THE bronze rhinoceros is installed on the terrace over-looking the Seine, and M. Mitterrand has opened the Musie d'Orsay, the latest in an extraordinary series of new French State Museums, beginning with Beaubourg and the Musée Picasso, and culminating, we must hope, with the grand Louvre. M'O (to give the Musée d'Orsay its sleek logo) is a remarkable achievement, presented on a scale and with a confidence which will make it the focus for study and debate about nineteenth-century art for the forseeable future. Both the French State and the curatorial teams involved deserve the warmest congratulations for bringing M'O to fruition.

AN important and previously unknown example of Pietro da Cortona's landscape art has recently come to light among the paintings classified as anonymous in the depositi of the Vatican Museums and is presented here for the first time (Fig. 10). The provenance of this Landscape with two temples can be traced back to the seventeenth century. Painted probably towards the end of the 1620s for Cortona's friend and patron Marcello Sacchetti, the work is documented until the middle of the eighteenth century in the Sacchetti collection, whence it passed either directly or by way of the Capitoline Museum into the papal collection in the Vatican Palace. Landscapes by Cortona are few in number, and the Vatican painting is therefore a particularly welcome addition to the oeuvre, contributing to our knowledge of the circumstances and chronology of the artist's involvement with this genre, as well as to an appreciation of his landscape style.

THE Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Kress Foundation last year performed an act of rare and elegant generosity. The Fine Arts Museums, represented by the President of the Board of Trustees, Alexandra K. Philipps, and the Director of the Museums, Ian McKibbin White, decided - with the full support of Charles Moffett, curator of paintings, and Marilyn Perry, President of the Kress Foundation, and after taking legal advice from the deputy city attorney - to return to the Louvre a painting by P.F. Mola which belonged to it and which had vanished from the Elysee Palace around 1950. Samuel Kress had bought it in Paris in 1952 (needless to say, unaware of its real provenance) and had given it in 1961 to the Museums of San Francisco. This act of restitution bears witness to the many years of friendly and cooperative understanding between the two museums.

A proper understanding of Savoldo's career has long been complicated by the fact that there are scarcely half a dozen pictures that are documented or dated. This situation has been further clouded by discoveries during recent restorations. Thus, the date on the Sts Anthony Abbot and Paul the Hermit in the Accademia, Venice, sometimes interpreted as 1510, has been shown to be false, and a new but only partly legible one has been uncovered. Similarly, cleaning of the Hampton Court Virgin adoring the Christ Child with two donors has revealed its inscribed date of 1527 - long considered fundamental to establishing a chronology for Savoldo's work - to be so badly damaged as to be illegible.

IN his famous study of Bolognese artists, Felsina Pittrice, published nearly forty years after Guido Reni's death, Carlo Cesare Malvasia listed - as he also did in his guide to the city, Le Pitture di Bologna - two frescoes which the artist painted in Palazzo Zani: the Fall of Phaeton, still in situ at via S. Stefano 56, and the Separation of Day and Night, which was removed and transferred to canvas in the nineteenth century and is now part of the Bankes Collection at Kingston Lacy (Fig. 16).

Since 1939, when Longhi published Rubens's equestrian portrait at Palazzo Doria d'Angri in Naples (Figs. 19 and 20) the canvas has been discussed many times by scholars from a stylistic point of view; the very sparse documentary data have been insufficient to put an end to the dispute about the dating of the picture and the identity of its sitter.

JACOB More (1740-93) lived and worked in Edinburgh until 1771, before moving to London and then Italy, where he became known as 'More of Rome'. He played an important part in the development of Scottish art and has often been referred to as 'the Father of Scottish Landscape Painting'. Despite a humble back-ground and a very late start to his career, his early exhibited work won public acclaim and he went on to achieve fame and popularity. More was not solely a painter, but also a stage designer, landscape gardener, dealer and guide to the Grand Tourists in Rome; his immense output and later personal connexions in Italy have tended to obscure the achievements of his Scottish period and his role as the leader of Scottish landscape painting.

ENGRAVED gems, so little valued today in relation to other works of art, were once considered among the ultimate prizes of connoisseurship. The Emperors and kings of antiquity competed for the work of the best artists; and great collections, such as that of Mithridates VI of Pontus, inspired the gem cabinets of the popes, princes and antiquaries of the Renaissance. English interest, which began with the purchase of the cabinet of the Flemish antiquary Abraham Gorlaeus by Prince Henry in 1609 was slow to develop, but reached a peak in the eighteenth century when classically educated aristocrats ranked the collecting of gems with the creation of fine libraries and galleries of painting and sculpture.

In recent years, the beautiful landscape paintings acquired for Philip IV's palace of the Buen Retiro in the 1630s have given rise to some lively discussion. This has turned in particular on the date of execution of the works and on the identity of the person entrusted with the commission. In our book, A Palace for a King, we produced evidence to show that Spain's ambassador to the Holy See, Don Manuel de Moura, Marquis of Castel Rodrigo, was the man who assembled for the palace the extra-ordinary group of paintings, which included works by Poussin and Claude. We can now add a further piece of documentary information which adds a little more to the story without, however, solving all its riddles.

ANDRE Rouquet in his perceptive study The Present State of the Arts in England, published in 1755, noted that, 'Every portrait painter in England has a room to show his pictures, separate from that in which he works. People who have nothing to do, make it one of their morning amusements, to go and see these collections. They are introduced by a footman without disturbing the master, who does not stir out of his closet unless he is particularly wanted . . . The footman knows by heart all the names, real or imaginary, of the persons, whose portraits, finished or unfinished, decorate the picture room...' .

IN this note I wish to present documents concerning the activity of the Flemish painter Giannino Bahuet and his circle (see Appendix), and to attribute one portrait to him, with the aim of re-establishing the artist's identity. It is hoped that the documentary evidence on Bahuet's lost portraits may lead to their identification, and that a better knowledge of his works may help to shed light on the diffusion of the state portrait in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.