The artistic and architectural patronage of the branch of the Lippomano family known as the Lippomano di Santa Fosca after the Venetian church near which they lived from the second half of the fifteenth century until 1647 has not hitherto been the subject of any detailed study.' This patrician family reached the summit of its wealth and prestige between the 1480s and 1565, during which time they intermarried with the Ruzzini, Moro, Pisani, Gradenigo and Dolfin fami- lies, weaving a network of relationships which placed them among the highest ranks of the Venetian nobility. Such a social ascent, based on their income from profitable land investments both in Venice and Padua, naturally went hand in hand with a desire to advertise their status through the usual media of a palace with suitable decorations and funerary chapels in prominent churches in the city.

On 20th December 1929, nine days after leaving Genoa and having been badly battered by tempestuous waves off the coast of Brittany, the Italian ship Leonardo da Vinci berthed at the East India Dock in the Port of London and began to discharge what was perhaps the most remarkable cargo ever brought into Great Britain.' It included Botticelli's Birth of Venus (Fig.9) and Piero della Francesca's Duke and Duchess of Urbino from the Uffizi, Donatello's bronze David from the Bargello, Giorgione's Tempesta from the collection of Prince Giovanelli, Titian's 'La Bella' and 'Portrait of an Englishman' from the Pitti, Masaccio's Crucifixion from Naples, Piero's Flagellation from Urbino and Carpaccio's so-called Courtesans from the Accademia in Venice - to choose a few items at random. In charge of these, and of several hundred other works of art, was the Director of the Brera and Sopraintendente delle Belle Arti ofLombardy, Ettore Modigliani (Fig.20), who was later compared by Roberto Longhi to Sir Francis Drake delivering the treasures of the Invincible Armada to Queen Elizabeth.2

After the initial interest shown in Piero della Francesca's fresco of a young male saint following its rediscovery at Borgo Sansepolcro in 1954, the painting has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Unmentioned by Vasari, it was found beneath a layer of white- wash on the right wall of the deconsecrated church ofS. Chiara, the former (until 1555) Augustinian church for which Piero painted his well-known S. Agostino altar-piece following the contract of 1454.' It was published while still in situ by Mario Salmi in 1955, and was subsequently detached and moved to the Museo Civico in 1957 (Fig.23).' Its obliteration and recovery account for its poor condition and uneven edges, especially evident at the right hand and lower margins. As any inscriptions or external attributes have been lost, the identity of this youth with golden hair, large eyes and a markedly curved nose has necessarily been a matter of guesswork: Salmi's initial suggestion that he is St Julian has not received universal acceptance, even though the red and green costume is canonical for that saint, and Eugenio Battisti went so far as to claim that a secure identification was impossible.3

As Tancred Borenius remarked in 1922, 'The identification of a hitherto unrecognised work by Luca Signorelli is in itself an event which cannot fail to arrest the attention of students; and when ... it is a question of a work in a well-known and frequently studied private collection, a peculiar psychological interest also attaches to a discovery of this kind'.' These words apply perfectly to an important early work by the artist (Fig.27) which has been in the Jacquemart-Andre collection for over a century, and publicly accessible since Nelie Jacquemart-Andre bequeathed the collection to the Institut de France in 1912.2