The Getty Museum's painting of bird-hunting on the Venetian lagoon (Fig. 1) has been the subject of much discussion since its reappearance in Italy in 1944. It is generally accepted as an early work of Vittore Carpaccio,l and has a provenance that can be traced back only to the first part of the nineteenth century when it was in the collection of Cardinal Fesch. It subsequently moved through the collections of the Marchese Gian Paolo Campana and Camillo Benucci and was rediscovered in Rome in 1944 by Andrea Busiri-Vici.2 It was cleaned and restored by Carlo Matteuci at this time,3 and was exported from Italy in 1950, after which it entered a Swiss collection. The Getty Museum purchased it in 1979.

In a seminal article published in 1970 Alessandro Ballarin announced that he was shortly to publish a book on the drawings of Girolamo Romanino. Although no such book has appeared, Ballarin was evidently concerned about the state of affairs in this field, the two most systematic surveys - both published in 1965 - being somewhat inadequate.2 Brief and valuable discussions of the problem had already been aired before Ballarin's essay, which concerned three drawings by Palma Vecchio, Lotto and Romanino, but his announcement seems to have inhibited any further broad investigations.3 Indeed, the most recent contributions to the subject are short notes on previously unknown sheets and entries in exhibition catalogues.4 The purpose of this two-part article is to outline Romanino's career as a draughtsman for the first time. No comprehensive catalogue raisonne is here attempted: only preparatory or fully documented drawings will be discussed, including recent attributions and previously over- looked evidence, in order to construct a plausible chronology for Romanino's graphic oeuvre and to consider some major changes in his working methods.

The purpose of this note is to draw attention to a small but not insignificant marginal detail in Marcantonio Michiel's discussion of the Assumption of the Virgin in the Ovetari Chapel of the Eremitani, Padua. In her article on Michiel published in this Magazine in 1981, Jennifer Fletcher noted that a reading of Michiel's manuscript Aotizia shows that he originally gave this scene to Mantegna, but then crossed out his name, leaving the fresco 'unattributed if we read his manuscript but attributed to Pizzolo if we read Frimmel, who does not reproduce Michiel's spacing or tell us that he has gone on to a new paragraph'.' Examination of the photograph of Michiel's manuscript, however, suggests that instead of leaving the fresco unattributed, Michiel may in the end have intended to give it to Niccolo Pizzolo who, as we know from contemporary documentation, was allotted that part of the decoration in the arbitration of 1449.2

A drawing in the collection of David Lachenmann (Fig.45),l traditionally attributed to Perino del Vaga, can be identified as a modello for the fresco of Usses receiving the armour of Achilles, with the suicide of Ajax (Fig.46) by Giovanni Battista Castello, il Bergamasco, originally on the ceiling of the Sala di Ulisse in the Villa Lanzi at Gorlago,2 some ten kilometres from Bergamo. The frescoes are among the earliest, and certainly the most important, extant works dating from the period before Castello established himself in Genoa in the 1550s.3 The decoration consists of a central scene in the ceiling, fictively suspended like a tapestry, for which the Lachenmann drawing is a study. Below this are thirteen lunettes of scenes from the story of Ulysses, separated by piers with twelve pendentives decorated with the Muses, Minerva and Apollo and on the walls, painted in monochrome, figures of soldiers and a Mars in five fictiveniches.4 In the mid-nineteenth century the villa was being used for agricultural purposes - the Salone was given over to silkworms warmed by a badly maintained, and consequently smoky stove - and the frescoes in the Sala di Ulisse were at risk. In order to preserve the frescoes they were given to the Comune of Bergamo and, under the supervision of the restorer Antonio Zanchi, were trans- ported and reconstituted in a room in the newly constructed Palazzo della Prefettura. An inscription records that the project was completed by 1869. Although the larger dimensions of the room in the Palazzo della Prefettura meant that changes had to be made to the original scheme,5 Castello's only surviving fresco cycle in his native region was preserved.

Several years ago I published in this Magazine the preparatory sketch for Giovanni Maria Butteri's Tuscan poets, a large chiaroscuro composition devised by Vincenzo Borghini and executed by the young Butteri under Allori's supervision. This was one of six displayed on the ephemeral monument constructed at the Porta al Prato as part of the celebration of Francesco de' Medici's wedding to Joanna of Austria in 1565.1 Since the publication of this drawing, more evidence about Butteri's composition and about the monument itself has come to light. It is now known that the artist's modello for this painting is preserved at the Palazzo Rosso, Genoa (Fig.49); and there are studies in the Uffizi for the friezes set beneath the compositions celebrating Agricoltura and Disegno. In addition, the Biblioteca Comunale, Siena, possesses a detailed elevation of the monument, evidently copied by an apprentice from the original architectural studies, which have since been lost (Fig.48).; This last drawing shows clearly how the wings of the 'ricchissimo Antiporto' extended some twenty metres from the ancient city gate, at which point they turned outwards at right angles to form two facades. It corresponds exactly to Borghini's sketched plan of the monument in his festival libretto, where he indicated the disposition of the six paintings - two on the facades and four in the gallery leading to the gateway.  To this body of evidence may now be added a third drawing related to the Porta al Prato paintings.

Michael Kitson's thoughtful and stimulating review in the January issue of this Magazine (pp.28ff.) ofthe recent Poussin exhibitions in France - including the splendid one in the Grand Palais - refers at considerable length to a conviction which I reached, and then developed, as a consequence of physical juxtapositions possible after the closure of the epoch-making Poussin exhibition in the Louvre of 1960. That conviction, based on purely visual grounds, was that one of Poussin's very greatest landscapes, that in the Louvre which includes the scene of Diogenes renouncing the use of his bowl for drinking (London, Royal Academy, cat.no.70) could only have been painted towards the end of the 1650s, some ten years after the date which the text in Felibien's biography of Poussin appeared at first reading to suggest.