Giovanni Caccini (1556-1613) and Baccio Valori (1535–1606) were both important figures in the culture of late sixteenth-century Florence. Although it used to be thought that Caccini was responsible for the sculpted herms that gave Valori's palace its nickname, the 'palazzo dei Visacci' (Fig. 1), this has recently been questioned. The facade of the palace does, nonetheless, testify to Valori's patronage of Caccini, for he carved the marble bust of Duke Cosimo I over the portal facing the Borgo degli Albizzi. Still another marble bust by Caccini used to grace the palace: a portrait of Baccio Valori himself was until recently in the entryway, set in a niche on the left-hand wall facing the stairway (Fig.2).

The study of London sculptors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been hampered by the absence, except in the case of Nicholas Stone, of bodies of work securely attributable to individual artists. Adam White's work has begun to remedy this situation' and we may now, perhaps, add two works to the oeuvre of Maximilian Colt.

In the summer of 1918, contributing an essay on 'Mestrovic in England' to a monograph on the sculptor then being prepared in London, Ernest Collings, a now forgotten draughtsman and critic, began by acknowledging the improbable impact of this Central European talent among a distant people often suspected of uncomprehending indifference to new forms of sculptural expression. That Ivan Mestrovic (1883-1962) could now be credited with banishing such indifference in England, with having 'stirred into more vigorous life our understanding of sculpture', owed very little to the routine procedures of the pre-War art world and, as Collings conceded, a great deal to the contingencies of wartime cultural-political manoeuvring.

In the early 1480s Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini commissioned a large and elaborate wall chapel and altar to decorate his archepiscopal seat, the cathedral church of Siena (Fig.47). Carved from white marble and some three stories tall, this work was executed in an elegant and then very fashionable classicising style by Andrea Bregno, one of the most sought-after sculptors in Rome in the last decades of the Quattrocento. Cardinal Francesco intended his chapel as a memorial to his uncle, Pope Pius II (1458–64), but also as a possible burial site for himself. In both his 1493 and 1503 wills, Francesco asked to be buried in St Peter's Basilica, next to his uncle, should he die in Rome or nearby, but were he to die in some other part of Italy, he instructed that his remains be interred in front of the altar of his chapel in the Sienese Duomo. Francesco Piccolomini became Pope Pius III in 1503 and, when he died after reigning for only eighteen days, he was buried in Rome.

In 2001 the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh acquired Naum Gabo's Construction through a plane of c. 1937 (Figs.48 and 49). In 1938 Gabo had sold it to Leslie and Sadie Martin and it remained in their family until its acquisition by the Gallery (Fig.50). Leslie Martin (1908–2000) was one of Britain's most distinguished twentieth-century architects, responsible for such buildings as London's Royal Festival Hall (1951), the Gulbenkian Foundation Centre, Lisbon (1979) and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow (1987). In 1934 he married Sadie Speight (1906–92), herself a trained architect. With Gabo, they played a crucial part in the development of British modemrnism from the 1930s.