THERE has been an inordinate amount of sensationalist controversy in the press, both in Europe and in the United States, since the acquisition of Dieric Bouts's Annunciation in January 1985 by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California. Brought into question have been its purportedly anomalous iconographical oddities, its state of preservation, and its very authenticity. The first point is addressed and discunted in this article, the second and third in the technical report which follows. The latter confirms that the painting is an exceptionally well preserved painting in tempera on fine linen from the fifteenth century.

THE GETTY Annunciation is one of the few surviving examples of works that are commonly referred to as Tuchlein painting. This technique involved the use of a glue-based medium for painting on very fine, often unprimed canvas. Such pictures were left unvarnished, resulting in a surface that was free of the glare or reflective qualities of oil paintings. Within a church setting, a Tuchlein painting would have assumed a luminous presence that would have been visible from all vantage points.

ON 19th May 1929 Rubens wrote to his friend Pierre Dupuy, '...sono stato piu volte a Genova.'  He seems to have spent more time there than in any other Italian city save Mantua and Rome. Returning from Spain to Italy early in 1604 he sailed by the shortest route between the Iberian and the Italian peninsulas. His port of landing was the one where he had been instructed to recoup the extraordinary expenses, incurred during the previous year, of his mission on behalf of the Duke of Mantua to the Court of Philip III.

A RECENT examination of Gerard David's Justice of Cambyses panels in Bruges by means of infared reflectography now makes it possible to clarify the relationship between these works and their associated drawings in the Stadelsches Institut, Frankfurt. The drawings in question are on the recto and verso of the same sheet. On the recto, in addition to a study of a young girl, is a male head which coresponds to that of an onlooker at the left of the King Camyses in the Flaying of Sisamnes (Figs. 42 & 43).

In 1974 the late Charles de Tolnay published a previously unknown sheet of drawings, No. 125604 in Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, Rome (Figs. 48, 49). The recto contains sketches of a male and a female head by Michelangelo, to which were added two figure studies by another hand. The verso contains further studies, none of which is by Michelangelo.

AMONG Guercino's first public commissions are the three altarpieces painted in c. 1613-15 for the parish church of S. Sebastiano at Renazzo di Cento, between Centi and Finale di Modena. The old church was demolished in the eighteenth century to make way for the present structure which was built over the original site to the designs of the Bolognese architect Carlo Francesco Dotti who began work in 1745. Since only four drawings have been previously related to these altar-pieces it seemed worthwhile to publish here another two which have only recently come to light.

PIETRO LONGHI (1702-82) was a prolific and elegant draughtsman - indeed his drawings are more delicate in touch than many of his accepted paintings - but those drawings that have survived are mostly concentrated in the Museo Correr in Venice (where there are nearly 150), and in other collections they are rare. In the printroom at Berlin there are nine, all apparently from the same source (perhaps the same album or sketchbook) as those in Venice; but apart from these, I know of very few that have been identified.