BY the end of the eleventh century the need for sumptuous service books had been well supplied in most parts of Germany by manuscripts of the Carolingian and Ottonian eras. This is one reason why similar liturgical books of the Romanesque period are relatively few in number. Yet the ambition to produce luxury manuscripts for special purposes never ceased, and a typical example is the splendid Gospel lectionary for the major feasts, now in the Bibliothe'que Nationale, Paris, MS lat. 17325, which has long been recognised as a masterpiece of German romanesque book illumination.

IN THE exhibition at Milan in 1951 of Caravaggio and his followers, which did so much to secure the widest recognition of the master's quite outstanding stature and of his major contributions to seventeenth-century painting, one picture of special importance among his very earliest works was unfortunately not present, because trace of it had been lost in relatively recent times. This was his celebrated, and often-copied, representation of three cardplayers in half-length format, known as The Cardsharps (I Bari) (Fig. 11). Having been acquired by the artist's first important patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, Caravaggio's painting passed, after that prelate's death, to Cardinal Antonio Barberini, and for very many generations remained in the possession of his family in Rome. A division was made of the Barberini collection of pictures in 1812, and Caravaggio's Cardsharps was allocated to the Colonna di Sciarra branch of the Barberini family. It was in fact to be seen in Palazzo Sciarra in Rome until the final decade of the last century, when it was exported from Italy with a view to its sale. And, since no reliable indication could be found as to who its purchaser at that time could have been, Caravaggio's canvas became impossible to trace thereafter.

THE canvas measures 94.2 by 130.9 cm; the original painted surface 91.5 by 128.2 cm. The condition is exceptionally fine, though small areas of the background have suffered at some point in the past (see below). The primary areas have retained all their vibrancy and subtlety, and the original surface texture is intact. An indication of the fine state of preservation is the fact that the vermilion red hearts on the card tucked into the card-sharp's waist retain their glazes. No less notable from this standpoint is the left hand and sleeve of the dupe, where a delicately described play of light and shadow is used to position the forms in space in a tour-de-force of observation.

THE brief but intense artistic career of Lattanzio Gambara (Brescia, c. 1530–74) has become clearer in recent years, I thanks to publications which have rounded out the artist's biography and his rble in the animated artistic scene in Brescia in the second half of the Cinquecento. Gambara's output has justly been described as 'torrential', though a great part of it has been lost. It is therefore not surprising that a precise notion of his artistic personality has been arrived at only with difficulty – and problems remain: this is a common fate for the painters who were active at a period which was at the same time one of the most productive in the history of Italian art, and one of the most overshadowed by models which could not be ignored. As with other artists active in these decades, so with Gambara, a sense emerges of an eclecticism which should be related not to a lack of creativity, but to an inevitable cultural conditioning in which the intellectual and conventional aspects of painting were emphasised.

TWO pendant paintings in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Landscape with Mutius (Fig.38) and Landscape with Anub (Fig.40), can be added to the ouvre of Paul Bril. Cardinal Federico Borromeo, founder of the Ambrosian library and art museum, was a personal friend of Bril, and probably obtained the pictures directly from the artist in Rome. Borromeo listed the paintings along with other works of art in a codicil to his Will of 1607, which stipulated that they would enter the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at his death. When in 1618 Borromeo subsequently founded the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, which is in the same complex as the library, he drew up an official document donating works of art to the museum. The donation lists eleven landscapes by Bril, including the pendants in question.These works have not entered standard literature on Bril, and in a recent study of the Ambrosiana were listed as unlocatable.

IN addition to the well known oil sketch that served, with slight variations, as the model for the central painting on the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre and has belonged to the Musees royaux de Belgique since 1865 (Fig.45), the catalogue of Delacroix's posthumous sale of February 1864 listed, as Lot 30, a 'Premiere pensee de celle composition' and, distinguishing it from the final design, added: 'Dans cette esquisse, le combat d'Apollon contrel es TPnebrese st plus spjcifid,e l la scene se passe entierement dans les espaces cdlestes'. The dimensions were given as 70 by 65 cm. It was knocked down to Dauzats for 1,000 francs, and has not since been on public view, to my knowledge, or ever reproduced in any form. Alfred Robaut, having presumably never seen it, described it summarily as 'Esquisse du plafond' in his catalogue raisonne of 1885, No.1109, while it was not mentioned at all in Adolphe Moreau's earlier catalogue.