THE FRESCOES FROM the church of S. Apollonia at Mezzaratta, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, form the most important narrative cycle of the Bolognese Trecento, and are central to our understanding of the school, for they bring together the best known painters of two generations in a series of images of consistent brilliance. S. Apollonia housed a devotional confraternity which gave solace to the condemned on their way to execution at the top of the hill on which it stands, and received pilgrims to the neigh-bouring sanctuary of the Madonna del Monte. This, in turn, was near the later church of the Observant Franciscans, while a Sanctuary containing a Madonna attributed to St Luke stood on the hills to the north west, and the churches of the Madonna della Misericordia and S. Maria degli Angeli - where Giotto's polyptych adorned the high altar – were on the next road to the south. The frescoes in S. Apollonia were studied with some care by Vasari, and according to Malvasia they were also admired by Michelangelo and the Carracci; indeed, Malvasia compares Vitale de Bologna's arrangement of the Nativity around the doorway (Figs. 1-2) with Raphael's Mass at Bolsena. Yet the dating and attribution of the cycle remains problematical.

IN THE FOLLOWING note I wish to present additional evidence for the dating of the S. Ansano altar-piece of the Annunciation and flanking saints (Uffizi, Florence), an issue recently examined by Andrew Martindale in this Magazine. An inscription on the retable informs us that it was completed by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi in 1333. Ten payments made between July and December of the same year for the completion and transportation of the altar-piece have also been identified, though the date of commencement remains undetermined. Re-examination of the two documents cited by Martindale in connection with the altar-piece's execution, one of which contains the earliest extant record of payment for the work, throws new light on the question.

THE STUDY OF renaissance sculpture has suffered in certain significant ways from the scarcity of surviving preparatory drawings by sculptors of the generation before Verrocchio and Pollaiuolo. Foremost among the few survivors is the sheet of studies by Ghiberti in the Albertina for his relief of the Flagellation. The only other examples associable with known sculptural projects are the drawing for or after Jacopo della Quercia's Fonte Gaia (divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the three studies of the Virgin and Child by Antonio Rossellino on the recto and verso of a sheet in the Uffizi (Figs.17 and 18).

THE RECORDS OF the Compagnia delle Brucciate in the Florentine State Archives contain hitherto unpublished documents for the painting byJacopo del Sellaio (Fig.3 1) once in the confraternity's chapel in the church of S. Frediano in Florence. It is now possible to integrate the published and unpublished documentary material related to this chapel, also dedicated to S. Frediano, and to establish the finished form of the altar-piece. These records not only clarify the place of the S. Frediano altar-piece in the oeuvre of Jacopo d'Arcangelo del Sellaio (1441/2-1493), but also contribute to our understanding of the use of the term 'pieta' in fifteenth-century religious painting.

FRANCESCO MELZI is best known as the inheritor of Leonardo's papers and possessions, and for having transcribed Leonardo's precepts on painting for posterity; he also copied several of the master's works which have since been lost. Our knowledge of his own artistic activity, however, is particularly meagre. In 1929 Wilhelm Suida, on the basis of earlier research, put forward a list of only four paintings (one doubtful) together with one drawing, but Melzi is entirely absent from the posthumous edition of Berenson's North Italian painters of 1968. This is particularly odd considering that, more than any other associate of the master, he participated in Leonardo's years of maturity and fame at the courts of Milan, Rome and France. Also, to judge from early sources such as Lomazzo, Morigia and Mazenta, he must have left some trace of his artistic activity at Milan, however confused it may have been with Leonardo's. Don Ambrogio Mazenta, for example, described Melzi as the first pupil who 'profited greatly' in his painting from the advice of Leonardo, and to such an extent that his works, along with those of Cesare da Sesto, Bernardino Luini and Marco d'Oggiono 'came to be considered, esteemed and sold as products of Leonardo's'.

THE STUDENT OF archives and documents inevitably forms a collection of references to lost works of art the very mention of which is exciting. One such work appears in the earliest inventory of the Tribuna of the Uffizi (1589), where a miniature portrait of the Duchess Eleonora di Toledo by Giulio Clovio is recorded. The description makes clear that it was round, glazed with crystal in a vermeil case with a chain, and it appears to have been mounted to an ebony panel or frame. Other than Vasari's general mention of 'alcuni ritratti' done for Duke Cosimo de' Medici and Borghini's notice of 'alcuni ritratti mirabili' in the collection of Francesco de' Medici, no other direct record of this miniature has come to light.