Painted by Albrecht Durer in 1506 in Venice, The Feast of the Rose Garlands (Fig. 1) is, despite its fragmentary state of preservation, one of the most important paintings in the artist's oeuvre.' It is also a very significant work of the European renaissance - not least because it was born of the conjunction of two different artistic traditions: those of Germany (or rather Nuremberg) and of Venice. Thanks to the felicitous symbiosis of these two worlds, Durer created a work which won high regard in Europe and was acquired by the famous patron and collector Emperor Rudolf II in 1606.

Durer produced a remarkable number of remarkable self- portraits. Apart from the dozen or so drawings and painted images of himself incorporated into other compositions, three autonomous paintings have been preserved. The earliest, now in the Louvre, is not signed, but clearly presents Dtirer's own features (Fig.20). It is inscribed with a date of 1493, as well as a text reading: My sach die gat, als es oben schtat, which literally means: 'My affairs go, as it stands above' (Fig. 19).

The reception of Italian renaissance influences in fifteenth- century Bohemia was a protracted and complex affair, hampered especially by the Hussite Wars of 1419-34. The grey, rigorous envi- ronment of Utraquist Bohemia,' with its tradition of Hussite iconoclasm, made it very difficult for the renewed ideals of antiquity to be accepted. Strong mutual feelings of mistrust and suspicion marked the relationship between 'heretical' Bohemia and Italy for much of the next century, and renaissance Italy remained a synonym of sin and evil for Czech non-Catholics.

Giovanni Bellini's Sacred Allegory in the Uffizi (Fig.27), usually dated to the last quarter of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, has attracted numerous interpretations.1 The picture shows a terrace, whose patterned pavement forms a cross. Around it a group of saints is united in prayer. The Virgin Mary is seated on a marble throne at the left, flanked by two female saints, perhaps Catherine of Alexandria and Margaret of Antioch. To the right, St Sebastian and Job look on, their attention attracted by the central potted tree shaken by a putto. Another putto picks up a fallen silver apple, while two others, one dressed in a white shirt and sitting on a cushion (he is sometimes seen as the infant Christ), contemplate the fruit in their hands. Behind the tree the precinct opens to the narrow bank of a small strip of water. The gate is guarded by St Peter and St Paul who has raised his sword as if to turn away an oriental figure at the left. A rocky landscape with a group of houses in the centre closes the view to the horizon.

Giovanni Bellini's St Francis in the Frick Collection (Fig.30) has long excited discussion as to its subject.' St Francis is shown in a desert landscape in front of his oratory-cell, his arms spread with palms out, his gaze fixed upwards and out beyond the frame, whence comes a radiant light illuminating the foreground. Only the saint and his oratory cast shadows. In the middle ground, above a low scarp with a heron perched on its edge, is a ploughed but now overgrowing field in which stands a donkey. Beyond are a shepherd and his flock, brown and gold autumnal fields, trees and a walled town. The picture was probably painted c.1480-85, arguably for the theologically-adept Zuan Giacomo Michiel (d. 1513), secretary to the Council of Ten.