IN HIS WILL, Diego Fernández Cabrera y Bobadilla, 3rd Conde de Chinchón (died 23rd September 1608), listed the titles he had earned during his political career and requested that if he died while in service at the court of Madrid, his body be taken back to Chinchón to be buried in his chapel. He had invested heavily in the chapel’s construction and decoration, had hired the king’s artists to work for him, including Pompeo Leoni, one of the most gifted sculptors in Spain, and ordered important paintings from Italy. Because of his political influence, the paintings were sent as state gifts from Florence and included works by Alessandro Allori and Francesco Bassano. In its design and impressive decoration, his burial chapel made explicit reference to the high altar chapel in S. Lorenzo in the Escorial where the families of Charles V and Philip II were commemorated.

A LARGE PAINTING by John Brett, which has been known for many years as Shipwreck after a typhoon (Figs.10 and 11), has recently undergone restoration at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth. In the Gallery’s Bulletin for 1929 it was described as a depiction of a sunset in the East, and dated to 1898:
The scene is laid in Eastern waters, and some few years ago when the late Rear-Admiral Winnington Ingram (brother of the Bishop of London) was visiting the gallery he gave more attention to this picture than any other, remarking that it was very realistic, and he had often seen similar cloud effects and stormy skies when on duty in the East. ‘That kind of thing’, he added, ‘is never seen here but is perfectly true out there’. However, one can see very fine wild cloud effects at sunset over the sea from the upper windows of this Museum building.

REPORTS SUMMARISING CONTEMPORARY events – known as avvisi – were sent to courts throughout Italy and Europe. Written anonymously, they provided news of marriages, births, baptisms, political appointments, papal audiences, dinner parties and diplomatic visits. They followed a clear pattern – a series of short notices organised by date and city, including, among others, Rome, Venice, Vienna, London and Warsaw. Those in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano have been gathered chronologically into volumes dated by year. However, a page inserted in a volume ostensibly covering the period 1670 to 1673 contains material relating to the Vacant See following the death of Pope Urban VIII (Barberini) on 29th July 1644 (see Appendix below). Two of the episodes related in the notice are well known, while two are hitherto unrecorded.

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES AND family legends are of their nature unreliable, and Picasso’s claim that he executed his drawing of Hercules with his club at the age of six or younger is no exception (Fig.23). In fact, he signed and dated it November 1890, and was therefore actually nine at the time. On the other hand, his recollection of its source was almost certainly more reliable than the gloss put on it by at least some subsequent commentators who have assumed that he was copying a painting. Actually, Picasso – as his own words suggest, and as John Richardson certainly realised – was copying a sculpture, and this is confirmed by his having included its base in the drawing. Any student of Renaissance bronzes would associate the sculpture in question with the world of Giambologna, but it is not actually identical to the Hercules wielding his club (Fig.24), which is universally accepted as being his invention, and is known in various casts. Picasso shows the right arm raised less high and bent at the elbow, and the left hand lower down with the hand closed round a stone rather than with spread fingers. In all these respects his drawing corresponds to a far rarer and much larger model, of which only a handful of variant casts are known. The best cast of this model, which is in a private collection in New York, gives every indication that it dates from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, and has recently been attributed to the young Adriaen de Vries. Others substitute a thunderbolt for the stone to create a kind of Hercules/Jupiter hybrid, while a palpably later example recently on the art market adds a fig leaf and shows Hercules grasping one hydra in his left hand and in combat with another (Fig.25). Oddly enough, no extant example appears to combine the stone in the hand with the fig leaf, as in Picasso’s prototype. It seems impossible to determine whether Picasso’s father owned a bronze original or a plaster cast of the piece, but the former option appears more likely, given the rarity of the model. Equally, it remains a mystery how he came to have a version of the Hercules at all, but there can be no doubt that this is what the young Picasso copied.

ONE OF PICASSO'S extant student drawings, Academic study of a cast of a classical sculpture (1893–94; Fig.26), was drawn at the age of twelve when he was enrolled at the Escuela de las Bellas Artes in La Coruña. The drawing demonstrates superb skill and a high degree of realism, both of which have dazzled the general public and art historians alike. Scholars, as well as Picasso himself, have used this drawing and others from his art school days (1892–97) as evidence that he was a child prodigy. What scholars have failed to identify and to discuss – and what is the subject of this article – is the sight-size technique that Picasso used to obtain such impressive realism.

PICASSO WAS LIVING a meagre existence but working steadily in his Bateau Lavoir studio in Montmartre when in February 1905 he wrote to his Barcelona friend Jacint Reventòs: in a few days, I’m going to have a small exhibition. God willing people will like it and I’ll sell all I’m sending. Charles Morice is in charge of organising it. He tries to cover whatever is in his hands at the Mercure de France – we’ll see about the results of all this . . . The show, which Picasso shared with Auguste Girardin and the Swiss painter Albert Trachsel, was held at the Galeries Serrurier, Paris, from 25th February to 6th March 1905. Most of the works that Picasso exhibited were recent, and many were devoted to saltimbanque subjects, including Seated harlequin with red background (Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen, Berlin), Two acrobats with a dog (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fig.29) and The harlequin’s family (Göteborgs Konstmuseum). As far as sales were concerned, nothing is recorded. Richardson surmises that Picasso probably only made enough to keep him in materials and to pay his rent until the summer.

GEORGE ZARNECKI, who died on 8th September, just four days short of his ninety-third birthday, must surely have been the last of the art historians whose conception of the discipline was consol­idated before the 1939–45 war, that is to say in terms which had been axiomatic in Mitteleuropa since the end of the nineteenth century. He was born in imperial Russia, almost certainly a refugee from the war zone which in 1915 was advancing eastwards across what had once been, and was shortly to be again, the country of Poland, and it was to Cracow that his family went to live when the First World War was over. Although he spent two-thirds of his long life in Britain, there was a sense in which he never ceased to be Polish. His Englishness, though undoubtedly impressive, was a veneer spread thinly over a very un-English core.

PAUL OVERY, critic, historian and, recently, a contributor to THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, died on 7th August 2008 at the age of sixty-eight. His career as a writer on art began in the early 1960s with the radical magazine Axle, which he founded with a group of friends, and lasted for over forty years. Distinctive about his writing was that not only did he span both journalistic and academic modes but, most particularly, that he wrote about twentieth-century art, architecture and design with equal authority in each of those fields – a rare ability in our current climate of specialisation.