The origins of Giovanni Battista di Jacopo di Guasparre, called Rosso Fiorentino, have long been a puzzle to scholars. Vasari's total silence about Rosso's family has even led to speculation that the artist's background may have held some embarrassing secret which he or his biographer was anxious to conceal.' The most colourful explanation is that proposed by Luciano Berti, who suggested that Rosso was the bastard son of the prior of SS. Annunziata, Fra'Jacopo de' Rossi, the patron who commissioned his early fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin (Fig. 1) as well as a lost Madonna with St John the Evangelist.2 Berti's conjecture rested on the fact that Rosso's father was named Jacopo and on the homonymy between the artist's nickname and the prior's family name, de' Rossi (though Vasari, who knew Rosso well, claims the soppranome was due to the painter's red hair).3 Children of the cloth were not uncommon in renaissance Italy (Filippino Lippi is only the most famous artist example), but they were subject to definite social prejudices and legal disadvantages,4 which might have led Vasari - on this view - to conceal Rosso's family origins.

In the last quarter of the sixteenth century the Oratorio del Santissimo Crocifisso in Rome was decorated with a series of frescoes illustrating the legend of the True Cross. Two near- contemporary sources for the creation of the cycle - a report written by Fabio Lando,' a member of the confraternity, and Giovanni Baglione's Le vite de' pittori2 - name Giovanni de' Vecchi, Cesare Nebbia and Niccolo Circignani as the painters responsible for individual scenes. In 1974 Josephine von Henneberg published a valuable analysis of the cycle as well as all relevant archival material, in a monograph which has remained the definitive study on the subject.3 Now, a quarter of a century later, newly identified drawings relating to the frescoes prompt a reappraisal of the decorations and their genesis.

A Raising of Lazarus by Jacopo Tintoretto (Fig.23), known to the literature but not seen in public for some seventy years, has recently been rediscovered in the Jesuit Center at Wern- ersville, some seven miles west of Reading, Pennsylvania. In May 1999, the Center's new Rector, the Rev. J.A. Panuska SJ., decided that a fresh inventory of the house's art col- lection, overlooked in recent years, was in order. Examining the oldest documentation concerning the collection, he was surprised to discover that the Raising of Lazarus had been un- equivocally attributed to Tintoretto. At that point, help was enlisted from the staff of the nearby Reading Public Museum and from Christie's, New York, who reconfirmed the painting's status as an autograph work. It has now been placed on indefinite loan at the nearby Reading Public Museum.