DURING HIS SECOND STAY in England (1532–43), Hans Holbein made a series of drawings of sitters connected with the court of Henry VIII that ranks among his finest achievements. Most of these were discovered as a group pasted into an album in a bureau at Kensington Palace by Queen Caroline in 1728, and the majority are now in the Royal Collection, Windsor.

IT IS WELL KNOWN that only a portion of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts and individual sheets of drawings survives. Various clues enable us to identify some of the lost compilations, the most famous being the Codex Huygens and the Libro A. The Codex Huygens (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York), by a Lombard artist working in the second half of the sixteenth century, is partially based on some of Leonardo’s lost drawings. Libro A, which has disappeared, has been reconstructed from passages of text and drawings copied by Francesco Melzi, a pupil of Leonardo, in his Libro di Pittura, and from Leonardo’s own Codex Leicester.

TORN APART BY religious quarrels and wars, the Southern and the Northern Netherlands were inundated by religious publications in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the Protestant texts, one of the most popular and authoritative was De Gheschiedenisse ende den doodt der vromer Martelaren (‘The histories and deaths of pious martyrs’) by Adriaen van Haemstede (c.1525–62/63), published in 1559, probably in Antwerp. The quarto book of more than 450 pages describes the lives and the gruesome deaths of martyrs, beginning with Christ himself, and ending with the Antwerp Protestants Cornelis Halewijn and Herman Jansz., who both died in the year the work was published. During the following centuries the book was often reprinted (with no fewer than twenty-four editions by 1747); the most recent edition dates from 1911. Earlier editions were usually updated to include recent martyrs and over the years additional information was added to the texts.

BEFORE HIS PREMATURE death at the age of twenty-eight, Raffaellino da Reggio (1550–78) was one of the rising stars on the Roman art scene, but today he remains something of a mystery. He received his training as a painter from Lelio Orsi and, like most Emilian artists of his generation, fell somewhat under the spell of Parmigianino, but his career was largely spent in Rome and he is most often discussed as a follower of the brothers Zuccaro.

AN ARRESTING DRAWING donated by Count Antoine Seilern to the British Museum in 1946 can be attributed to the Spanish Franciscan Antonio Villanueva (1714–85). Executed in pen and wash and drawn in about 1780, it depicts scenes from the life of St John the Baptist and a Franciscan allegory (Fig.45). It was made for a painting that once covered the entire back wall of the presbytery of the church of San Juan de la Penetencia in Orihuela, in the province of Valencia (Fig.43). The painting was mostly destroyed in the Spanish Civil War, and today only its top section representing the allegory remains (Fig.42).

JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS’s copies after Spanish old-master paintings bought by the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, in 1853 have already been the subject of an article in this Magazine. But Lewis also made studies after Italian, Flemish, Dutch and French works which both provided him with compositional ideas and motifs and helped to form his mature style for his paintings on oriental themes. However compelling the attractions of Lewis’s Spanish subjects were to the Academy, it was doubtless the international breadth of his sources that determined its decision to buy his collection: these were copies after works which would clearly be of benefit to its students.

MARCEL DUCHAMP’S ACTIVITIES as an art dealer are a familiar, though understudied, aspect of his career. His large-scale transactions include the purchase in early 1926 of eighty works from Francis Picabia, which he then sold at auction; and his acquisition that summer, with Henri-Pierre Roché, of twenty-nine sculptures by Brancusi from the estate of the collector John Quinn.

PATRICK CAULFIELD died in September 2005. Shortly before his death, he was able to see the publication in June of the first major monograph on his work, a book on which he had enthusiastically collaborated, even allowing pages from his previously unseen sketchbooks to be used as additional illustrations. This was surprising because it was well known that Caulfield was reluctant to allow anyone into his studio, and if the studio is a strictly private place, a sketchbook is hardly less so. Until then, his only drawings to be shown publicly had been either very early ones (the suite of studies he made for Portrait of Juan Gris of 1964, which had been acquired by the owner of that painting, Colin St John Wilson, and shown in part at Pallant House, Chichester, in 1997),2 or very late (Lamp studies, a series of pencil drawings made in 1991, some of which were included in his exhibition at Waddington Galleries, London, in 2002). His later willingness to let others in on the sketchbooks was no doubt due to a wish that the projected monograph should look and feel very different from the exhibition catalogues that, until then, had been virtually the only record of a career spanning forty-five years.