IN 1454 the Augustinian friars and laity of the church of S. Agostino in Borgo San Sepolcro commissioned Piero della Francesca to paint an altar-piece with 'images, figures, pictures, and ornaments'. Though he agreed to complete the commission within eight years, Piero required twice that time. Vasari in the 1550 edition of his Lives described the polyptych, then still in S. Agostino, as 'highly praised'. In the same decade as Vasari's publication the Augustinian friars were transferred from S. Agostino to another church in the town, S. Maria della Pieve. It has generally been assumed that the friars took Piero's altar-piece to their new church, but the recent discovery of a note written in the 1680s has been the first proof of this. The note, published by Parronchi in 1984, records that four of the panels of Piero's altar-piece, previously in S. Maria della Pieve, were then in a house in San Sepolcro.

ROSSO Fiorentino's Enthroned Madonna and Child with four saints (Fig.3), now in the Uffizi, is of special interest as the artist's earliest extant altar-piece. It was commissioned by the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova to fulfil the testament of Francesca de Ripoi, a Catalan widow, and its authorship has never been called into question. Typical of Rosso's style is the compression of the picture-space which puts the figures in close proximity to both the frame and the frontal plane, as in two other altar-pieces, the Pala Dei of 1522 in the Palazzo Pitti and the Boston Dead Christ from his period in Rome before the Sack of 1527. The arrange-ment of the heads of the Virgin, Child and saints along the top of the panel, with the two outside ones in profile facing in, is symptomatic of this somewhat restricting attitude to altar-piece composition. The stiff, linear draperies are further refined in his two Volterra altar-pieces, both dated 1521. Along with his aggressive treatment of space, Rosso, at the age of twenty-five, proves himselfa daring manipulator of paint which, because of its comparatively open texture, imparts a sense of movement to the figures and vibrancy to the atmosphere.

IN his first volume of autobiography Kenneth Clark mentions the acquisition of a portrait roundel of Valerio Belli (c.1468- 1546), the famous goldsmith, gem-cutter and medallist, which, he felt convinced, was painted by Raphael himself (Fig.7). Soon afterwards he linked it to a passage concerning Raphael in the Giardino di Chå Gualdo of 1650 by Girolamo Gualdo, which runs as follows.

THE recent discovery of three documents in the Mantuan archives sheds new light on the career of Bartolomeo Manfredi, one of Caravaggio's closest followers. The first, Manfredi's baptismal certificate, has already been published, and has finally established the year of his birth as 1582. The other two are published here in their entirety for the first time.

ANGELIKA Kauffmann's Costanza (Fig. 17) belongs to an import-ant commission the artist received in Rome in 1783, and, contrary to her general practice, it exists in no other version nor was it ever engraved. Since the four vertical ovals of the commission were dispersed at some time in the nineteenth century, this work, now in Queensland but with no known provenance earlier than 1900, is the only one which can be now identified positively. While versions of the others have survived, none of them can be traced to the Caetani collection.