher Wren in Parentalia (1750). Wren stated that the pointed arch derived from the Saracens, a term that generally speaking refers to all the Muslim conquerors, but particularly to the Moors in Spain at the time of the Reconquest. According to Wren, it was during the Crusades that the Christians brought the pointed arch from Jerusalem to Europe and then elaborated the form into Gothic.

IN his brief career Gericault completed only one painting which satisfied the criteria of what contemporaries held to be the most elevated category of pictorial endeavour, la
peinture d'histoire. The Raft of the Medusa alone was enough to qualify him in their estimation as a history-painter, and it is almost exclusively on this aspect of his art that early biographical notices dwell. These tell us very little about Gericault's large output of work in lesser genres, which counts for so much in the modern view of his achievement, but do trouble to place on record that there were other subjects, after the Raft, which he gave thought to painting on a grand scale.

'ROSSETTI wanted everyone to be a painter. So horrible of him, wasn't it?' commented Burne-Jones late in his life, adding that the first time Rossetti met William Morris, 'he said to him "Of course you must be a painter" . . . it was so exciting that he set everyone going." So William Morris gave up architecture, as he had earlier given up his intention of entering the church, and began to practise art. He had his doubts, however: 'Rossetti says I ought to paint, he says I shall be able', he reported to a friend. 'I don't hope much, I must say, yet I will try my best.'

A late painting by Agnolo Bronzino, a Pietå in a tabernacle-shaped frame, hangs on the wall of the left side aisle in the church of S. Croce in Florence (Fig.28). Although almost always included among Bronzino's late works, it has never received more than a brief mention in the literature because of the complete lack of documentation for the painting. However, this deficiency can be remedied by examining several hitherto unpublished references to the Pietå as well as a piece of physical evidence on the frame. These also reveal the work's original purpose.

A letter written by the English architect Stephen Riou (1720-80) from Constantinople in 1753, which was purchased by the British Architectural Library in 1984, adds not only to the little that is known about Riou's life and work, but also to the story of the proposals for a home for the Society of Dilettanti and an Academy of Arts in London.

IN early January 1789 the Irish architectural draughtsman James Cavenah Murphy left Dublin on a journey that would take him to Portugal and one quite specific building, the late fourteenth-century abbey church of Sta Maria Da Vitoria, Batalha. His patron, William Burton Conyngham, President of the Irish Academy and member of the London Society of Antiquaries, had already visited the church in 1783, taking the opportunity to execute a number of perspective studies. Murphy's brief was significantly different. When he eventually returned from Portugal it was with a collection of carefully measured drawings, many of ornamental details, that provided the basis for the meticulously engraved plates of Plans, Elevations, Sections . . . of the Portuguese Church of Batalha, issued to a long list of subscribers between 1792 and 1795 (Figs.31, 34).

THE debts of the Prince of Wales had, by 1787, reached formidable proportions. In an effort to regularise the situation, the House of Commons voted the sum of £161,000 for payment of his creditors and an additional £60,000 for the completion of Carlton House; and the Prince promised that he would never incur debts in the future. Characteristically, his promise proved worthless. By 1795 his debts, all accumulated since the attempted settlement made in 1787, amounted to £630,000. On this occasion the management of the Prince's financial affairs was entrusted to a body of Commissioners: the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Master of the Rolls, the Master of the King's Household and the Surveyor of Crown Lands. Those to whom the Prince owed money submitted statements of their claims and received a bond for the  payment, in regular instalments over a period of time, of what was due to them, with interest.

THE Orvietan origin of Simone Martini's polyptych in the Gardner Museum in Boston (Fig.35) has never been lost sight of, but the painting's history prior to the 1860s has been the subject of considerable confusion. Mrs Gardner bought the altar-piece in 1899 through Berenson from members of the Mazzocchi family. Until that time it had been displayed for a decade or more in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, to which it had been lent by the Mazzocchi family. First published by Crowe and Cavalcaselle in 1864, then by Guardabassi in 1872 and Fumi in 1891, it was firmly recorded as having once belonged to Leandro Mazzocchi; its earlier provenance, however, was unrecorded.

FREDERIC George Stephens's most substantive contribution to the history of Victorian taste was the ninety-part series he wrote for The Athenaeum on the private collections of England between the years 1873 and 1884. His essays are noteworthy not only because of his assessment of Old Master paintings in ancestral collections but, more particularly, because of the attention he draws to Victorian middle-class collectors of modern British art. At least one-third of Stephens's subjects are the proprietors of collections recently formed in the industrial north of England. John Sheepshanks and Robert Vernon, the early Victorian collectors who pioneered the practice of collecting contemporary art, are well known to students of the history of taste, as, to a lesser extent, are their mid-Victorian successors, Frederick Leyland, James Leathart, and George Rae. Not as familiar, however, are patrons such as Henry Bolckow, the Middlesbrough iron master, Sir William Armstrong, the armaments king, and Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell of iron and steel fame. Since most of their treasures have been dispersed, Stephens's articles are a valuable resource in that they
provide us with an inventory of Victorian art owned by a prominent group of relatively little-known collectors.

THE 1635 inventory of the Duke of Buckingham's collection of paintings published in 1907 can be supplemented by three documents now in the Wiltshire Record Office. The first is an undated partial draft inventory listing ninety-nine paintings, most of which appear in the 1635 inventory, the sequence of which it follows. This document does, however, list three works which cannot be identified in either the later complete inventory or in the list of paintings sold by the second Duke in Antwerp in 1648. These are: An Ambassador of Venice of Mitens, Democritus and Heraclitus of Palma and A piece of the Lords Supper of Bassan.