OVER the past three decades a number of important manu- scripts and fragments with miniatures by Simon Bening (1483-1561), the last major figure in the history of Flemish illumination, have come to light. To these may now be added a fragmentary Book of Hours in the collection of the Duke of Norfolk at Arundel Castle, Sussex. Because it has been noted only in the private catalogues of the collection of the Dukes of Norfolk, scholars have hitherto been unaware of the book's existence.

WHILE previously known Byzantine ivories which disappear from sight after the dispersal of private collections occasionally resurface in public museums, the discovery of pieces unreported in the standard corpus of objects in this medium is a rare occur- rence. Even in Greece, where one might expect to find ivories that escaped the attention of nineteenth- and early twentieth- century dealers and scholars, only two previously unknown examples have been recorded since the Second World War. The appearance of a hitherto unpublished ivory is, then, something of an event, the more so in that the piece is indubitably authentic and arguably an important link between the icons and boxes that constitute the two main series of Byzantine work in ivory and bone.

CESARE NEBBIA (c.1536-c.1614) is best known for his long and steady productivity in Rome in the service of a series of popes.* Following the guidance of his teacher Girolamo Muziano, he worked for Gregory XIII (1572-85) on the Gregorian Chapel in St Peter's; he then supervised almost all the decorative enter- prises commissioned by Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), including the interiors of the Lateran and Vatican palaces, the Scala Santa and the Cappella Sistina in S. Maria Maggiore. During the papacy of Clement VIII (1592-1605) he designed the cartoons for the mosaics of the evangelists Matthew and Mark for the pendentives of St Peter's. Outside Rome he played a leading r61e in one of the great undertakings of the late-sixteenth century, the decoration of the cathedral in his native town of Orvieto, of which only the altar-pieces, now in the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo are extant. Very little, however, of Nebbia's work for private patrons is known, with a few exceptions such as the decoration of the Cappella Sforza in S. Maria Maggiore, and the altar-piece of the Birth of the Virgin, commissioned by Sforza Monaldeschi della Cervara in 1582 for Orvieto Cathedral and now also in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo there.

commissioned by Sforza Monaldeschi della Cervara in 1582 for Orvieto Cathedral and now also in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo there.

ONE of the most ambitious Grand Tour portraits of the 1730s is surely Antonio David's whole-length, originally at Redlynch, of the Hon. Stephen Fox of 1732, which suggests that the sitter's time in Rome was dedicated rather to hunting in the Campagna than to the ordained routine of sightseeing. Such pictures as this - or that of George Lewis Coke of 1735 at Melbourne -nonethe- less lay behind the spectacular portraits of young travellers painted by Batoni a generation later. David, like other painters in Rome, worked not only for those on the Grand Tour but also for the exiled KingJames III (the Old Pretender) and members of his Court. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the as yet unidentified sitter of the portrait of 1728 at Corehouse (Fig.41) was a Scottish adherent of the Stuarts. The picture, with its restrained colour and painterly detail, well exemplifies the quali- ties of a key figure in Roman portraiture of the second quarter of the Settecento, and the pattern of patronage it implies offers a hint that the development of Grand Tour portraiture owed more to the Jacobite presence in Rome than is generally admitted.

THE recent exhibition of the work of Allan Ramsay in Edinburgh and London provided the opportunity for a detailed review of the picture frames associated with the artist's portraits. Of the sixty-five paintings in the show, perhaps twenty were in their original frames and another fifteen in frames of the period. It is possible to group the frames into a number of distinctive types and to associate at least one of these (Fig.50), a variation on French rococo frames, with Ramsay himself, at least to the extent of suggesting that it was his preferred style when sending portraits out ready framed. It is also possible to identify Isaac Gosset as the framemaker most closely associated with the artist.