Borromini prided himself on his originality. Into his first independent commission, S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, he packed 'all he knew', to produce 'an extraordinary design, with nothing copied or borrowed from any architect, but founded on the antique and on the best architectural authors' (Fig. 1). To his surprise, the church received an immediately favourable reception. Visitors from foreign parts, Germans, Flemings, French, Italians, Spaniards, even Indians asked for the plan, but Borromini declined to satisfy their requests. Even though his Trinitarian patrons urged him to have a plan printed for his own financial advantage, he avoided the task. This was partly due to secretiveness, partly to contempt for the idea of provincial visitors taking a plan of S. Carlo home and imitating it: 'and I for certain would never have entered this profession only to become a copyist'.'

My lengthy researches about Carlo Ceresa's life and works led in due course to discoveries, restorations and to the revealing exhibition held at Bergamo in 1983. More recently, I have examined this self-taught painter's use of sources and his links with Carraccesque currents in northern Italy.' Here I would like to re-examine some chapels decorated by Ceresa in the light of new documentary evidence, as well as to consider afresh his activity as a portrait painter adding some previously unpublished examples.

A private archive in the Marches has yielded two hitherto unpublished letters by the Florentine artist Andrea Boscoli (see the Appendix below). Both are addressed to Antonio Maria Vinci, a gentleman-scholar and poet in Fermo,' and were sent by Boscoli from Florence not long before his death in 1608. The first is dated 3rd December 1605; the second is undated, but it is clear that it was sent only slightly later. Written with a lively turn of phrase and confidential tone, they are of particular interest in that they contribute to our knowledge of Boscoli's cultural ties.with Fermo where, only a few years earlier, he had painted the altar-piece of the Circumcision (Fig.35) for the Chapel of the Sacrament in the Cathedral.2 His decorations of another chapel there unfortunately no longer survive,3 but in 1971, fragments of a fresco cycle illustrating the Life of the Virgin came to light in the church of S. Maria Piccinina in Fermo which have subsequently been restored and placed in the Pinacoteca Comunale.4

Such are the riches of the great European collections of drawings that - despite the scrutiny over many years of connoisseurs and specialists - the possibility still remains of finding under wrong attributions interesting and previously overlooked examples by some of the greatest artists. The two drawings by Annibale Carracci from the British Museum presented here, though always placed in the main series of mounted drawings, were previously classified under different names, one as Guercino, the other as Simon Vouet.

Studies of the Dal Pozzo family have tended to concentrate on Cassiano Dal Pozzo (1588-1657),' often treating him somewhat in isolation from his family of origin, the Dal Pozzo of Piedmont, counts of Reano and Ponderano, marquises of Voghera and, from 1670 onwards, princes Della Cisterna. This family flourished in the Turin and Biella regions from the Cinquecento until the extinction of the male line with Carlo Emanuele Dal Pozzo (1789-1864),2 producing a whole series of collectors and connoisseurs, some of them figures of exceptional interest and importance. The archives of the Dal Pozzo della Cisterna are very rich in documents for the family's collecting activities, including a large number of inventories from 1644 to 1877, as well as contracts, account books and correspondence with artists.

An interesting drawing has recently come to light in a private collection in Rome, showing an angel supporting a candle hung with the papal insignia and bearing an inscribed dedication to the Lateran Basilica (Fig.46).' Drawn in black ink with grey wash on lightly prepared white paper, the sheet measures 37 by 23.5 cm. and has been slightly shorn along the right edge, resulting in the loss of the tip of the angel's wing. When the drawing was removed from the backing to which it had previously been pasted, two inscriptions were revealed (Fig.48), of which the first, which may possibly be in a seventeenth-century hand, reads 'Del Mochi Scultore', and the second, possibly eighteenth-century, 'Design for a piece of Plate/ Orig'.