AMONG the connoisseur-collectors of the nineteenth-century the figure of Louis-Claude Carrand (1827–88) deserves an important place. His love of the decorative arts and the exquisite taste with which he assembled his own cabinet of ivories, jewellery, textiles and goldsmiths' work is apparent from the collection which he left in 1887 to the city of Florence to be placed in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Not least among the objects which he selcted with such care and discernment where the shell cameos - some set in a box or a priming flask, and some independent of their original settings, which had often been an ornamental cup with cover. Carrand may have inherited some of these cameos from his father, Jean-Baptiste, but we may assume that the greater part was collected by Louis-Claude himself. In the case of only two pieces is it possible to establish a provenance.

ALTHOUGH the career of Giuseppe Arcimboldo before his arrival at the imperial court in 1562 remains largely unfamiliar, more early works can be attributed to his hand than have hitherto been recognised. Documents from 1549 to 1558 attest to his having executed a variety of commissions for the Cathedral of Milan, and he is also documented in 1558 as having designed tapestries for the Cathedral of Como. A complaint made by Giuseppe Meda in 1564 indicates that he had collaborated with Arcimboldo on the design of the gonfalone of San Ambrogio for Milan. From Robert Miller's important archival findings, we now know that in 1556 a commission came to the artist and to Jusepe Lomazzo to paint frescoes in the south transept of the Catheral of Monza. Arcimboldo's activity for Monza, and his designs for tapestries and a standard, can be brought together in the suggestion here proposed that he was involved in the preparation for the Cathedral of Monza of a tapestry representing John the Baptist preaching to soldiers, receiving the ambassadors of the Hebrews, and baptising.

GIVEN the mediocrity of Giacomo Serpotta's early stuccoes, the sudden flowering of his art in the late 1680s in the Oratorio del SS. Rosario in S. Cita might seem little short of miraculous (Fig. 39). What has hithero been lacking is a decoration that would bridge the abyss between his surviving work from the late 1760s, which is characterised by an unimaginative use of the Palermitan equivalent of the hard-edged style spread throughout Europe by Comasque artisans in the seventeenth century, and those inimitable later creations for which he is justly famous.

EVEN AMONG Italian baroque specialists Paolo Campi is hardly a household name. Yet he left behind one marble, the over-life-size statue of St Juliana Falconieri in the Vatican basilica, that raises him, in thish single instance, to a level wit the best in his age. The figure, which has finished in 1732, commemorates the saint who established the third order of Servites and forms part of the series of statues of the founders of religious orders that line the nave and transept of St Peter's (Fig. 46).

THE FOUR-DAY SALE of the Fountaine Collection held in London at Christie, Manson & Woods, 16th to 19th June 1884, has long been recognised by collectors, connoisseurs and curators as the dispersal of oe of the greatest European collections of maiolica and Limoges enamels. The sale was notable in that it saw the formation of 'The Syndicate,' whose sole aim was to pursue certain important items during the course of the sale and then offer them, at the price paid, to the Government. The managers of this body were Sir W.H Gregory, a trustee of the National Gallery, Sir William Drake and Richard Fisher. Augustus Wollaston Franks of the British Museum and J.C Robinson, Her Majesty's Surveyor of Pictures and formerly Art Superintendent of the South Kensington Museum, acted as advisers to the syndicate and assessors in the selection of potential purchases.

IN 1814 THE Irish-born portrait miniaturist and illustrator Adam Buck exhibited what was for him an ambitious composition entitled Portrait of a family with the bust of a deceased child (Fig. 58). This water-colour drawing, now in the Yale Center for British Art, is signed and dated 'Adam Buck, 1913.' The picture is distinctive for its naive, frieze-like arrangement of figures, and for the Greek vases displayed in the background, reflecting the contemporary vogue for these objects. The special attraction of Greek vases in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was twofold. First, their refined shape and drawing provided a model of taste; second, the subjects depicted on them were thought to be allegorical and, in particular, were connected with the mysticisim of Dionysiac religion.

THE THREE-QUARTER length portrait of a nobleman in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Fig. 70), attributed to Sebastiano del Piombo, has long ben presumed to be of Anton Francesco degli Albizzi (1486-1537), initially a supporter of the Medici, who later became their adversary and in 1537 was publicly beheaded for treason by Cosimo I.  Identification of the subject as the Florentine diplomat was inspired by Vasari's description of the Albizzi portrait in his vita of Sebastiano, and by certain traits of character that the sitter appears to share with Benedetto Varchi's assessment of Anton Francesco as a noble and bold man of haughty and restless disposition.

JEAN NEYRET de la Ravoye is hardly mentioned among the small group of recognised French collectors of the second half of the reign of Louis XIV. His only claim on out attention to emerge from the literature of the time is that he owned the Rape of the Sabines by Poussin, but Felibien and Florent le Comte, much concerned as they were collectors of Poussin, tell us no more than this about him.

TWO posthumous sales of the studio material left by the decorative painter Louis Cheron are recorded. No copy of either catalogue has hitherto come to light and thus the survival of that of the earlier sale, referred to in somewhat general terms by Vertue, is of some interest. Apart from certain specific bequests, all Cheron's pictures and drawings were left, with the sum of £300, to Isaac Grassineau. Cheron died in May 1725 and the sale was held on 26th and 28th February and 2nd March of the following year.