DESPITE BEING DOCUMENTED in the possession of the Guicciardini family plausibly as far back as the seventeenth century, the splendid tondo of the Adoration of the Magi (Fig.1) in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, has in recent decades been associated with the Medici. While no new documents have come to light regarding the painting’s commission or its subsequent history, sufficient existing and newly discovered evidence convincingly confirms the association with Florence’s leading family. Georg Pudelko first linked the work to the Medici in 1934 by connecting it with a painting in Lorenzo the Magnificent’s possession listed in the inventory of the palace made after his death in 1492. The clerk who enumerated the contents of each room described a large tondo with a gilded frame showing the Madonna and Child and the Magi, attributed it to Fra Angelico and appraised it at one hundred florins. Considering that this picture was included in Lorenzo’s princely ground-floor room, in the company of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano series and other pictures by Uccello and Pesellino, it must have had a special significance and distinctive presence. Its high valuation also sets it apart, as all six of the other, presumably larger, paintings by Uccello and Pesellino were listed at a total value of 300 florins.

THE FRESCOS OF the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Palace, originally the private library of Pope Julius II, celebrate learning. Below the allegories of Justice, Theology, Philosophy and Poetry on the ceiling, each mural dramatises the pursuit of its respective faculty through discourse and transcription. Parnassus most distinctly reflects the court life of Julian and Leonine Rome (Fig.17). Raphael’s arrangement of the composition around the window links the painted summit with the real view of the Belvedere palace rising on the Vatican hill, a site that in antiquity was sacred to Apollo and the Muses. The courtly performances in the palace created the new Parnassus of Julius II. The portraits of classical, medieval and contemporary poets in Raphael’s fresco reinforce the continuity between ancient and modern culture, although not all the laureates have been definitively identified. One in particular has resisted a satisfactory explanation, despite his prominence in the right foreground and his curious action of raising a finger to his lips, as if to silence the assembly. This article resolves his identity and also proposes that a newly discovered portrait of the same person is by Andrea del Sarto.

TWO VIEWS OF Florence are central to E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View (1908). The first is the view of S. Miniato from the front rooms of the Pensione Bertolini, rooms which are so indelicately offered by George Emerson and his father to Lucy Honeychurch and her cousin Miss Bartlett on their first evening in the city. The second is the vista of Florence and the Arno from the road between Fiesole and Settignano, allegedly to be found in the paintings of ‘Alessio Baldovinetti’. At the urging of the English chaplain, Mr Eager, a party from the pensione sets off to find the exact spot from which Baldovinetti took his view, and the outing ends with George Emerson’s fateful kissing of Lucy. On the way, Mr Eager and the ‘clever’ novelist Miss Lavish have an absurd debate about Baldovinetti: ‘Was he the cause of the Renaissance or was he one of its manifestations?’

THE FIFTH CENTENARY of the death of Mantegna is marked by exhibitions (all to 14th January) in three Italian cities – Padua, Mantua and Verona – with which the artist was most closely associated. Mantegna and Padua in the Musei Civici, Padua, is the most tightly organised, with stimulating juxtapositions of paintings, prints, drawings, books and relief sculpture. Part of its interest lies in the difficulty of deciding exactly how many works are in fact by Mantegna. The wonderful St Jerome from São Paulo (cat. no.19) looks too loose in the stretches of its rocky setting and in the anatomy of the lanky saint to be by him, nor is it certain that he painted the profile portrait of a man from the Poldi Pezzoli, Milan (no.39): might it not be by Ercole de’ Roberti?

GIOVANNI BELLINI’S PAINTING of St Francis (Fig.43) in the Frick Collection, New York, dated c.1480–85, has long excited discussion.1 St Francis is shown in front of an oratory, arms spread and gazing up to a radiant light beyond the frame. In the middle ground, above a low scarp that gives on to cultivated fields with a river and walled town beyond, is a ploughed but overgrown field in which stands a donkey; to the left of the donkey, poised on the very edge of the scarp, is a large, long-necked and long-legged bird (Fig.44). In the lower left-hand corner of the picture, Bellini’s signature appears on a trompe l’oeil strip of paper attached to a small, leafless bush that springs, apparently, from an extension of the rocky scarp. Slightly further along, a projecting gutter discharges a thin stream of water into the void. In front of this, perched on the topmost branch of the bush, is a smaller bird (Fig.45). Were it not for the splashes of red on its breast and head, which make it stand out against a dark declivity below the gutter spout, the bird would be almost invisible; it is much less prominent than the larger one next to the donkey.

GIANNICOLA DI PAOLO, one of Pietro Perugino’s most important followers, was principally active in Perugia and the surrounding region of Umbria. New documents, recently discovered in the Archivio di Stato, Perugia, add significantly to our understanding of his early career. These documents, from the account books of the Confraternity of St Peter Martyr, Perugia, date from April to November 1493 and include the earliest known record of his activity as a painter, his commission for frescos executed in the confraternity’s oratory (see Appendix below).