WRITING from an enviable vantage point in the mid- sixteenth century, Vasari had no difficulty in pinpointing the artists who had changed the course of Italian painting. Giotto had opened the way in the years around 1300 by overturning the 'maniera greca'. But it was to Masaccio that Vasari ascribed the crucial change: Masaccio, he wrote, 'entirely supplanted Giotto's manner of treating heads, drapery, architecture, nudes, colour, and fore- shortening, which he created anew, bringing into light the modern style that has been followed ever since by all artists'. The work Vasari had in mind was, of course, the cycle of frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, and he went on to note that 'all the most celebrated sculptors and painters who have come after Masaccio have become excellent and illustrious by studying in this chapel: that is Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, Fra Filippo [Lippi], Filippino [Lippi], who completed it, Alesso Baldovinetti, Andrea del Castagno, Andrea del Verrocchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Mariotto Albertinelli, and the most divine Michelangelo'.

THE DECISION to reconstruct Basel Town Hall in 1503 may be regarded as symbolic of the city's sense of enhanced prestige after its accession to the Swiss Confederation in 1501, and of' the citizens' efforts to throw off episcopal domination. Since the middle of the fourteenth century the city council had been successful in gaining basic political rights at the bishop's expense. It was against this historical background that the rear structure on the second floor of the town hall was built, and the Great Council chamber created between 1517 and 1521. The Great Council, which had previously met in the refectories of the Dominicans and the Augustinians, used the town hall for the first time on 21st March 1521. On that day the Great and Small Council jointly repudiated the bishop's authority over the city.

AMONG the most impressive romanesque wall paintings in England are those of St Mary's Church, Kempley (Gloucester- shire). Remarkably complete, the apocalyptic scheme in the chancel is justly famous, though further painting of the same date (c. 1130-40) on the east wall of the nave (Fig.33) - greatly clarified by conservation work since 1978 - has received little scholarly attention. Before 1978 the most notable remains of painting visible here were a pattern of counterchanged triangles above the chancel arch, and, to the south, part of a figure within a painted niche, with, above, obscure traces of a subject identified by Tristram as a fifteenth-century LastJudgement. Now, however, the removal of later limewash and of an abutting seventeenth- century ceiling beam has revealed the full extent of this register of original painting at the top of the wall (Figs.33 and 35). Elucidation of the subject of this painting, through reference to contemporary liturgical drama, and of other fragmentary re- mains on the same wall, show that the scheme here focused on a sculptured rood over the chancel arch, forming an introduction to the programme in the chancel.

THE north-east (right) transept of the lower church at Assisi (Fig.51) is often known as the St Elizabeth chapel, but there has been some confusion in the literature as to its original dedication. It contains in one corner Simone Martini's frescoed altar-piece of the Virgin with two royal saints and its attendant row of saintly onlookers, while Cimabue's frescoed Maestà and the Giottesque Infancy of Christ cycle are found in the vault. Fra Ludovico da Pietralunga in his Descrizione della Basilica di San Francesco, written c.1570-80, informs us that under Simone's altar-piece, which he calls a 'mezza Madonna', was an altar 'dedicata a Sa[n]ta Elisabet et a San Josephe, ornata con grata di Ferro, dove sotto gli e sepolto il Beato Frate Iohanni Anglico', and that the other altar, to the right of the door into the Magdalen chapel and under the Cimabue, was dedicated to the Immaculate Conception. This account has been taken as evidence that the dedication to Sts Elizabeth and Joseph was the original one, that the St Elizabeth in question might have been the mother of John the Baptist, and that the dedication could therefore be iconographically connected with the Infancy of Christ cycle above, which contains scenes of the Visitation and the Nativity. Although some scepticism has rightly been expressed about these suggestions, it has not-hitherto been noted that the documentary evidence makes it clear that the altar was in fact originally dedicated to only one saint.

ANDRE CHASTEL, who died at the age of 77 on 18th July 1990, literally dominated art history in France for four memorable decades. His exceptional intellectual brilliance, his vast literary culture, his ironic openmindedness, were universally respected and admired. More than most of his colleagues he had a vivid curiosity about modern art, including film, but he was never swayed by fashion. Very much present on the Parisian scene, always aware of new trends, he nevertheless stood firmly apart from the notorious quarrels between French intellectuals. 'J'appartenais à la génération naïve et de bonne volonté dont la maxime, après tant de traverses, allait être: construire, à la différence du mot d'ordre inverse que la 'dialectique' a mis à la mode', he wrote with candid sarcasm in 1978. He had an aristocratic belief in the value of tradition, without being doctrinaire. Passionately fas- cinated by the great masters of the Italian renaissance - above all by Leonardo - he regretted in French academic culture an absence of sensuous response. He never forgot that French intel- lectual tradition encompasses not only Descartes and Voltaire, but also Montaigne and Rabelais.