When Lodovico Gonzaga learned in 1471 that Leon Battista Alberti's designs for the choir at SS. Annunziata in Florence would cause serious complications for the Servites, he responded by asserting his right to spend his money as he liked 'without having to justify ourselves to others'.' The patron had his way, but the decision of the friars in 1500 to commission the largest Florentine altar-piece of the renaissance shows their need, in the wake ofthe choir's completion, to organise better the liturgical spaces within their church. The history and reconstruction of the altar-piece informs us about the functions which this double-sided structure served within the Annunziata itself, as well as illuminating the development of high altar-piece in the Cinquecento. An analysis of new documents and published sources also clarifies how the Servites aimed to glorify the Virgin and their own order through commissions to four of the most prominent artists active in Florence: Baccio d'Agnolo, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, and Pietro Perugino.

There has been much scholarly conjecture about the date and early history of Bronzino's Pieta with Mary Magdalen in the Uffizi (Fig. 16). ' Earlier this century its attribution was disputed between artists as diverse as Pontormo and Santi di Tito and, although Bronzino's authorship is no longer in doubt - his signature emerged during restoration in 1989 - central questions about the work's original location, patron, and function have remained unanswered. All that has hitherto been known is that the Pieta was removed from S. Trinita, Florence, in 1810, and reached the Uffizi between 1870 and 1925. However, newly-discovered documents (see the Appendix below) now reveal its date and patron as well as its original site in the church. This information opens the way to an understanding of some of the panel's more striking and anomalous features.

The large Coronation of the Virgin which now hangs at the end of the left aisle of S. Giovannino dei Cavalieri in Florence (Fig.22) is one of the few altar-pieces by Neri di Bicci to have survived with its original predella,' but it has received scant notice in the literature concerning this artist. The altar-piece depicts the coronation in a circular glory, flanked by music-making angels and eight saints: on the left are James (or Roch), Sebastian, Mary Magdalen and John the Baptist, and on the right Zenobius(?), Dominic, Nicholas and Catherine of Alexandria. In the lower central foreground is a hinged section on which are depicted a multi-faceted ciborium and four kneeling angels. The predella shows six kneeling saints (Francis,Jerome, Peter, Michael Archangel, Lawrence and Margaret of Antioch) and, in the middle section, two narrative scenes from the lives of the two principal saints in the main panel,John the Baptist and Nicholas of Bari. These flank another hinged central panel depicting Christ as the Man of Sorrows with the Virgin and St John. The two hinged central sections probably originally served as receptacles for the chalice and host, offering an interesting example of combined tabernacle and high altar image, a combination which occurs in at least one other work by the artist.

According to a previously undetected ricordo in the Archivio di Stato, Florence, two Clarissan sisters of the Monte Domini convent in the outskirts of Florence accompanied a new high altar-piece to a church dedicated to S. Giusto on 21st September 1509 (see the Appendix below). The price of this panel painting had been borne by two sisters whose names are given simply as Margherita and Tita, while it was escorted to its new location by Sisters Madalena and Margherita, the latter presumably one of those who had helped pay for it. The subject was the Virgin with the Christ Child in her arms, and four saints: Justus and Jerome, with two Francis- cans, Clare and Francis. The cost of the workmanship, exclusive of the panel, was eighteen florins, which is not a large sum for an altar- piece of this date and implies that the painting was either by a secondary master or by a younger, less experienced one.' The role of the sister named Margherita in this project is further reinforced by one entry included later in the ricordanze, in which she appears to be reimbursed a small sum of money by another sister ('suor Lena', perhaps the Madalena mentioned earlier) to help pay for the altar- piece (see the Appendix). Her surname is difficult to establish from the documentary evidence, but as we shall see Margherita may have been rewarded visually for her central role in this commission. The abbess of the convent at this date is named as Valentia della Casa. There is no mention of the painter, but this is understandable given the nature of the document, which is not a contract but simply a record.

It cannot be often that a romantic novel provides the clue for the rediscovery of an important series of works of art, but this is the case with the group of late sixteenth-century Florentine paintings which is here published for the first time. The book in question, by Monsignor Giovanni Maria Vignolo, has the unpromising title La regina e il re della fava, ossia Teodolinda ed Accaccio, and appeared in Turin in 1867. Its plot- the peripatetic adventures of a pair of betrothed lovers through the Val di Susa in the company of their parish priest - is little more than a pretext for an artistic and historical guide to an area of Piedmont particularly rich in rnonuments and works of art. At one point the art-loving priest, Don Vignolo, recounts a visit to Reano, a feudal possession of the Dal Pozzo family, and describes the fine new neo-gothic parish church recently erected by Don Carlo Emanuele Dal Pozzo, Principe della Cisterna, in which, he states, there are valuable old paintings, brought there from Pisa.l This is a somewhat surprising claim, but it proves not to be unfounded, for the paintings remain there to this day (Figs.28-38).

While Goya's extensive and diverse oeuvre is well known, his still lifes, of which ten are extant today, have received less attention than the other types of painting he produced. With the exception of Jose Lopez-Rey's essay of 1948, in which all the known examples were assembled and discussed for the first time, they have made only marginal appearances in the literature, although included in the catalogue raisonne by Pierre Gassier and Juliet Wilson and that by Jose Gudiol, both of which appeared in 1970.' Over the past two years, however, his still lifes have begun to appear at international exhibitions. The Goya exhibition in Stockholm in 1994-95 and the London exhibition of Spanish still-life painting in 1995 each included four; two were shown in autumn 1995 in La Belleza de lo Real at the Prado, two were shown in Oslo in early 1996 and no less than five at the Prado's exhibition celebrating the 250th anniversary of Goya's birth in 1996.2 But though the recent opportunities for viewing and studying the still lifes have been ample, various questions remain: how many pictures of this type did Goya paint, which of them are extant, and of these, how many are securely attributable to him?