IN THIS ISSUE of 13th May 1807, The Times informed its readers: ‘Among the Exhibitions which excite the curiosity of the town at present moment is that of Mr. Dubost, in Pall-mall, whom Mr. West, no common judge, has denominated first painter of the age. It consists of only six Pictures, but they possess a rare variety of powers combined in one man. The Damocles is one of the richest pictures we ever beheld’. Of course on that Wednesday morning the paper had no idea that the French painter and his painting would soon rile the London art world and then as surprisingly vanish from sight. The rediscovery of Antoine Dubost’s Sword of Damocles (Fig.2) in Mumbai (Bombay) prompts re-examination of an unusually well-documented, bizarre affair that involved some of London’s leading personalities, not only the past president of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, but also Henry Fuseli, Thomas Lawrence and Lord Byron, as well as prominent journalists and the ambitious Dutch merchant, patron, collector, designer, author and promoter of the Greek Revival, Thomas Hope, who had settled in London in 1795 as a refugee from the French invasion of Holland.

THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION of Chinese Art held by the Royal Academy of Arts at Burlington House, London, from 28th November 1935 to 7th March 1936 was the largest exhibition of Chinese art ever mounted. Of the over 240 lenders from throughout the world – museums and institutions, scholars, collectors and dealers – most, if not all, were sponsored or promoted by their government institutions. Even against recent large-scale exhibitions at the Royal Academy and elsewhere, the International Exhibition of Chinese Art was extraordinarily well received and attended, attracting a total of 401,768 visitors. Student groups and industrial organisations were enticed to the exhibition by discounts on train fares and admission tickets. A total of 108,914 exhibition catalogues were sold, as well as 3,486 illustrated supplements, 2,196 exhibition handbooks and 336 copies of the Royal Society of Arts Journal. With one in four visitors buying publications, knowledge of the exhibition soon spread, both at home and abroad.

WITH THE PUBLICATION of Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century, the National Gallery of Art in Washington has reached the mid-point of its so-called systematic catalogue. The present volume, the fifteenth in a series which began in 1986 with the early Netherlandish school, is a leviathan just shy of eight hundred pages, and weighing almost five kilograms. Replacing about half of Fern Rust Shapley’s catalogue of all the Gallery’s Italian paintings, published in 1979, its 156 entries contain a mass of information about the pictures, but only eight substantive changes of attributions. In order to keep the book from becoming even more ungainly, a few works by fifteenth-century painters such as Lorenzo Monaco and Piero di Cosimo will be published in the future and three of the dozen paintings by or attributed to Giovanni Bellini have been withheld for the volume on sixteenth-century Italian pictures. As with some of the previous volumes in the series, the Gallery has called in outside specialists – in this case, Miklós Boskovits, who contributed sixty-four entries, primarily for the Tuscan school, and Joseph Manca, who catalogued ten Emilian pictures. David Alan Brown and other members of the Gallery’s staff worked on the rest.

THE RECENT EXHIBITION devoted to Antonello da Messina at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome (closed 25th June) was among the most beautiful and affecting this reviewer has seen. The organisers, above all Mauro Lucco, are to be applauded for having risen magnificently to the challenge of assembling in one place so many works by Antonello, thus affording the visitor many intimate moments within a cumulative effect that was extraordinary. While the works on display evinced strong emotional responses, the accompanying catalogue avoids any discussion of this and concentrates, for the most part, on chronology, influences and attribution.

ONE OF RAPHAEL’S strengths was his ability to organise pictorial space effectively through the use of perspectival constructions. From Giorgio Vasari’s Life and from Raphael’s works such as the Marriage of the Virgin (1504; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan), we learn that from an early stage the artist had a command of the basic rules of perspectival construction. Yet there is a dearth of written information or drawings to provide clues as to his methods in such constructions at the start of his career. A perspective drawing in the British Museum, London, would seem to provide visual evidence to illustrate Raphael’s methods at this phase of his development.