APART from a baptismal record of 1591, there is no evidence of Jusepe de Ribera in Spain; however, his early career in Italy is now beginning to be better understood.* A painting, recently acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is remarkable for its ingenuity of design and breadth of handling, is likely to be one of his earliest multifigured compositions to have survived (Fig.2). It provides the context for a fresh examination of Ribera's artistic development.

MUCH of the current debate about the origin and function of landscape painting has focused on the conceptual and visual similarities between landscapes and maps. This article concerns a painting which was created when the conventions of landscape and cartography were still being formed, and which has been assigned to both categories. It introduces several hitherto unpublished documents that reveal the name of the artist responsible for the painting and the specific context in which it was commissioned. From this, it is possible to draw conclusions about the painting's practical and symbolic functions, as well as its form.

THE PAINTER known as the Master of the Modena Hours from his work in a fourteenth-century Book of Hours in the Biblioteca Estense (Fig.31) is a central figure in any survey of Milanese manuscript painting of the Visconti era. Not only was he an inventive and accomplished artist, but his style can be charac- terised as combining features from the work of the preceding generation of illuminators in the service of the Visconti court and being, in turn, the basis upon which his successors drew and developed.

AMONG the sculptors active in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Italy were several members of the Baratta family. The present article concerns the family's least known member, Francesco Baratta. Born in Carrara, he was the nephew of the more famous Francesco Baratta (d. 1666), who came to Rome in 1626 and studied with Bernini. Under Bernini, the elder Francesco executed the relief of St Francis in the Rainaldi Chapel in S. Pietro in Montorio (1642-46), some sculpture in St Peter's (1647-48), and the figure representing the Rio de la Plata on the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona (1650-51). The younger Francesco was the son of Isidoro Baratta and brother of the sculptors Pietro Baratta (1668-1729 or 33), who worked mainly in Venice, and Giovanni Baratta (1670-1747), now considered one of the most talented Settecento sculptors, who was active in Florence and other cities in central and northern Italy including Genoa and Turin, and received several foreign commissions.

LEONARDO'S friend, pupil, and later assistant, Gian Giacomo Caprotti di Oreno, called Salai or Salaino, died a 'violent death' on 19th January 1524: a document of March of that year informs us that he was shot, probably by the French troops laying siege to Milan at the time.

FIVE hitherto unpublished documents in Madrid archives, all dating from between 1624 and 1629 (see Appendix), throw new light on the early career of Diego Velazquez at the Spanish court. While four of them are of mainly biographical interest, the fifth concerns a previously unknown group of portraits produced for the Marques de Montesclaros.

ALTHOUGH the collections of paintings belonging to the Dukes of Buccleuch and Queensberry still include works of exceptional importance, during the past century a number of major pictures have left the collection, eventually finding their way into a variety of museums - most notably the National Gallery, London. As a result, it is only through early inventories, many of them unpublished, that one can begin to reconstruct the full range of what was once to be seen in Montagu House, the former Buccleuch residence in London.' The core of the collection was an out- standing group of works, largely Dutch and Flemish, that had been originally acquired by George Montagu (previously Brudenell), 4th Earl of Cardigan and later 3rd Duke of Montagu and 6th Baron Montagu (1712-90), as well as his wife, Mary, and their son John Montagu, Lord Brudenell (1735-70). Their possessions, largely acquired during the 1750s, were inherited by their daughter, Elizabeth, who had married the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch in 1767. An inventory of Montagu House made c.1770, at about the time of the son's death, indicates that the collection was already sizeable and we know that it included such paintings as Rubens's Watering place (now in the National Gallery, London) as well as three first-rate pictures by Rembrandt, the Portrait of Saskia as Flora (also National Gallery), his Self- portrait (Washington National Gallery) and the Old woman reading of 1655 (still in the Buccleuch collection, at Drumlanrig Castle, Dumfriesshire).