In the January sales of old master paintings in New York the Metropolitan Museum was able to acquire a work of exceptional quality and historical importance: Ludovico Carracci's Lamentation (Figs. 1, 4 and 5). The picture, heretofore known only from early sources and guidebooks, was thoroughly catalogued and it will be sufficient here to summarise what is known of the picture's history, setting the work in the context of its first owner's collection and of Ludovico's early career.' The earliest notice of the Lamentation is in an inventory of the Tanari collection in Bologna drawn up in 1640 by Vincenzo Pisani, a pupil of Denys Calvaert and a friend of Carlo Cesare Malvasia (Pisani provided the biographer with information for the Felsina pittrice). In the inventory the picture is described as ' Cristo Morto la Beata Vergine San Giovanni et le Madalene di mano di Ludovico Carazzi con cornice nera' and is assigned a value of three hundred ducatoni,2 a solid figure, though well below the thousand ducatoni assigned to the largest and most prestigious works in the collection. Our two principal sources on paintings in Bolognese private collections, Malvasia and Oretti, both list the work and so also does Belvisi in his 1825 elogio on Ludovico.3 Any doubt that the Metropolitan canvas is the Tanari picture is laid to rest by two labels, probably of the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, reading 'Casa Tanari', one affixed to the back of the stretcher and the other to the back of the frame. The picture must have been sold soon after Belvisi's publication of 1825: around 1827 James Irvine acquired from the Tanari collection Annibale Carracci's Venus adorned by the Graces (National Gallery, Washington; Fig.2), Ludovico's Alexander and Thais (Richard Feigen, New York; Fig.3), and a now lost work by Guido Reni.' In the last century the Lamentation belonged to the Ravenna family in Buenos Aires, but by then Ludovico's authorship had beenforgotten and the picture was recognised for what it is only after its consignment to Christie's, New York."

Giovanni Lanfranco was one of the most significant painters in early seventeenth-century Rome, one who developed Annibale Carracci's classicism into a vigorous baroque style which answered the requirements of influential ecclesiastical patrons.' Information on his early career is, however, scanty: documents for this period are few, and Passeri and Bellori describe his life up to 1610 in such general terms that no clear picture of his artistic development can be reconstructed. Any chronology of Lanfranco's early work has necessarily been based largely on stylistic analysis. This article aims to provide a firmer documentary basis for dating an important early commission, the so-called Camerino degli Eremiti, which has hitherto been assigned to the years 1604 or 1605 and assumed to be Lanfranco's first independent work in Rome.

The Musee Magnin in Dijon houses one of the most inter- esting collections of Italian Seicento pictures in France, left to the French state in 1937 by Jean-Hugues-Maurice and Jeanne Magnin who had built it up over fifty years. Their discriminating connoisseurship was in advance of contemporary taste which seldom admitted admiration for seventeenth-century Italian art,' and in his preface to a manuscript catalogue of the collection compiled in 1938, Paul Jamot, a friend of the Magnins, devotes not a word to their examples of Lombard, Neapolitan, Roman or Venetian baroque painting.2 Among the finest Seicento pictures is an intriguing canvas by Bernardo Strozzi, acquired at auction at an unknown date,3 and described in the museum's current catalogue as 'Portrait de (?) Giulio Strozzi en Persee' (Fig. 16).4 Documentary evidence now makes it possible to establish both the original provenance of the portrait and the identity of the man portrayed as Perseus.5

A growing, if erratic, interest in tracing as a means of producing replicas and copies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has gradually begun to focus on Caravaggio, an artist for whom the number of alternative versions has naturally provoked questions about their status and how they were made.' In the case of the rediscovered Lute player (private collection on loan to the Metropolitan Museum, New York) once owned by Caravaggio's early patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, Keith Christiansen has shown that its original composition, as revealed in a radiograph, coincided in virtually all its details with a tracing taken from the version, today in St Petersburg, that formerly belonged to the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, another patron of the artist.' A similarly close correspondence - of figure, drapery, and such ancillary elements as the plant in the foreground and the ram behind - has also been established for the two paintings of St John the Baptist in the Capitoline Museum and the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, respectively.

Camillo Massimi (1620-77) has long been recognised as one of the leading figures in seventeenth-century Roman artistic circles,' and interest in his friendship with Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613- 96) will undoubtedly be stimulated by the recent exhibition devoted to Bellori.2 A recently discovered letter from Massimi to Bellori in the Massimo family archive gives a first-hand account of Philip IV's collections in Madrid and also provides new information concerning paintings Massimi gave to the king as diplomatic gifts when he was papal nuncio at the Spanish court.

In his introduction to the publication in 1981 of Gianlorenzo Bernini's will and post mortem inventory, Franco Borsi noted that no books were listed there.' He concluded that Bernini was a 'uomo senza lettere', his learned conceptions the result of researches made by others. As Borsi put it: 'gli altri leggessero per lui'. Bernini's buildings and sculptures belie these charges but, in the absence of direct evidence, scholars have had trouble assessing the extent and nature of his intellectual pursuits.