Nonnos is thought to have lived in the fifth century A.D. and to have come from Panopolis in Egypt. His two surviving works make a curious pair, being a forty-eight book epic in Greek hexameters about the life of Dionysus, and, in the same metre, a paraphrase of the fourth gospel. Neither poem has enjoyed great renown. The Dionysiaca was unknown in the middle ages, and the manuscript came from Byzantium to Italy only in the fifteenth century. It was first published in 1569, and translated into Latin in 1605. In consequence, although the epic provided a comprehensive account of the life of Bacchus, including many stories not found elsewhere, it had a limited influence on artistic and literary culture in the early modern period and was sparingly used even by mythographers. The exceptions to this general neglect are mostly French. The Greek edition of the Dionysiaca, published in Antwerp in 1569, was almost immediately used as the basis for a complex decorative programme, designed by Jean Dorat and executed by Niccolo dell'Abate and his son, which celebrated the entry of Charles IX and Elizabeth of Austria into Paris in 1571.' It was in France too that the only vernacular translation appeared - Claude Boitet de Frauville's Les Dionysiaques; ou Les metamorphoses, les voyages, les amours, et, les advantures et les conquestes de Bacchus aux Indes, published in Paris in 1625.2 Unlike the Latin translation, this was a relatively accessible work written in straightforward prose without the Greek text or any critical annotation. Insofar as Nonnos ever found a wider audience it was through this edition.

Despite the efforts of art historians, Pierre Lemaire remains a mysterious figure. For almost three centuries his identity has been confused with that of the architecture- and ruin-painter Jean Lemaire, both of them known by the sobriquet Lemaire- Poussin, and his personality remains largely unknown. While he has become something of a dumping ground for architectural vedute that cannot be attributed to Jean Lemaire,2 his name has also been attached to at least one celebrated picture in a strongly Poussinesque style, the Golden calf at San Francisco,3 and he has provided a handy identification for the 'assistant' who copied Poussin's drawings at the end of the 1630s.4 The problem of Pierre Lemaire is now becoming almost fashionable, as happened with Charles Mellin some twenty years ago. Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco's recent book on Jean Lemaire, the attributions to Pierre put forward by Doris Wild, Anthony Blunt, Gilles Chomer and Sylvain Laveissiere, as well as those in the corpus of Poussin drawings by Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, and in Jean- Claude Boyer's review of Fagiolo dell'Arco's book (see p.756 below),5 all invite a closer scrutiny of this truly obscure artist whose only certain works are one painted copy and some engravings. By contrast, Charles Mellin was initially much better known, even before any attempt was made to reconstruct his oeuvre.

Poussin' s Sts Peter and John healing the lame man in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Fig.35), painted in 1655 for a trisorier in Lyon named Mercier,' is one of a small group of narrative compositions in townscape settings the artist produced, other examples being Christ and the woman taken in adultery and the Death of Sapphirah, both at the Louvre. In comparison with the other paintings by Poussin at the Metropolitan (the Rape of the Sabine, and the Blind Orion), it has received relatively little attention. In this note I would like to suggest a new visual source for the composition.

The magisterial catalogue of Watteau's drawings published in 1996 by Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat includes (in volumes I and II) 669 drawings accepted as autograph by the authors and (in volume III) 858 rejected sheets.' Parker and Mathey's catalogue of 1957 contained 961 drawings, of which around a third have here been transferred to the section of refuses. We might recall that the abbe Haranger's inventory, compiled in 1735, included 1200 drawings as certainly 'authentic' and that, although he was Watteau's principal heir, he was by no means the only one. Furthermore, in their account of drawings known through engravings, which constitutes the invaluable final section of their study, Rosenberg and Prat point out that one-third of the drawings engraved in the Figures de differents caracteres are unknown, today as are twelve of the twenty-seven Tetes engraved by Fillkeul.