AMONG the unattributed architectural drawings housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum is a small but beautiful sheet (Fig.1) which appears to be a project for one of Jacopo Sansovino's most renowned buildings: the Log- getta in Piazza San Marco, Venice, designed in 1537 (Figs.3-4).'If this is indeed the case, the drawing would hold a position of some importance in Sansovino's œuvre since no other drawing certainly by him for a documented architectural project is known.2 As such the drawing would give us a hitherto unavailable insight into his work- ing methods and imagination, a better understanding of how this particular project evolved and a basis for the identification of further drawings by his hand.

ON 22nd October 1630 the Venetian Senate decided to commission a new church to be called S. Maria della Salute.'It was dedicated to the Virgin in the hope that she would intercede and save the city firom the plague that was devastating the city, just as the church of the Redentore had been commissioned dur- ing the pestilence of 1576. The site behind the Punta della Dogana was chosen in late November 1630 (Fig. 18). A com- petition for the design of the church was also held at this time, the two principal contenders being Baldisera Longhena and Antonio Fracao. On 13th April 1631 Longhena presented his submission to the Senate, reconstructed in Fig.16. His design included a monastery to house sixty conventuals to be located at the south-east of the site behind the church of the Trinità. The then existing Scuola della SS. Trinitai in the centre, adjacent to the Grand Canal, was to be demolished and rebuilt to the west. The Scuola was designed to complement the church of Trinità at the east, so that the new votive church would be flanked by buildings which together would channel the view of those approaching the Salute onto the principal façade of the church.

AN autograph project for Guarino Guarini's unexecuted church of S. Gaetano, Vicenza (1675) has recently emerged in the Archivio Generale dei Teatini, Rome (Fig.22).The drawing greatly supplements our knowledge of the Vicenza design, which was previously known only through a later engraving. The vast majority of Guarini's hundred or so surviving drawings are in Turin and document his two great commissions for the Carignano branch of the House of Savoy: the castello at Racconigi, and the Palazzo Carignano. Among the fewer than ten surviving autograph drawings for ecclesiastical commissions, the present sheet is one of only two plans recording critical early stages of the architect's design process, and is thus an important addition to Guarini's graphic corpus.

ON 7th July 1624 the Roman engraver Francesco Villa- mena (Fig.28) died suddenly as he was passing by the church of S. Maria della Pace, leaving his thirty-year-old wife Caterina with the difficult burden of providing for their five young children. Francesco died intestate, which further compounded Caterina's problems. Just over a year after her husband's death Caterina remarried, offering as dowry to her new husband Luca Morletti her share (a sixth part) of Francesco's inheritance ; Luca Morletti, in turn, took appropriate legal steps to assume formal responsi- bility and tutelage of his new family and to settle their inheritance.

IN October 1685, from a temporary retreat on the Con- tinent, Lord Wharton - described by a contemporary as 'an old and expert Parliament man, of eminent Piety and Abilities, besides a great friend of the Protestant Religion and Interest of England' - composed a brief autobiogra- phy in Latin. In it he spoke of his relations with Charles II and his successor, the then Duke of York. 'My one fur- ther ambition,' he wrote 'was to have portraits of them and their Queens (as I have had of Charles I and his Queen) and with those they have presented me painted in full length and from the life by the best painters in Eng- land and perhaps in all Europe'.

THE British Museum was established by an Act of Parliament in 1753 as a hurried response to an unprecedented crisis. The Will of Sir Hans Sloane had stipulated that his library and collection were to be offered to the nation for the very low sum of £20,000. Sloane was a physician, the author of a Natural History of Jamaica, and his library and collection arose out of his medical interests. Besides his printed books and manuscripts, his collection included numerous dried plants and stuffed animals, as well as man- made objects, together forming what were then rather well termed 'natural and artificial curiosities'. To the Sloane collection, the 1753 Act added two collections of manuscripts, those of Sir Robert Cotton and of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and the printed books of Major Arthur Edwards. These collections established the character of the institution, which was divided into three departments, of manuscripts, printed books and natural history. Ironically, these are precisely the categories that are no longer part of the British Museum: the natural history collections departed to South Kensington in the 1880s, and the library was separated in 1973, and is soon to move to St Pancras.

It has been known since Palomino that one of the high-ranking officials who befriended Velazquez during his second Roman sojourn of 1649–50 was the papal chamberlain Camillo Massimi – later to become Patriarch of Jerusalem, nuncio to Spain and a cardinal – who was one of the leading private patrons of the day and a friend of both Cassiano dal Pozzo and Poussin.'Massimi – in whom the taste of a man of letters was combined with the connoisseurship of an amateur painter – not only commissioned his own portrait from Velazquez, but later acquired no fewer than five other portraits by him. That the two men remained in contact after Velazquez's return to Spain has been known since 1960, when Enriqueta Harris published a letter from the painter to the prelate dated 28th March 1654, shortly after Massimi's arrival in Spain as papal nuncio and during a diplomatic imbroglio which kept him exiled outside Madrid as a persona non grata. The recent discovery of copies of two letters from Massimi to Velazquez among Massimi's letter-books in the Archivio Massimo, Rome (see the Appendix below), now helps to clarify the events of 1654 as well as indicating that the relationship of the two men was maintained until at least 1659, the year before the artist's death.

IN 1834 William IV presented the British Museum with a fine classical Venus of the Capitoline type (BM 1578; Figs.74, 76- 79). On its arrival, the statue was first placed in the Central Saloon, then removed to the First Graeco-Roman Room and finally deposited in the basement. During this gradual process of demotion, its previous history was forgotten: no provenance for it was given in Arthur Hamilton Smith's 1904 catalogue of the Greek and Roman antiquities, and the Museum's later records are no more informative on its origins.

HUGH MACANDREW, who died from cancer on 28th July 1993, epitomised the dedicated museum man, uncompromisingly devoted to the ideals of scholarship, quality and public educa- tion during a period when the conduct of art museums was undergoing rapid changes, changes to which he fell victim. His legacies are the sound acquisitions he made for the Ashmolean Museum and the National Gallery of Scotland, the scrupulous catalogues he produced or supervised of their collections and the elegant articles he published.

CECIL GOULD, who died after a mercifully short illness on 7th April, was a scholar associated particularly with high renais- sance Italian painting, but his scholarly and cultural interests were much wider - of, indeed, impressive width. He was keenly interested in sculpture and had considerable knowledge of archi- tecture, extending to that of the Middle East and India. His reading took in Gibbon and Saki and the novels of Ivy Compton- Burnett, one of his friends. Music always meant much to him; his profound, informed taste ranged from Bach to Britten, with a fondness for opera and a special fondness for Wagner.