St Mary Peribleptos was one of the most celebrated monasteries of Byzantine Constantinople.1 Its grandeur was referred to by Russian, Armenian and western European travellers alike, and it has recently been termed 'the greatest building effort of the Middle Byzantine period in ecclesiastical architecture'.2 The potential importance of this church to the history of art and architecture has often been stressed,3 but it was long believed to be irretrievably lost.

One of Boris Anrep's mosaics in the north vestibule of the National Gallery in London depicts T.S. Eliot contemplating Einstein's famous mathematical formula e=mc2 (Fig. 12). The ancient medium in which Anrep chose to depict the alliance of modern poetry and modern science provides an appropriate emblem for the early twentieth-century fascination with Byzantine art.' Eliot's own work contains just one reference to Byzantium. It occurs in the poem of 1920 in French, 'Lune de Miel', in which two unhappy and uncomfortable newlyweds pass through Ravenna. Eliot contrasts the couple with the Byzantine figure of St Apollinaris - stiff and ascetic ('raide et ascetique') who is walled up in the crumbling stones ('pierres ecroulantes') of his church, 'which still holds . . . the precise form of Byzantium' ('tient encore... la forme precise de Byzance'),2 and in a rapid series of sharp images Eliot contrasts the fretful irritations of daily life with the cool, austere 'geometric' art of Byzantium.

The title of Paul Barolsky's recent book, Giotto's Father and the Family of Vasari's Lives,' refers to an essentially fictional character, who seems to have been invented by Ghiberti and then further elaborated by Vasari. According to Ghiberti, Giotto's father was 'pouerissimo', while Vasari described him as a 'lavoratore di terra e naturale persona'.2 In both authors, he is said to have lived in the village of Vespignano, not far from the small town of Vicchio in the Mugello, a rural region in the countryside north of Florence. In keeping with Bondone's humble social background, his son was destined for the uneducated life of a shepherd.

Vasari's career as a painter has been largely considered in terms of his extensive decorative campaigns for the Palazzo Vecchio and the Vatican. Yet the emphasis placed on the ducal and papal projects with which he was encumbered during the last two decades of his life has been at the expense of the more intimate and characteristic works that he painted throughout his career, often for places outside Florence and Rome. Vasari himself could be surprisingly laconic and sometimes misleading about these commissions in his own writings. This study focuses on one such case, a Virgin and Child with saints now in the Pinacoteca Comunale of Castiglione Fioren- tino (Fig.25),' and presents archival documents which shed further light on its original patron and function.

In front of the medieval castle at Moretta in Piedmont - a village in the province of Cuneo which was from 1362 a feudal possession of the counts of Solaro - is a modest, single-naved oratory dedicated to St Mary Magdalen.' On its altar, which is decorated with twisted columns and late seventeenth-century stucco angels, probably the work of craftsmen from Lugano, is a painting of high quality, representing the somewhat unusual subject of the Madonna del miele (Fig.28). The Christ Child reaches across the Madonna's lap towards a pair of angels, who offer him a honeycomb and a pat of butter decorated with violets. Behind them is St Joseph, asleep or in meditation, and up above fly two lively putti holding a scroll inscribed: 'EN MEL O PRUDENS EMANUEL ECCE BUTIRUM' - a reference to Isaiah's prophecy that butter and honey would be eaten by the Saviour of Israel.2