A half-length St Sebastian, which recently entered the collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza (Villa Favorita, Lugano) is instantly recognisable as a major Florentine painting of the mid-cinquecento (Fig.1). Previosly in private hands, this work has been known only under Federico Zeri's attribution to the early Jacopino del Conte, but is unrelated in style to the work of pasticheur, whose paintings of the early 1530s depend heavily on the mode of Andrea del Sarto. Rather, it may be attributed without hesitation to Agnolo Bronzino. it is an important early work dating from after Bronzino's years of collaboration with his master, Jacopo del Pontormo, in the late 1520s, but before he became court painter to Duke Cosimo I de'Medici in 1539.

The episode commonly depicted from the story of Lucretia, wife of Tarquinius Collatinus, is her suicide after recounting to her husband and father the outrageous conduct of Sextus Tarquinius towards her the previous day (Livy, History of Rome, 1, 58). Titian had painted this scene, without apparent regard to its moral overtones, as an elegant dance movement in a landscape in the picture o about 1520 (Royal Collection, London). Half a century later he chose to depict more ambitiously for his great patron Philip II of Spain another episode, that where Tarquin compels Lucretia to submit to his lust by threatening to kill her - the killing to appear as retribution for adultery with a servant (Fig. 12). Titian himself described the painting as 'an invention involving greater labour and artifice than anything, perhaps, that I have produced for many years'.

In Italy the involvement of the natural sciences in the restoration and conservation of work of art is quite long-established, although the degree of involvement has fluctuated with both time and place over the past half century. The Istituto Centrale del Restauro at Rome, founded in 1950, has always had a scientific laboratory. 

Of noteworthy interest, after its disappearance for more than a century, is the recent discovery by the writer of Perugino's lost fresco, the Albizi Pietå (Fig.37).

This note starts with an apology and ends with an appeal. The apology is due for a faulty memory of a document of which I was forcibly relieved almost as soon as I found it. In writing a catalogue-entry on Raphael's villa-elevation in the Ashmolean Museum (Fig.40), for the exhibition Raffaello Architetto, I gave a fair summary of the contents but mistakenly believed that I found the letter in question in Mantua, in the correspondence between Isabella d'Este and Grossino in Rome. I have now had the opportunity to recoup the material lost in 1983, and I am grateful that I can at lat produce this correction, and the text.

Considering the rarity of unpublished documents in Michelangelo's own hand, it was a surprise to discover one in the George N. Meissner collection of rare books and autographs at Washington University in St Louis. The surprise is all the greater since the project to publish all the letters and records of the master has recently been completed in the six volumes edited by Paola Barocchi, Renzo Ristori, and Lucilla Bardeschi Ciulich. The Washington Universit document, however, escaped their notice, and although in itslef modest, it is important for it tells us someting both about the artist during one of the most desperate periods of his life, and about the history of his native city.

Item no.378 in the Catalogue of Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church is a red chalk drawing of a left foot (Fig.42). The drawing is described as 'Study of a L. foot propped upon a piece of knotted cloth' with the capricious addition of an inexplicable 'face in the clouds' immediately to its right. the catalogue note reservedly proposes that the drawing is a copy after an unkown study by Raphael for one of the frescoes in the Sala di Psiche, possibly the Jupiter and Cupid. a tentative attribution to Parmigianino by Mr John Gere is cited.

The presence of the panel of the Raisin of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo in the cathedral of Narbonne (Fig.44) is attested in written sources from the seventeenth century. Elsewhere I have argued that it is reflected in local painting shortly after its arrival in France. There has been recent discussion about its setting in Saint Just et Pasteur and, in particular, its relationship to Raphael's Transfiguration, with which it was painted in competition.

'Si attribuise particolar lode ad Oratio ne' ritratti; e cosi bene ne fece alcuni, che gareggiano di perfettione co quelli di Titiano suo Padre'. Vasari had mentioned Orazio Veceelio's portraiture, citing a picture of the violinist Battista Ceciliano, but it was left to Ridolfi to appraise the painter's success in what was apparently his chosen field. Orazio, a natural son of Titian born in 1525, and who died of the same epidemic as his father in 1576, remains a mysterious figure. he travelled with his father to Rome during the pontificate of Pope Paul III in 1545-46 and to the court of Charles V in 1548. There are intermittent documents of his activity ut these do not contradict Ridolfi's statement of his activity but these do not contradict Ridolfi's statement that the painter had a character inclined to high living and indolence - 'a vivere alla grande e con poca noia' - a tendency that no doubt developed with the passing years to the virtual exclusion of his practice as a painter.