WOODEN CHOIRSTALLS, OFTEN richly carved and decorated with intarsia, were almost ubiquitous in Venetian churches in the fifteenth century; indeed, some churches had two sets. To the pilgrim Canon Pietro Casola visiting the city in 1494, it seemed that almost every parish church had a set of beautiful choirstalls. Documents record twenty-one sets of stalls dating from the quattrocento, but the apostolic visitation of 1581 reveals that of the 105 churches surveyed (which excluded all female convents as well as a few other churches), only the parish church of S. Paternian lacked stalls of any kind. Most were classed as ‘decent’, but a considerable number were called ‘honorifica’: the stalls in the parish church of S. Maria Nova, for example, were described as ‘sedilia honorifica et egregie laborata ex nuce’.

DURING HIS LIFETIME Michelangelo relied heavily on influential friends and acquaintances who, through their connections and recommendations, helped to advance the artist’s career. Arguably the most important in this respect was the prominent Florentine banking family the Salviati. Extensive evidence for the artist’s relations with them survives in his Carteggio, notably from the period he worked for the Medici at S. Lorenzo when Jacopo Salviati offered Michelangelo his friendship and assistance in managing the enormous projects of the façade, the New Sacristy and the Laurentian Library. A letter published by Michael Hirst in this Magazine shows that members of the family must have had dealings with him even earlier in the sixteenth century. From that letter, written by Francesco Alidosi to Alamanno Salviati, we learn that early in the spring of 1505 Alamanno had recommended Michelangelo to Pope Julius II in the most laudatory terms: ‘for the testimony [Alamanno] gave of the aforesaid Michelangelo, Julius remained content and at ease’; no other guarantors were needed to convince him of Michelangelo’s skills. Some days later we encounter the artist in papal employ, receiving a salary disbursed to him by the Salviati bank.

RECENT STUDIES HAVE clarified the original setting of Raphael’s Coronation of the Virgin (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome) in the burial chapel of the Degli Oddi family in the church of S. Francesco al Prato in Perugia. It is now possible to introduce three further
discoveries from the Perugian archives which concern Raphael’s altarpiece more directly, and which shed new light on the painting’s date and appearance.

TWO OF THE most important pictures to arrive in Britain in the eighteenth century, Leonardo’s Madonna of the rocks and Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna, both now in the National Gallery, London, are reputed to have been acquired in Italy by Gavin Hamilton. The Leonardo was certainly bought by Hamilton in 1785 from the administrators of S. Caterina alla Ruota in Milan for the sum of 1,582 lire. Returning to England with his prize, he exhibited it in London in December 1785 and by 1st February of the following year had sold it to Lord Lansdowne. Passavant in 1833 credited Hamilton likewise with the acquisition of the Ansidei Madonna (Fig.21): ‘Gavino Hamilton purchased it for Lord Robert Spencer, in 1764; and a copy by Nic. Monti was substituted, which still exists in the church of St. Fiorenzo. Lord Spencer afterwards presented the original to his brother, the Duke of Marlborough’. This account of the painting’s movements has become part of its accepted history. Early guides to Blenheim, however, record the date of purchase of the altarpiece as 1768 and make no mention of Hamilton’s involvement: ‘The picture was a present of the Right Hon. Lord Robert Spencer to his brother the Duke of Marlborough, having been purchased by him in 1768 from the Cappella degl’Ansidei at Perugia’. The later acquisition date is more reliable for in 1764 Lord Robert was only seventeen and still at Oxford while in 1767–68 he was in Italy on his Grand Tour.

THE EXHIBITION Renaissance faces from Van Eyck to Titian, opening at the National Gallery, London, this month, will introduce to a wider public an exceptional portrait of a young man in black by Pontormo (Fig.25). Hitherto known to art historians only from an engraving of 1759, it is on long-term loan to the National Gallery from a private collection. In 1976 Georg Ewald correctly recognised that the original of the print must have been by Pontormo, a view later accepted by Robert Simon, Philippe Costamagna and Janet Cox-Rearick. That the portrait is by Pontormo has been unanimously accepted.

MANY OF THE large number of surviving figure studies by Jacopo Tintoretto can be loosely connected with paintings by the artist. However, because he often re-used individual figure studies and adjusted figures during the painting process, few sheets can be securely identified as preparatory drawings for individual commissions. A study now in the Uffizi (Fig.27) has traditionally been accepted as preparatory to the so-called Bald philosopher, one of a series of figures in fictive niches painted by Tintoretto for the Marciana Library, Venice, sometime between 1571 and 1572 (Fig.29). However, despite the obvious connection, there are notable differences between the drawing and the painting. A consideration of these in the context of an earlier work by Tintoretto, one of two figures of prophets in the albergo of the Scuola Grande di S. Rocco (Fig.30), painted between 1566 and 1567, indicates that the Uffizi study is actually a preparatory drawing for an earlier painting, and was subsequently remodelled in preparation for the Marciana Philosopher.

VINCENZO DANTI (1530–77) has never enjoyed the fame and scholarly attention lavished upon his contemporary Giambologna, whose technical mastery of bronze and marble – not to mention his organisational skills – to some degree overshadowed the renown of all other sculptors working in Florence during the years following Bandinelli’s death in 1560. Admittedly Danti has been the subject of no fewer than three monographs (of which the most important is the earliest, by David Summers) and a number of substantial, probing essays. Yet the exhibition recently at the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, was the first ever devoted to this many-sided sculptor, architect, goldsmith, painter and art theorist, who worked in his native Perugia, in Rome and (from 1557 to 1573, during the reign of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici) in Florence.