It is well known that the paintings of the Master of Flemalle, Robert Campin, were used as sources by manuscript illuminators.' The best known examples are in the Salisbury Breviary, illuminated in Paris between 1424 and c.1460 by the Bedford workshop,2 and in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, illuminated most probably in Utrecht around 1440 by the Master of Catherine of Cleves.3 In these cases the borrowings are not repetitions of entire compositions, but show figures or groups of figures carefully integrated into miniatures which remain characteristic of the illuminators' indigenous style. The manner in which they are used suggests that they were regarded as useful and eye-catching motifs, derived from pattern-book drawings, rather than through first hand knowledge of Campin's paintings.

Almost five hundred years ago, on the evening of 22nd May 1498, a wooden scaffold was erected on the Piazza della Signoria in Florence for the public execution and burning of Savonarola and two of his followers (Fig.28). Among those who participated in this horrific spectacle was the Dominican Benedetto Pagagnotti, a man who had a special relationship to the condemned friar, as they had lived together in the same Florentine monastery. But the path on which Pagagnotti had set out, a path which led to promotion within the Church, to humanist scholarship and a life of refinement, had brought him into conflict with his fellow friar. Savonarola is remembered to this day by a plaque at the spot where he died, while Pagagnotti has been forgotten. And yet his mark is to be found in a distant, unexpected place, in the rooms of the National Gallery in London.

The changes in the appearance of the Capitoline Hill in Rome from its desolate state in the late middle ages to its gradual remodelling following Michelangelo's design - a process which took over two centuries - can be traced from only a handful of drawings and engravings.' Before the rise of 'vedutismo' in the eighteenth century, when the Grand Tour encouraged the craze for views of Rome, the celebration of Holy Years or Jubilees spurred the printing of maps and views of churches to be visited by pilgrims; but the Capitol - the centre of exclusively civic authority - did not concern them. Given the scarcity of available images of the Campidoglio during the early centuries of its transformation, the rediscovery in an English private collection of a hitherto unpublished late sixteenth- century drawing (Figs.29, 38, 40, 41 and 42) that can be added to that group is particularly welcome. Drawn in pen and ink, this spectacular and well-preserved panorama delineates the view from the Capitol to the Quirinal, seen in the distance on the left, with unusual detail and liveliness.

In an article published in this Magazine a few years ago I noted that, pedantically speaking, there exist no preparatory drawings by Jacob van Ruisdael for his paintings or etchings.1 Squared, indented or pricked drawings for transfer by his hand are unknown, and exact painted or etched copies of his sketches do not exist. Nevertheless, some of his drawings qualify as preparatory studies, while others, more or less related to his painted compositions, can rea- sonably be classified as preliminary sketches, aide-memoires or premieres pensees. Today about thirty sheets can be assigned to these less than watertight categories. An unpublished signed, black-chalk and grey-wash drawing, now in a private collection (Fig.43),' which is a carefully worked-up study used by the artist for his signed painting, dated 1653, of a Village with half-timbered houses flanking a road on a hill, at Angers (Fig.44)," augments the list. The half-timbered cottages and barns with vertical planked gables securely identify the village's location; these are distinguishing elements of the vernacular architecture of Westphalia at the border between Germany and the eastern Netherlands.' Young Jacob became familiar with the type in about 1650 when he toured the region, almost certainly with his friend and sometime collaborator Nicolaes Berchem whose father, the still-life painter Pieter Claesz., was born in Burgsteinfurt, a town in the area. The modest structures and imposing Bentheim Castle, around twenty kilometres northwest of Burgsteinfurt, as well as the region's characteristic water-mills quickly became part of Ruisdael's repertoire; he continued to use them as motifs in his landscape paintings until his last years.

The J. Paul Getty Museum recently had on loan Rembrandt's Self- portrait of 1629 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (Fig.54).' A principal purpose of exhibiting the Gardner panel amongst the Getty's Dutch paintings, which include Jan Lievens's Prince Charles Louis of the Palatinate and his tutor and Gerrit Dou's Prince Rupert and an elderly man (pendants of 1631),2 as well as Rembrandt's Man in a gorget and plumed cap of the same period (Fig.56), was to shed light on the last picture's authorship.