Domestic plates painted with moralising scenes were popular in the sixteenth-century Netherlands and form what amounts to a distinct genre. The example under examination here is typical oftheir subject-matter (Figs.l4): a man and a woman are shown pushing a drunkard into a thatched pigsty observed by onlookers in a variety of poses. This wooden plate, which is in a private collection and measures only twenty centimetres across, was reproduced and briefly discussed by Joseph De Coo in an article of 1975 devoted to painted wooden roundels. He suggested an attribution to Pieter Bruegel the Elder but, having failed to find a signature, he remained cautious,' and the attribution has not been accepted by the authors of subsequent catalogues raisonnes of the artist's oeuvre.2

One of the most appealing portraits in the recent Van Dyck exhibitions in Antwerp and London was the full-length portrait of a young boy in black from Vienna (Fig 17), l shown leaning elegantly on a plinth partly hidden by a green drapery, while a grey dog looks faithfully up at him against an overcast, almost stormy landscape. The pendant portrait of a similarly dressed, somewhat taller, fairer boy, his head turned towards his companion (Fig.18), was not included in the exhibition.2

The relationship between Rembrandt and his pupil Constantijn Daniel van Renesse (1626-80) is difficult to envisage, for their careers differed entirely. Rembrandt's ambition brought him renown in his twenties despite his late start as an apprentice, yet his personal life was marked by a calamitous financial failure and some fraught personal relationships. Van Renesse, born twenty years later and endowed with lesser artistic gifts, led a more respectable existence.' From a well-regarded, scholarly family, related on his mother's side to Constantijn Huygens the Elder, Van Renesse studied languages and mathematics at Leiden University, the institution Rembrandt had abandoned to pursue a career as a painter within months of his arrival there. Van Renesse subsequendy studied under Rembrandt for a few years, and from 1653 he occupied the post of city clerk at Eindhoven. He was also to become a Professor and Regent of the Prince of Orange's Collegium Illustre in Breda, an honour for which Rembrandt - who according to Arnold Houbraken preferred to spend his leisure hours in unsophisticated company - is not likely to have been considered.

Most Florentine illuminated manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are liturgical - books of chant for the Mass and the Divine Oflices. The collections of the major ecclesiastical institutions sometimes yield codices illuminated by important artists, and occasionally these provide archival evidence that help date those artists' principal works.

The completion of the fresco-cycle in the Salone of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano was probably the most important commission of Alessandro Allori's career. The programme of decoration there had been begun for Leo X in 1520, but only Pontormo's famous lunette of Vertumnus and Pomona was completed and two scenes on the side walls by Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio substantially painted: the former's Tribute to Caesar alludes to the Sultan's gift of a giraffe to Leo's father, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and the latter's Triumph of Cicero to the return from exile of his illustrious great- grandfather, Cosimo Pater Patriae.l After Leo's death in December 1521 work was suspended,2 and the decorations remained in their unfinished state until 1578, when Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici employed Allori to complete them.3