During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Antwerp's most prosperous decades as an international centre of trade, carved and polychromed wooden altar-pieces were manufactured in huge numbers in the city and exported all over Europe. They were produced both to commission and ready-made, the latter being sold at the Onser Liever Vrouwen Pand, an art market located on premises leased from the church of Our Lady from 1460.1 Just as their rivals in Brussels introduced craftsmen's marks in 1454 as guarantees of quality, so too from 1470 the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, to which carvers and painters alike belonged, required that the carvers' mark of the open hand and the castle mark of the painters should be applied once the completed altar- pieces had been inspected by the guild.2 The open hand is usually found on the heads of some of the figures and on the base of the carved sections, while the castle mark (or 'burcht') is commonly found on the sides of the case. The fact that these marks are usually clearly visible means that it is very easy to identify Antwerp products - though not, of course, those predating 1470. From c.1515 to c.1535 altar-piece production was dominated by the idiosyncratic style known as Antwerp mannerism in which exaggerated and distorted figure types are grouped in graphic narratives liberally enlivened with exotic dress and detail.3 Thereafter carvers began to adopt a more antiquising approach to decorative detail and even to the human figure,4 but the narratives remained just as embellished. Antwerp carved altar-pieces were still being produced in the mid-sixteenth century,5 though apparently at a reduced rate as the Reformation eliminated some markets and tastes changed.

Guido Reni is known to have painted two nearly identical versions of La Fortuna, in which the subject is depicted as a handsome nude female figure with sceptre and palm flying over the globe, restrained by an Amor who pulls on her flying blonde tresses as if to brake her progress. In one he represented her holding in her right hand a purse from which fall coins and pearls; in the other she holds a crown.' How these two versions came to be painted is a remarkable story which can now be completed as the original autograph, though not quite finished, version of Fortuna with a pursehas been identified (Figs.22 and 20, 23, 24); it is now in a private collection in Bologna.

The identification of a drawing showing the lower section of Perino del Vaga's now largely destroyed Deposition of Christ painted for the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome sheds some light on the evolution and original appearance of Perino's first major religious painting. The Minerva Deposition is extensively discussed by Vasari,1 who provides a detailed description of the painting, refers to its physical setting (the altar-piece was covered by a vault- ed canopy supported by four columns),2 gives an account of the damage suffered by the work in the flood of 1530, and mentions the title of the patron ('un protonotario'), who has been identified by Linda Wolk as Giovanni Battista Branconio dell'Aquila.3 Some time between 1530 and c. 1600 the altar-piece was dismembered,' and all that now remains of it are two fragments with the good thief and the bad thief in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court (Figs.31 and 32).

Andrea Boscoli's reputation as a painter has suffered from the fact that so many of his works have been destroyed.' Nevertheless, his copious graphic legacy provides a glimpse of his creativity, and can also help recreate the appearance of at least some of his vanished works.