A triptych in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin, bears the signature: 'Jacobus Yverni de [Av]inione pîxcit' (Figs. 1-3). In the centre panel is the Virgin enthroned, with the Child at her breast (Fig.2). In the lateral panels are, on the left St Stephen and on the right St Lucy (Fig.3). On the predella, in the centre is Christ as the Man of Sorrows accompanied by Sts Peter and Paul; on the right are the arms of the Piedmontese family of the Marquesses of Ceva.' The work is not dated, but even if nothing at all were known about Jacques Yverni, it could confidently be assigned to the mature phase of the International Gothic style in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. It is an attractive painting, characterised by restrained colour harmonies and a slightly languid elegance; and it is also a precious document for the history of painting in Avignon. Not only is it one of the very few works of art to have survived from that period, but its survival gives substance to an artist's name which would otherwise have remained among those known only through archival records.

IT was a fitting and felicitous accident that the march of the centuries should make the crowning event of Luciano Berti's career as Soprintendente in Florence a great commemorative exhibition of Andrea del Sarto. For it is an appropriate conclusion to his career that, as we look around Florence now, we no longer see Andrea's paintings denied the investment in conservation that is symbolic of respect and interest; and it is appropriate, too, that much new scholarship on this artist should be produced by and for the occasion, not a little of it by Berti himself.

WHEN Federico Zuccaro arrived at the Escorial in December 1585, accompanied by five assistants, he was received with enthusiasm. According to Fray José de Sigüienza, 'Federico came with such a reputation, recommended to the king's service by important people of such good judgment, and made famous by his prints, that we almost went out to meet him with a canopy (palio)'. There had been several years of protracted negotiations before he finally signed - in the palace of the Spanish Ambassador in Rome - the contract engaging him in the service of Philip II. In spite of these high expectations, Zuccaro's career in Spain was not a success: 'Little of what he painted pleased the king, nor anyone, and nothing he did lived up to the expectations raised by his fame'.

THE 1983 quincentenary festivities honouring Raphael's birth were staged around the globe, took many forms, and seemed to go on forever. The abundant issue of these anniversary publications, exhibitions, symposia, and. other tributes to Raphael will continue to nourish generations of art historians and to in-spire a long line of postscripts. The present article, on a drawing for the Psyche loggia of Agostino Chigi's villa, known as the Farnesina, is one such footnote to the 1983 anniversary.

A little-known drapery study in the Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence, constitutes a significant addition to the small number of drawings which are securely attributable to Cosimo Rosselli (Fig.33). Published for the first time in 1930 by Bernhard Degenhart as a possible Lorenzo di Credi, the sheet was over-looked by later scholars until in 1966 Gigetta Dalli Regoli correctly noted a stylistic connection with Rosselli's work. She associated the drawing with other sheets at Christ Church, Oxford, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts (Musée Wicar) at Lille, but failed to observe the direct relationship between the Marucelliana drawing and the figure of St Thomas in Rosselli's 1482 (dated) Madonna and Child with Sis Thomas and Peter (originally St Augustine) and two angels (Fig.34) in the Corbinelli Chapel at the church of Santo Spirito.

IN Newhailes House, outside Edinburgh, there is a large chest of drawers of Flemish origin, dating from the end of the seventeenth century. Excluding the base which is of coarse later construction, the chest measures 137 cm wide by 91.5 cm high by 61 cm deep. It is of mixed woods, veneered in wave-turned ebony which makes it both magnificent and heavy (Fig.36). The intriguing feature, to which particular attention will be drawn here, is that each of the oak'drawers, numbered one to fifteen from the top left, is lined with a set of engraved plans and elevations for a grand house. They are glued on top of the original marbled paper linings, and are identified as designs by Claude Comiers dated 1680 for a town house for the Hopes of Edinburgh. As far as can be established, no other examples of the engravings are known, and these have remained unpublished. The great interest of the engravings is that they are for a house on a specific site in Edinburgh. This is shown by their references to a party wall on the left and a little street or close on the right (Fig.40). The elevation also reveals a rise in the level of the site from front to back of about 3.24 cm.

Two overdoor compositions in the Wallace Collection, long catalogued as Fragonard, may now be attributed to Hughes Taraval (1728-85) and Nicolas-René Jollain (1732-91); a new royal provenance provides some consolation.

COLLECTING Netherlandish tapestries was not a trait peculiar to Henry VIII among English monarchs; for over a century they had been sought to decorate royal palaces and castles. It is true that at his death Henry VIII left one of the largest collections of tapestry, the greatest part of which was probably Netherlandish in origin. The precedent, however, for his collecting and indeed the basis of his collection as recorded in 1547 had been established a long time beforehand by successive English kings.

NO picture hang of the eighteenth century survives in its entirety in Britain and surprisingly few are accurately documented. Kedleston, where the arrangement of the pictures is established in a marvellous series of drawings from the office of Robert Adam and remained intact until the sale of some eight pictures in 1929, is the most complete survival. And although inventories of the period establish the statistics of the room-by-room distribution of many great collections of the time, we have tantalisingly little visual evidence of their appearance.

MUCH has been written about Prince Albert's enthusiasm for the arts. Extremely little, however, has been published on Eduard Joseph d'Alton (1772-1840), the engraver, collector, and first professor of art history at the Friedrich- Wilhelm University of Bonn, whose historical links with the Prince have also been much overlooked. In 1837, together with his brother Prince Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Prince Albert attended d'Alton's classes; and the purchases he subsequently made from d'Alton's collection were to be the foundation of his own collecting activities.