LEONARDO'S portrait of Ginevra de' Benci in the National Gallery, Washington (Fig. 1) is usually dated 1474 on the supposition that it was made to commemorate her marriage to Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini in that year. Study of the device painted on the back of the picture, however, suggests that the portrait may well have been commissioned not by Ginevra's husband but by the Venetian poet and humanist Bernardo Bembo, whose platonic love affair with the sitter was one celebrated outcome of his embassies to Florence in 1475–76 and 1478–80.

ROSSO's career in Italy is relatively well-documented. Four contracts are already known for him, compared to only one for Andrea del Sarto and none for Jacopo Pontormo, to take just two of his Florentine contemporaries. Nevertheless, the publication here (see the Appendix below) of the contract and other documents relevant to Rosso's Deposition from the Cross in the church of S. Lorenzo in Sansepolcro (Fig. 10), helps to create a richer context for his first independent project following the Sack of Rome. Previous interpretations of the Sansepolcro picture have not treated its subject in a sympathetic and sustained way. With the documents in hand, I would like to consider how the painter, under contract, set about creating a memorable religious image for a patron whose expectations can, at least in part, be reconstructed.

ROSSO's French period remains obscure: even the Galerie Frangois Premier, which has been so much discussed, continues to present unresolved problems. A recently discovered painting suggests a new approach to reconstructing a lost element of the Galerie - the pair of oval pictures by Rosso which were incorporated into the end walls to east and west. Before moving on to this question, however, a new piece of graphic evidence for Rosso's activity may be briefly discussed.

THE second edition of Vasari's Lives, published in 1568, contains an expanded life of Rosso listing the artist's works in France, among them a 'libro di notomie' which he had intended to publish. Vasari further remarks of this book that 'there are some pieces by his hand in our book of drawings'.  This brief mention is the earliest known reference to Rosso's lost book of anatomy and the one on which later references are ultimately based. Rosso's book may be seen as belonging to a tradition of sixteenth-century Italian artists writing on anatomy- a primarily unsuccessful one in the sense that all these projects were either left unfinished or lost.

GIOVANNI BELLINI'S Coronation of the Virgin in the Museo Civico in Pesaro (Fig.59) is universally regarded as a major turning point in the master's career, with its monumental figural conception, its spatially unified central composition, and its medium approximating Netherlandish oil technique. However, scant attention has been paid in the literature to the original location of the undated and undocumented work. Early citations of the altar-piece, either unpublished or overlooked, serve to establish clearly the original site as the high altar of S. Francesco, Pesaro (now S. Maria delle Grazie) and also to suggest a more specific context for the interpretation of stylistic and iconographic features than has previously been available.

VASARI tells us that in 1528 he made a trip to Borgo Sansepolcro in order to see Rosso Fiorentino, who had arrived in that city the year before, fleeing from the sack of Rome. It was evidently while he was in Sansepolcro that Vasari also met the painter Raffaellino del Colle, a former pupil of Giulio Romano in Rome, and Cristofano Gherardi who, in 1528, was completing an apprenticeship under Raffaellino. The meeting initiated lasting friendships, especially between Vasari and Gherardi, and provided the basis for a working relationship in which Vasari called on Raffaellino and Gherardi to assist him with various decorative projects. In 1536 they both travelled to Florence to help Vasari with the preparations for the entry of Charles V, and in 1545 were invited to assist with the decoration of the refectory at Monteoliveto in Naples (although Gherardi was un-able to accept the invitation because of illness). The following year both contributed to the decoration of the Sala dei Cento Giorni in the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome. Gherardi, who eventually became Vasari's chief assistant, also worked with the master in Bologna (1539-40), Venice (1541-42), Cortona (1554), and Florence where his involvement with the decorations in the Quartiere degli Elementi in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence was cut short by his death in 1556.