THE CORONATION OF the Virgin was a radical Romanesque invention, the inception of which depended on the political and devotional circumstances of early twelfth-century England. This is worth stressing at the outset since, as will be suggested here, without a direct cultural catalyst the imagery would have been, quite literally, unthinkable. The confluence of historical events and liturgical celebration was a necessary prerequisite, if not a sufficient explanation, for this remarkable imaginative leap.

IN 2004 CLAUS SLUTER'S 'Well of Moses', one of the canonical works of European art, was at last revealed after having been hidden from public view for fifteen years. During this time the area around the monument was excavated and remodelled, the sculptures were cleaned and restored, and the platform that surrounded it was removed. The figures can now be viewed from ground level, as was originally envisaged (Fig.9); the space in which the Well stands is now closer in scale to the 102-metre-square cloister of the Carthusian monastery (Fig. 10), and, most dramatically, much more of the original polychromy can now be seen (Figs.9 and 18).

THE 1830s WAS a disastrous decade for the French sculptor Auguste Préault (1809-79). All had begun promisingly enough: he made his Salon debut in 1833, where the proletarian themes of his socially conscious exhibits, notably Deux pauvres femmes and Mendicité, found immediate favour with the liberal Republican press of the time. He was the first to make 'Republican art', proclaimed the journalist Jean-Barthelemy Hauréau, writing on Préault in his 1833 Salon review for La Tribune. But this and other enthusiastic endorsements were to cost Préault dearly and he soon became something of a scapegoat for the increasingly conservative Salon juries of the 1830s and 1840s. As a consequence, he suffered not only an all but total exclusion from the Salon, but also a complete dearth of commissions, either public or private. As the decade progressed, he began to lose support even within the Republican camp. One of his worst professional setbacks was his failure to secure the commission for the tomb of Armand Carrel, the Republican polemicist and founding-editor of the opposition journal Le National, who was killed at the age of thirty-six in a duel with Emile de Girardin, the father of commercial journalism and owner of La Presse. Initially favoured by the committee created to raise funds and erect a monument to the memory of the Republican martyr, Préault eventually lost the commission to his teacher and rival David d'Angers, who executed the Carrel tomb (1838-39) for the cemetery of Saint-Mandé, to the east of Paris.

IN HIS BIOGRAPHY of the sculptor Antonio Susini (1558-1624), Filippo Baldinucci attributed to him the two bronze holy-water stoups in the Chiostro dei Voti in the Florentine church of SS. Annunziata (Figs.36 and 37). Giovanni Cinelli, on the other hand, ascribed them to Antonio's nephew and pupil, Giovan Francesco Susini (1585-c.1653). These basins have been overlooked in the few scholarly studies devoted to the Susini, and perhaps Baldinucci's precise wording has caused their authorship to go unquestioned. The passage devoted to these two works in Baldinucci's Notizie di Antonio Susini contains detailed and seemingly accurate information on both the patron and his commission. He writes that, in 1615, the courtier Francesco di Giovanni Lucardesi Paolsanti (1559-1641) built a tomb for his family in SS. Annunziata. He spent 3,000 scudi on the decoration in coloured stones of the floor in front of the entrance, and, as a mark of his devotion, commissioned from Antonio Susini two holy-water stoups to abut the columns in the Chiostro dei Voti. Giovanni Cinelli merely asserts that the stoups were made by Giovan Francesco Susini.

THE DISCOVERY OF the estate inventory of the Vicentine sculptor Camillo Mariani provides an opportunity to reflect on several of the stories told about him by his earliest biographer, the painter and author Giovanni Baglione. Mariani was born around 1567 in Vicenza and is believed to have begun his career as a sculptor at the Teatro Olimpico there, where in 1582-83 Agostino Rubini, Alessandro Vittoria's nephew, was among the sculptors working on the stucco decorations being installed above the theatre's stage.

SCULPTORS IN THE New World were fond of fusing two idealised images, that of the mythological Greek hero with the concept of the 'noble savage'. It is remarkable how closely intertwined images of Greek gods and American Indians became during the Neo-classical period. In this, Henry Kirke Brown (1814-86) followed Benjamin West who had originally formulated the notion by remarking as early as 1760 how much the Apollo Belvedere resembled a Mohawk warrior. As Brown has been the subject of three detailed studies by Wayne Craven, only a few relevant facts from the artist's career are here necessary.