INCREASING attention has been given in recent decades to issues of workshop practice in early Netherlandish paint- ing. With advances in infra-red photography and, more recently, reflectography, important information continues to emerge from beneath the painted surfaces of Nether- landish panels.  Archival research has revealed equally provocative evidence, evoking an ever-more complex pic- ture of the life within painters' ateliers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

A SERIES of rare and fascinating visual documents relating to the history of S. Maria Maggiore, Rome, in the early eighteenth century has recently come to light in the basil- ican archive: five illuminated manuscripts, choir books scored for the liturgy of Holy Week and dating from the pontificate of Clement XI Albani (1700-21).1 The five leather-bound volumes, bearing the titles Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Secundum Lucam or Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Secundam Matthaeum, are not profusely illus- trated. Within the texts themselves, in fact, the only dec- oration consists of seven historiated capitals, pen and ink drawings representing scenes from the Passion of Christ. Preceding the text of each of the five manuscripts, how- ever, is a richly coloured full-page illuminated frontispiece.

IT may be useful to give here a brief account of the statutes of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno which were in force at the time of the election of the members scheduled below. The statutes were drawn up in the second half of the sixteenth century, and, in general, were not radically altered until a reform of 1784.

IN THE 166 years since Delacroix exhibited his Scenes des Massacres de Scio at the Salon of 1824 historians have not established precisely where he painted it. According to Th6ophile Silvestre, writing in 1855, it was 'fait a la diable dans un petit atelier humide du quartier de la Sorbonne'; Eugeine de Mirecourt claimed a year later that Delacroix had 'un atelier sombre, humide, ouvert aux souffles de la bise' in the rue des Magons-Sorbonne (now Champollion; 'Massons' in Fig. 12); and in 1880 Delacroix was reported by his former assistant Gustave Lassalle-Bordes to have told him he had begun his picture 'dans une chapelle en riparation (a" la Sorbonne, je crois)'. Nothing of significance was added until 1938, when Andre Joubin, editor of Delacroix's journal and correspond- ence, published a manuscript note by Leon Riesener, the artist's cousin, stating that the Massacres was executed 'dans un atelier situ e'place Saint-Michel; l'atelier etait une des chapelles de cdtd d'une vieille iglise.' Puzzled as to which church in that area Riesener could have meant, Joubin proposed, with strict (and under- standable) reservations, St-Julien-le-Pauvre. In 1981, having considered all these accounts, I concluded that the studio was most likely to have been located in the rue des Magons, and, finding no evidence of a church having been in the street at the relevant period, added that Delacroix might have used the chapel of one of the colleges thereabouts.'

IN 1987 the first in a series of exhibitions on Van Gogh's taste in the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam, focused on an English painting, God Speed! by the American-born George Henry Boughton (1833-1905). The subject of the picture (Fig.14) is the pilgrims setting out for Canterbury, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.' In the centre of the painting a young woman is filling two pilgrims' water-flasks, while to the left are three more women sitting and standing around a well; on the right a Franciscan monk kneels in prayer behind a blossoming bush. In the distance lies the city the pilgrims have left behind.