Although Desiderio da Settignano is one of the most admired Florentine sculptors of the Quattrocento, he is also one of the least documented. Few significant facts are known concerning his life and works,' none of his extant sculptures may be precisely dated, nor has any been securely documented to a specific patron. New documents published here (see the Appendix below) establish a commencement date and patron for Desiderio's wooden statue of Mary Magdalen in S. Trinita, Florence (Figs. 4, 5, 6 and 7), and mention his production of a terracotta bust of Christ. This archival material also discloses the involvement of an unexpected and important figure - Annalena Malatesta, founder of the Florentine convent which bears her name. In addition, findings from the statue's recent restoration prompt a reconsideration of contemporary claims that this work was finished by another sculptor.

In May 1988 I recognised the relief of a nude woman with a ram in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich (Inv. 2867; Fig. 13) as a late work by Antonio Minello. Endorsing my discovery, Dr Peter Volk, the museum's curator of sculpture, changed the label of the relief to Antonio Minello, Venice, ca. 1525', leaving me to justify the reattribution to a wider public. Not long afterward, there came to my attention, in a private collection in New York, an unpublished Bust of a young woman attributable to the same hand and span of years (Fig.21). Each of these works significantly enhances our understanding of Paduan and Venetian sculpture at a moment of particular efflorescence in the third decade of the sixteenth century.

On 3lst June 1559 Henry II of France was mortally wounded in a tournament held in Paris to celebrate the peace treaty of Le Cateau-Cambresis and died ten days later.' His distraught consort, Catherine de Medicis, immediately set about organising a number of projects to commemorate her husband and the Valois dynasty. These included the creation of the Valois tombs at St Denis,2 and the erection of an equestrian statue of the king.3 The queen's largely Italian choice of sculptors was characteristic of the direction of her artistic patronage.

Wile the workshop practices of portrait painters in eighteenth-century England have received some attention, little has been written about the procedures employed by portrait sculptors or about how these conditioned the use of conventions and the representation of individual likeness.' By examining a problematic series of busts commissioned for the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, this article will outline the diverse practices involved in the production of portrait sculpture in mid-eighteenth-century England and suggest the implications these may have for understanding the operation of the sculpture trade as well as the transactions between sculptor and sitter.

Rodin was almost sixty years old at the time of his first one- man exhibition, held in Brussels in 1899, an event he contemplated with hesitation and anxiety. He had originally planned a joint show there with Puvis de Chavannes, intended to be a repetition of one held three years earlier at the Musee Rath in Geneva where he had exhibited a number of important sculptures alongside paintings by Puvis and Carriere. Both artists were friends of Rodin as members of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts.' The first substantial presentation of his works had been at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1889, when they were shown with paintings by Claude Monet on the occasion of the Paris World Exhibition that same year.

A chance discovery during restoration work on a bridge over the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam in 1986 brought to light a terracotta fragment (Fig.61), evidently from a male portrait bust, the lower part terminating in a grotesque mask. The sides are badly damaged, and the head and the shoulders are completely broken off. There is, however, a clean break at the neck, which suggests that the head and the torso were originally made as two discrete entities, and joined together only after firing.1 The fragment's importance lies, above all, in the presence of the monogram HDK which is inscribed on a knop at the top of the grotesque mask, allowing the bust to be added to the sculpted oeuvre of the architect and sculptor Hendrick de Keyser. Only two signed portraits by him, both in the Rijksmuseum, have hitherto been known: the marble portrait of Vincent Coster of 1608 (Fig.62) and a terracotta bust of 1606 possibly representing the Utrecht painter Joachim Wtewael (Fig.63).2 A third bust, portraying the celebrated burgomaster of Leiden, Adriaen van der Werff, is known from a drawing by Jan de Bisschop (Fig.64).3 On account of its documentary importance, the newly discovered fragment has also been acquired by the Rijksmuseum.

When Girolamo Rainaldi undertook the construction of S. Agnese in Agone at Giovan Battista Pamphili's request in 1652, Alessandro Algardi, fresh from the success of his Meeting of Attila and Leo the Great, was commissioned to execute a large marble altar- piece for the high altar, completing models for it before his death.l Shortly after this, in summer 1654, Domenico Guidi and Ercole Ferrata received a series of payments for producing a life-size stucco model,2 which, fashioned in Algardi's own studio in the fonderie vaticane, was pven to the Oratory of the Filippini in 1659, along with the one for the Attila relief.3 Four years earlier, in 1655, the death of Innocent X had brought the works at S. Agnese to a halt, and it was decided to abandon Algardi's project for the high altar) moving the St Agnes altar to the right arm of the church where Ercole Ferrata placed a large marble statue of the martyrdom of the saint in 1664.4 (In the accounts he presented to the Pamphili) Ferrata refers to three models for the high altar executed after 1661, which suggests that, after the abandonment of Algardi's project, the commission had initially passed to him.)5 At the same time, the nephew of the dead pope, Camillo Pamphili, promoted the execution of four marble altar-pieces destined for the lateral altars, which were completed in the course of the 1660s. Antonio Raggi carved a Death of St Cecilia (originally allocated to Giuseppe Perone), Giovanni Francesco de Rossi produced the Martyrdom of S. Alessio and, together with Ercole Ferrata, completed the St Eustace in the lions' den left unfinished by Melchiorre Caffa. Ferrata was responsible for the Stoning of S. Emeranziana, but did not complete it himself.6

A remarkably large number of sculptures made by Barbara Hepworth before the Second World War go unrecorded in any published image. They include pieces which were destroyed as well as those whose location is unknown. Using the catalogue established by Alan Bowness forJ.P. Hodin's monograph of 1961,' and checking it against some subsequent publications,2 one can calculate that there are sixteen pre-war pieces of which there appears to be no recorded reproduction (see Appendix 1). A further thirteen (see Appendix 2), though listed as unreproduced, are known from the unpublished photographs collated by the artist in the record books which she kept through her life, though these are hardly in the public domain.3 Given that Hepworth's pre-war oeuvre numbers 110 pieces, this amounts to a significant lacuna. Moreover, it is not accounted for by student work, for the published catalogue begins only with the works which Hepworth was happy to acknowledge as part of her oeuvre.4 Indeed, many of these unknown works date from the very years which most interest Hepworth's critics, the early and mid-1930s, and this ignorance may well have affected our understanding of her contribution to English sculpture at this time.