Carved wooden altar-pieces were evidently a Netherlandish art form as early as 1390, when Philip the Bold ordered from the Dendermonde carver Jacques Baerze two examples (now in the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon) to be modelled on those in the ducal chapel at Dendermonde and in Bijloke Abbey, Ghent.' The fact that the commission followed the duke's tour of his northern provinces suggests that such works may already have been a local speciality that impressed him. Although there were numerous centres of production,2 by the mid-fifteenth century Brussels seems to have been predominant. Here a guild edict of 1454 ruled that craftsmen's marks be applied to altar-pieces as guarantees of quality between the three guilds involved: joiners (compass mark), carvers (mallet mark) and painters ('BRUESEL')." Antwerp, increasingly Brussels's chief competitor, followed suit in 1470 when the open-hand mark of the carver and the castle mark of the painters were introduced. Although some altar-pieces were custom-made, both centres produced large numbers in standardised form for particular clients and for sale on the open market.4 During the second half of the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, both Brussels and Antwerp altar-pieces were exported in large numbers to Western Europe and beyond, predominantly through the Onser Liever Vrouwen Pand, an art market operating on premises leased from the church of Our Lady, Antwerp, from 1460.5

Few of J.-K. Huysmans's statements on sculpture have been assimilated by art history. This may be because he strove to project a negative attitude to the plastic arts as constituted in his time. One brief moment of enthusiasm on his part has furnished authoritative and favourable quotations to evoke the shock effect of Degas's Little dancer (Fig.25), when she finally reached the exhibition stand in 1881. The Dancer and two sculptures by Gauguin (Fig.24), almost alone among contemporary three-dimensional works, overcame a deeply entrenched resistance. Huysmans, it must be said, opened his arms to Degas's creation rather as a long-awaited encapsulation of the Naturalist principle than as an example for future performances. The same applies to his early laudatory references to the work of J.-B. Carpeaux and a brief, fevered and erotomanic description of the studies for the Gates of Hell which Auguste Rodin exhibited in 1887 at the Georges Petit Gallery.' These acknowledgements of an exceptional vitality in sculpture were without sequel in Huysmans's writings. When in the essay Des Prix of 1889, he lined up the contents of his ideal museum of modern art, he included no sculpture at all. Give or take one or two wayward choices, his selection conforms to a remarkable extent to the twentieth century's evaluation of the art of his time. The major impressionist painters are all included. There were to be Cezanne still lifes. Moreau, Redon and Bresdin represent the tendency, as Huysmans would have put it, to throw oneself out of one's time. Drawings and graphics have their space allocated, but not sculpture.2

Of the sixteen models attributed to Michelangelo that were acquired by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) as part of the Gherardini Collection in 1854, only one is still generally accepted as an autograph work by the master.' The red wax figure (Fig.31) is a sketch model for the unfinished marble of the Young slave in the Accademia, Florence, designed for the 1516 scheme of the tomb of Pope Julius II. The condition of the object was described by Pope-Hennessy in his Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria andAlbert Museum thus: 'The wax has been varnished, and the surface is blotchy and discoloured. Broken and repaired'. No details were provided in connexion with the concluding statement. It is possible, however, to reconstruct the exact circumstances of the damage with the aid of previously unpublished documents and photographs of the object taken during and after restoration.

No satisfactory image of Bernini's famous bust of Charles I which perished in the Whitehall palace fire of 1698 has hitherto come to light in modern times. The most widely accepted has been a mar- ble bust, now at Windsor (Fig.43), which Katherine Esdaile published as a copy after the Bernini in 1938, but which Michael Vickers in 1978 suggested was more likely to be a copy after a lost bust by Francois Dieussart.' Two previously unnoticed plaster casts (Figs.44 and 46a-c), here published for the first time, may help to resolve, if only partially, the actual appearance of the lost work.

The lost funerary sculpture by Medardo Rosso known as Ultimo bacio has long been the subject of scholarly speculation. Its appearance has been known only from an undated photograph of a plaster model presumed to have been taken in the artist's studio, and it is briefly discussed in three short articles published during Rosso's lifetime. Two Italian journalists writing about Rosso in autumn 1885, both found him at work on a sculpture of a female figure lying in mourning at the opening of a tomb. While one claimed that the piece had yet to be completed, the other believed it had already been returned to the artist's studio after failure to erect it for unspecified 'artistic reasons'.' In an article published in Paris in 1896, Camille de Sainte-Croix dated the work along with others made by Rosso in 1884, and further claimed that it had been destroyed by the City of Milan for unknown reasons after initial placement in the local cemetery.2 Although Sainte-Croix's article was supposedly written on the basis of an interview with Rosso, many of the dates, including the artist's birthdate, are incorrect, as are titles and descriptions of works (the article included no illustrations). In fact, Sainte-Croix's account of the sculpture as a female figure kissing a medallion on which the face of her beloved departed was engraved matches neither the photograph nor the image described in the Italian articles.

The recent Brancusi exhibition in Paris and Philadelphia provided unprecedented opportunities to analyse the development of the sculptor's work,' making it possible to trace the evolution of certain themes and to compare the same subjects treated in different materials. With the notable exception of Sidney Geist's work, research on Brancusi has tended to neglect the study of materials and sculptural techniques in favour of other approaches. If closer attention is paid to the way in which he transmutes shapes from one medium to another, it is possible to arrive at a more precise interpretation of some of the Romanian artist's famous sculptures and, in some cases, to a more reliable chronology.

In the catalogue of Robert Mangold's 1982 retrospective exhibition in Amsterdam, the first work accepted into his oeuvre is Gray window wall (1964; Fig.64) now destroyed.' Although there were various reviews of his 1965 exhibition in which Gray window wallwas first shown, including one marvellously supportive statement by Lucy R. Lippard," there has been surprisingly little discussion of the origins of Mangold's art in the large literature since devoted to him.