UNTIL RELATIVELY RECENTLY, scientific examination of Jan van Eyck’s work was mostly restricted to illuminating the mystery of his technique as a painter. However, with the advent of infra-red reflectography, the focus of such analysis has shifted to the underdrawing of his paintings. this article considers Van eyck as a draughtsman, particularly in relation to his metalpoint drawing Portrait of a cardinal (?Niccolò Albergati) in Dresden (Fig.24). Since its discovery in the Dresden collection by Johann David Passavant in 1841, this work has been regarded as a preparatory drawing for the painted portrait now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Fig.25). It is currently the only drawing securely attributable to Jan van Eyck, and it is the only known fifteenth-century drawing that can be securely attributed to a specific Netherlandish artist. The identification of the sitter as Cardinal Niccolò Albergati (proposed in 1902 by Max Rooses) has sometimes been questioned. To gain further insights into the drawing technique employed by Van Eyck, the physical and chemical properties of the drawing were analysed, and the results are presented here for the first time, permitting a more precise assessment of the role of the drawing in the production of the painting in Vienna.

It has been established that, in his Trattato d’abaco, Piero della Francesca employed several of Archimedes’ concepts derived from medieval sources, and in his later Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus he made direct citations from the Greek mathematician’s work. A comparison of Piero’s handwriting in the autograph manuscript of his Trattato in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence (MS Ashburnham 359*; Fig.22), with that of a manuscript of Archimedes’ corpus in the Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence (MS Ricc.Lat.106; Fig.23), reveals that Piero copied the latter work in his own hand. The decision to undertake and complete the onerous task of transcribing nearly all the manuscript in Latin and, in all likelihood, drawing its geometrical figures, attests to Piero’s fascination with Greek mathematics. Piero wrote, transcribed, edited or illustrated at least seven manuscripts, four of which were devoted to his De prospectiva pingendi. His scientific interests, evident in three manuscripts concerned with mathematical and geometrical problems, may have reduced the number of paintings that he was willing to undertake in the last one or two decades of his life. His citing and copying of Archimedes’ works in Latin also confirm his ability to read that language.

THE EARLIEST KNOWN depiction of the sculpture court in the Vatican Belvedere, a drawing now in the British Museum (Fig.30), was first published in 1935 by A.E. Popham as a work of an anonymous Roman draughtsman of the sixteenth century, but in 1987 was attributed by Matthias Winner to Maarten van Heemskerck. More recently, the drawing’s great documentary value was underlined by references to it in no less than four papers presented at the 1992 colloquium on the sculpture court. Although it is unnecessary to reiterate here all the observations on this drawing in relation to the restoration of the Laocoön group, the sarcophagus of M. Sulpicius Pylades and the statue called La Zitella, the crucial point is, as was first demonstrated by Arnold Nesselrath and Paolo Liverani, that the drawing in the British Museum can be dated to between the summer of 1532, when Heemskerck arrived in Rome, and July 1533; the view depicted does not include the terracotta arm which Giovanni Angelo da Montorsoli must have attached to the statue of the Laocoön by the latter date.

SERGEI IVANOVICH SHCHUKIN (1854-1936) was an unusual man. A member of a rich Russian merchant family, he was a successful and astute trader and importer of textiles. As a devotee of French art, moving form Impressionism to Post-Impressionism, and then to Matisse and Picasso, he was a bold and passionate collector. Between 1906 and 1914 he acquired almost forty paintings by Matisse, among them the large panels of La Danse and La Musique of 1909-10, which were commissioned for the stairwell of the collector's rococo palace in Moscow.

THIS ARTICLE PUBLISHES for the first time a drawing by Pontormo (Figs.38 and 39) recently acquired by the National Gallery of Canada. Catalogued in 1836 in the celebrated exhibition of one hundred drawings by Michelangelo from the Sir Thomas Lawrence collection as a study for the sleeping Adam in the fresco of the Creation of Eve on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and singled out for praise as ‘very capital’, the drawing passed as an original by Michelangelo for at least two centuries. Except for the brief entry in the Lawrence catalogue, it is unrecorded in published sources, in spite of its highly distinguished provenance: after Lawrence, it passed through the collections of both the Dutch and German royal houses, and subsequently reappeared in a European private collection before its recent acquisition by Ottawa.

IN THE SUMMER of 2003 a package was delivered to an auction house in Rome. The removal of its wrapping – a page from a local newspaper – revealed a nondescript vellum binding of c.1800 with the title, ‘Officium B. M. Virginis’, written in amateurish letters on the spine. No hint was given of the extraordinary pages these covers contained. Yet the most cursory glance at the contents showed it to be an entirely exceptional manuscript: an early fourteenth-century Book of Hours, extensively and richly illuminated with a series of miniatures of arresting iconographic invention. Closer consideration and further investigation established that this anonymous book was, in fact, the long-lost Officiolum of Francesco da Barberino (see Appendix 1 below).