IN HIS MAGISTERIAL survey of English medieval sculpture, Lawrence Stone lavished praise on a fragmentary statue of the Virgin and Child in Winchester Cathedral (Fig. 1). Describing it as 'one of the major achievements of medieval art', he lamented that such an 'exquisitely sensitive carving' was 'without any parallel in this country', concluding, 'it is a tragic indication of our losses by destruction and neglect that only this fragmentary piece survives of the work of an artist who must have been the outstanding genius of his generation'. However, a large number of other images still remaining at Winchester Cathedral can, in fact, be assigned to the sculptor of the Virgin and Child, and the whole group can also be firmly associated with one of the most important monuments of the late middle ages, the 'Great Screen' of Winchester Cathedral (Fig.3), whose original programme is here reunited.

ALTHOUGH THE SMALL terracotta bust of a laughing boy in the Royal Collection (Fig.29) is by any standards a virtuoso work both in its startling realism and in its technical perfection, it has attracted little attention from historians of Italian renaissance sculpture. This neglect is partly due to the fact that it has never been prominently displayed, and partly because of the difficulties involved in identifying its subject and author. The results of recent conservation and technical examination now provide a more secure foundation for future research, and lend some weight to the hypothesis put forward by Helen Dow in 1960 that the bust is by Guido Mazzoni and may represent Henry VIII as a child.

WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT of the Second Empire in December 1852, an entirely new cast of administrative charac-ters entered the French art scene. Although many of them were of the same generation as the Romantic painters and sculptors whose relationships with the state had been so thorny under Louis Philippe, and some were old Saint- Simonians of 1830, artists now had to adjust to them in their new rbles in order to be able to supplicate effectively for the government commissions on which they so often depended for a living. This was particularly true of sculptors, whose public work was frequently tied to the architectural projects of which Napoleon III was especially fond. The new administration included baron Haussmann, appointed prefect of the Seine immediately after Louis Napoleon's accession, the comte de Nieuwerkerke, who became director general of Imperial Museums and was later director of Fine Arts, and Frederic de Mercey, director of Fine Arts between 1855 and 1860. At the top of this administrative pyramid was the emperor himself, who took a passionate interest in the modernisation of Paris and especially in the development of the Louvre, to which his own palace of the Tuileries was attached. As Alain Plessis has noted, 'for artists, particularly, success depended upon the emperor, who wanted to make himself their protector and Maecenas, and upon all those officials who distributed state prizes and commissions'.

ALTHOUGH John Flaxman frequently drew inspiration from Homer, Aeschylus and Dante for both sculptures and drawings, and illustrated published editions of their works, he seldom - as David Irwin has pointed out - illustrated works by later authors. Only three illustrations to Milton by him were published - in Hayley's 1808 edition of Cowper's translation of the Latin and Italian poems. In 1826, however, he received a commission for a marble relief with a subject from Milton's Paradise Lost. Irwin associated this commission with one drawing and two plaster models (Figs.49, 50, 52), but assumed that the sculpture itself was never executed. However, a finished marble relief of Satan's flight from paradise which corresponds closely to these plaster models has recently been identified in a Swedish private collection (Figs.48 and 51).

WITHIN the sculpted oeuvre of Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876- 1918), there are several portraits, including those of his father, grandfather, sister, doctor (Professor Gosset) and Baudelaire – the latter done from photographs, since Duchamp-Villon could not have known the poet, who died in 1867. One of his most striking and monumental portrait heads is that of Maggy, executed in 1912. The large plaster in the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris (Fig.55) is one of several versions of the sculpture. The prominent nose and chin, the bulging forehead and deep ridge across the brow, the protruding eyes, cylindrical neck and smooth skull make Maggy an unforgettable image. It is well known that the sitter was the wife of Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (1884–1974), painter, poet and contributor to Dada publications. He had been a friend of the sculptor and of his brothers, Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Villon, from 1909 until shortly before the First World War. His collaboration with Duchamp-Villon on the 'Maison Cubiste' of 1912 is well documented.

THE SCULPTURAL SCREEN by Henry Moore on the Time-Life Building in New Bond Street, London (Figs.61, 67 and 69) is a familiar and well documented piece of sculpture, as are the four maquettes submitted by Moore to the architect, Michael Rosenauer, in March 1952. Less well-known is the background to the selection of Moore as sculptor, but letters and photographs in the Rosenauer Archive, now in the Stadtmuseum, Linz-Nordico, Linz, Austria, make it clear that his name was not among those originally considered for the commission. Indeed, in January 1952, only three months before Moore produced his maquettes, it appears to have been almost a foregone conclusion that the job would be given without competition to Maurice Lambert, who, in the event, had to be content with the lesser commission to model the near abstract group of the American Eagle above the main entrance.

MEMORABLE SHOWS OF new work by key Minimalist practitioners continue to proliferate, notably by Donald Judd (Fig.70), Carl Andre (Fig.71) and, currently, by Sol LeWitt, to mention only the most recent in London. They attest to the continuing vitality of the major protagonists of this movement and to its role as a touchstone for much of the most significant art of the past twenty years. In view of the resurgence of intense critical debate on the subject, the arrival of the first full-scale study could not be more timely. Kenneth Baker's Minimalism is, however, far from what might have been anticipated, given both the dearth of major scholarly publications to date, and the richness and pertinency of recent theoretical reappraisals.