Zanetto Bugatto's central place in the history of Lombard painting has long been assumed. The unusually large array of documentary material regarding his activity has been analysed to demonstrate his importance as a portraitist to the two first Sforza dukes of Milan and to illuminate the rare circumstance of his training in Rogier van der Weyden's workshop - a fact that makes him a key figure in any discussion of Netherlandish influence on Italian painting.' In the absence of any surviving signed or fully documented pictures, attempts have been made to attach his name to various, extremely diverse paintings, an exercise that has some affinities with the game of pinning the tail on the donkey. Indeed, critics have been working blindfold, guided only by often misleading assumptions about what Zanetto's painting style might have been.

Wilhelm von Bode's attribution to Francesco Botticini of the monumental Assumption of the Virgin in the National Gallery, London, with portraits of the kneeling donors Matteo Palmieri and his wife Niccolosa de' Serragli (Figs. 11 and 12) has found general acceptance.' It is usually dated close to 1475, the year of Palmieri's death. New documentary evidence establishes that Botticini was indeed the painter of the Assumption, that he worked on the picture between the first months of 1475 (at the latest) and 1477, and that he made contracts concerning it both with the humanist and with his widow. Vasari saw the picture in the church of the Benedictine nunnery of S. Pier Maggiore in Florence, and some of the arrangements Palmieri's heirs made for their chapel in this church can be traced. These records and Matteo Palmieri's hitherto unremarked will of 1469 help to expand the picture's context, although a recent suggestion that the Assumption was intended for a different location needs to be considered. Palmieri ran a profitable apothecary's shop, held high positions in government, composed important Floren- tine chronicles, and still found time to write the Citta di Vita, a lengthy poem modelled on the Divine Comedy, with a central idea that is literally unorthodox. The problem of the picture's relation to the poem has been much discussed, but needs to be raised afresh.

Great works of art have an inevitability of their own; and it seems astonishing that Fra Angelico's name has not previously been invoked in connexion with a devotional panel of Christ on the Cross, with the Virgin, St John the Evangelist and the Magdalen in a private collection (Figs. 13,14 and 18). Although of modest dimensions, this is sufficiently well-preserved for its pictorial qualities to be self-evident. Once in the collection of Louisa, Lady Ashburton and thus perhaps acquired by Alexander Baring, 1st Lord Ashburton or his successor, William Bingham Baring,' it bears an attribution on the frame to the school of Lorenzo Monaco and has, more recently, been ascribed to the Master of 1419, so-named from the altar-piece of which the dated central panel is at Cleveland.'

The attribution of the marble altar-piece depicting the Adoration of the Child in the Piccolomini chapel of the Olivetan church of S. Anna dei Lombardi in Naples (Fig.20) to the Florentine sculptor Antonio Rossellino has never been seriously questioned, although there has hitherto been no documentary evidence to confirm it.' The altar-piece (Fig.21) - highly praised by Vasari who knew the chapel at first hand, having worked in the church in 1544 - is the first 'monumental pictorial relief of the Italian renaissance and scholars have dated it variously, to 1466-70 or to 1470-75.3 It has recently been argued that the relief might have been commissioned only after 1473 and that it is therefore later than the reliefs for the pulpit in Prato for which Rossellino received final payment in 1473.* Newly discovered documents (see the Appendix, below) now confirm Rossellino's authorship and also fix the date of the altar's execution to between 1471 and 1474, contemporary with the Prato reliefs.

Between his departure from Spoleto early in January 1470 and his registration with the Compagnia di San Luca in Florence in 1472 as 'Filippo di Filippo da Prato dipintore chon Sandro Botticelli',' nothing is known of Filippino Lippi. Fra Diamante was also registered with the confraternity and thus was resident in Florence by the same date,2 but no association between him and Filippino is recorded subsequent to their common experience working with Filippino's father, Filippo, in the Duomo of Spoleto. The reasonable and widely held assumption that Filippino transferred from his father's workshop to that of Botticelli finds support in pictures highly influenced by Botticelli and in at least one picture on which the two artists seem to have collaborated.3

A damaged fresco of a bishop saint (Figs.28 and 29) survives in the church of S. Francesco at Montone, in Umbria. The purpose of this note is to identify the artist who painted the figure, to recognise the identity of the saint and to provide details of the decorative scheme to which he belonged.