UNLIKE his compatriots Guido Reni, Lanfranco, and Guercino, Domenichino devoted the majority of his career to painting frescoes, which is why the number of his known easel pictures increases so rarely. Moreover, because he never organised an active studio in the way Reni did, and because he was a slow, deliberate worker who had little interest in copying, autograph, partially-autograph and authorised replicas by him are extremely rare.' Domen- ichino was much more prolific as a draughtsman; but since the holdings of drawings in his Roman and Neapolitan studios remained unusually intact, eventually finding a permanent home in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, very few sheets remain to be discovered. In the circum- stances of such rarity, it is worthwhile to call attention to some unpublished paintings and drawings by Domenichino and to some recently discovered documents; it also seems timely on this occasion to append comments on a variety of issues that have arisen since publication of my mono- graph on the artist seven years ago.

ON 11th April 1624 Virginio Cesarini, cameriere segreto to Urban VIII, poet and scholar, member of the most pres- tigious of Rome's literary and scientific academies, the Accademia dei Lincei, close friend not only of the new Pope but also of Galileo Galilei, Giovanni Ciampoli, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Agostino Mascardi and G.B. Marino - in brief one of the brightest stars in the Roman intellectual firmament - died at the age of twenty-eight. In accordance with his standing in papal and civic circles, he was given a public funeral and then, with the mutual agreement of the Pope and Roman civic authorities, a memorial was erected in a location normally reserved for men who had commanded troops in defence of the city of Rome, the Sala dei Capitani of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill. The hand- some wall monument (Fig. 17) with a bust of the poet at its summit has a long and florid inscription written by Giovanni Ciampoli which explains that in this way 'the Capitol might be decorated no less with the glory of letters than with the glory of arms'.

WORK on the catalogue raisonne of Flemish paintings belonging to the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, has led to the re-assessment of a panel of exceptional quality, hitherto kept in the museum's store, which measures 174 by 114 cm. and represents the Annunciation (Inv. 1944; Fig.26). To the left of the kneeling Virgin, on the lectern, it bears an easily legible monogram and date: 'HB 1609' (Fig.27). On the basis of this monogram the panel had been attributed to the Antwerp painter Hendrick van Balen (1575-1632) and it was entered in the museum's inventory under this name in c. 1928.1 Comparison with securely attributed works by Van Balen, such as his Annunciation of 1611 in the church of St Paul at Antwerp which is close to the Moscow panel in subject, date, size and purpose, makes this attribution difficult to uphold. Van Balen's dark shadows, areas of saturated colour and open brushwork show a style very different from that of the light, sleek, shining painting in Moscow. The latter represents an earlier phase of European art, and its author should belong to an older generation. For all these reasons the attribution to Van Balen was rejected, but suggesting another name proved difficult because of the monogram.

AFTER the symposium on Emilian painting held at the National Gallery, Washington D.C. inJanuary 1987 at which I presented six small portraits of blind sitters, two of which I attributed to Annibale Carracci, I began to receive an endless stream of information: portraits of the dead, the almost dead, the blind, the ecstatic or the merely thoughtful with their eyes lowered in the act of meditation, began to pile up on my desk. These 'clinical cases' to which I have been subjected reveal an unsuspected lean- ing to the pathological among the art-historical community - one which might perhaps be susceptible to Freudian analysis. However, this would not greatly benefit our understanding of the Carracci, for the link between these images consists only in a tendency to spy on the deformities, abnormalities and handicaps of the sitters.

GUERCINO'S Samson taken by the Philistines (Fig.34) painted by the artist for Cardinal Jacopo Serra in 1619 is one of the more striking Italian baroque paintings to have gone on show in recent years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.' It well illustrates the artist's so-called 'pre-Roman' style, that is the highly personal, somewhat unconventional method of painting that typified his work in Cento before his departure for Rome in 1621. Only one drawing, a composition study in the Teylers Museum at Haarlem, has so far been connected with the picture. Another has come to light in the Gabinetto dei Disegni of the Uffizi, Florence, which helps explain the evolution of the com- position (Fig.33): it is placed among the drawings by Ludovico Carracci, but Guercino's authorship, I hasten to point out, was already recognised by Anna Maria Petrioli Tofani and Mario Di Giampaolo.

IN THE recent exhibition Civiltai Napoletana del Seicento held in Naples, 1984-85, Aniello Falcone emerged as one of the more prominent personalities in the Neapolitan artistic scene during the twenty or so years immediately preceding the plague of 1655. He is best known as a battle-painter, but was also a competent academic painter and a distinguished draughtsman - especially in red chalk - who was extremely sensitive to a whole range of stylistic influences. His skills as a history painter can be seen in the series of frescoes of the History of Moses in the Villa Roomer (now Rodino di Miglione), at Barra. These were first glimpsed and attributed to Falcone by Anthony Blunt in 1969, and they came to my attention during the preparations for the exhibition of Neapolitan painting in London of 1982. In her brilliant study of Andrea and Onofrio de Lione of 1976, Magda Novelli Radice challenged the attribution to Falcone and suggested Andrea de Lione as the author; but at the time of writing she only knew a detail of the Battle from the photograph published by Blunt, and on seeing the frescoes themselves agreed with the attribution to Falcone. Along with the frescoes, Novelli Radice also attributed to de Lione two Battle scenes - in the museum at Burghausen and in the Haussmann collection in Berlin - as well as the drawing said to portray the head of Masaniello, in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. These should all be returned to Falcone. More recently, Nicola Spinosa, while dis- cussing the frescoes as close to de Lione, has expressed doubts in favour of Falcone.

DOMENICO PIOLA'S biographer, C.G. Ratti, wrote in 1769 that paintings by Piola (1627-1703) in Genoese houses, particularly those belonging to the nobility, were so numerous that it would tire any writer to list them ('son tanti da stancare qualunque penna'). So as not to offend the critics, Ratti cited two paintings, one de- picting the 'Chariot of the Sun with the seasons, the hours, the winds, and various poetic images' that decorated the facade of the Palazzo Brignole on the via Garibaldi, and the other, 'The Royal Banquet given by Maometto IV, Sultan of Constantinople, for Giovanni Agostino Durazzo', in the Palazzo Marcello Durazzo on the via Balbi.