BETWEEN ABOUT 1435 AND 1439 the cloister of the Florentine Badia was decorated with murals depicting scenes from the life of St Benedict (Fig.1). Scholars have long separated them into two distinct groups, assigning ten narrative scenes and an overdoor to one artist and two narrative scenes to another, although the identities of these artists are contested. The larger group is usually attributed to Giovanni di Consalvo (active in Florence c.1435–39); the smaller group continues to evade a secure attribution. In seeking a single artistic personality for each group of murals, art historians have overlooked the collaborative nature of Renaissance fresco production and the realities of Florentine workshop practice. Focusing on how the Badia murals were made allows new insights into the question of who made them. A reappraisal of the documentary evidence shows that Giovanni di Consalvo was, at most, a minor workshop assistant on the Badia project. A closer look at the larger group of Badia frescos and their sinopia underdrawings indicates that they are not the work of a single master but rather were designed and painted by a workshop team, most probably supervised by Fra Angelico.

THE SCULPTOR, GOLDSMITH and painter Antonio di Jacopo del Pollaiuolo died in Rome on 4th February 1498, leaving no male offspring to take over his family’s workshop. His youngest brother and long-time collaborator, Piero (born 1441), had predeceased him some time before Antonio drew up his will in 1496, although his exact date of death is unknown. Another brother, Giovanni (born 1438), was alive at least until 1496 but had taken over their father’s poultry business instead of going into an artistic profession. The fourth brother, Salvestro (born c.1433–34), who worked for Antonio as a goldsmith in the 1460s, had left the family home in 1480 and was making a living as a scribe (‘chyrographum’) in Pisa when Antonio bequeathed him an oil-press in his will of 1496. In his will, Antonio also stipulated generous dowries of a thousand ducats apiece for his two daughters, Marietta and Maddalena, and gave lifetime usufruct of his real and personal property to his wife, Lucrezia, and his daughters. As his universal heirs he named the sons of his brother Giovanni the poulterer. One of Giovanni’s sons, Salvestro di Giovanni del Pollaiuolo (born 1472), appears to have been the only member of the family to continue to work as a professional craftsman after 1498. A newly discovered contract reveals that, two-and-a-half months after Antonio’s death, the artist’s widow donated the contents of the family workshop to Salvestro.

HORIZONTAL IN FORMAT, and executed in red chalk, a drawing in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Fig.15), depicts a group of putti carrying bundles of wheat and grapes towards a classically inspired altar. Catalogued under the school of Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), the design first entered the collection of the Uffizi as part of Emilio Santarelli’s donation in 1866, at which time it was listed as an autograph work by Carracci for ‘various putti for the ornament of a frieze’. Although inconsistencies in relative figural proportions and modelling indicate the efforts of a less accomplished hand, the artist belongs to the circle of an earlier master who was much admired by Carracci and his school: Antonio Allegri, better known as Correggio (?1489–1534). The drawing, which can be dated on technical grounds to the 1520s, specifically relates to two painted friezes that were once part of Correggio’s vast mural project in the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista in Parma.

A DRAWING BY Mattia de Rossi (1637–95), recently acquired by a Belgian private collector, shows a previously unknown design by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) for the east front of the Louvre (Fig.24), here renumbered as his third design and placing the final design, known only from engravings, as his fourth. This project, conceived in the early years of the reign of Louis XIV, is probably the greatest unfulfilled commission in the architectural history of France. After the appointment by Louis XIV of Jean-Baptiste Colbert as Surintendant des Bâtiments in January 1664, the plans to extend the Louvre, recently commissioned from the king’s architect, Louis Le Vau, were shelved. Although Colbert was keen to employ his own favourite architect, François Mansart, this wilful man was proving eccentric in his old age and the king and Colbert looked elsewhere. A commission was originally sent, via the Abbé Elpido Benedetti, to three Roman architects, Pietro da Cortona, Carlo Rainaldi and Gianlorenzo Bernini. In April 1664 Benedetti arrived in Rome with Le Vau’s rejected plans. Although both Cortona and Rainaldi completed designs, it is clear that Benedetti was primarily interested in Bernini and immediately offered him the commission to design the east front of the Louvre, which Bernini accepted in a letter to Colbert of 4th May 1664.

THE GREAT ALTARPIECE (some four and a half metres in height) painted by Paolo Veronese for the Petrobelli altar in the church of S. Francesco in Lendinara near Rovigo was dismembered at some point during the late eighteenth century (Fig.31), and is now divided between Edinburgh, Dulwich and Ottawa. While still intact and in situ it was described by the local historian Gioacchino Masatto as showing ‘the dead Redeemer above supported by angels, and below St Michael the Archangel in the act of trampling Lucifer in the midst of various saints’. The saints were identified as Jerome and Antony Abbot in an inventory drawn up at the time of the church’s suppression in 1769. In 1782 S. Francesco and the adjoining convent were demolished and the contents dispersed. By 1795, when Pietro Brandolese wrote his account of the ‘valuable paintings’ (‘pregevoli pitture’) recorded in Lendinara, Veronese’s altarpiece had disappeared. Further information on its fate can now be provided from letters written by Gavin Hamilton, the Scottish artist, dealer and antiquarian, to his Venetian agent Giovanni Maria Sasso. Writing from Rome on 26th July 1788, Hamilton alludes to the imminent dissection of the altarpiece and gives the name of the perpetrator as Pietro Concolo:

THE SPLENDID Death of Cleopatra (Fig.34) in the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, has always been considered one of the collection’s most attractive paintings, although its authorship had long remained unresolved. The National Inventory Research Project (NIRP) has made it possible to research the work for the first time, and its remarkable history can now be revealed as an autograph painting by the Bolognese artist Benedetto Gennari (1633–1715), a favourite painter at the courts of both Charles II and James II.

IN JULY 1785 Domenico De Angelis was at work on a painting for Marcantonio Borghese destined for the Casino of the Villa Pinciana. The painting of Flora must have been at that time fairly well advanced, for the critic of the Giornale delle Belle Arti was able to give a precise description, anticipating the moment when the canvas would be in the ‘Camerino’ exposed to the gaze of connoisseurs (Fig.37). The painting’s appearance and effect are described by the anonymous commentator (who can very probably be identified as the painter Raimondo Ghelli, formerly a pupil of Mengs):

WILLIAM WATSON, who died on 15th March aged eighty-nine, was an imaginative and enthusiastic teacher, his talent fuelled by a varied career that encompassed language studies, art history, archaeology, museum curatorship, university professorship and the organisation of international exhibitions and symposia.