It was only in 1973 when a scholar of Leonardo, Carlo Pedretti of the Department of Art, University of California, wrote to me, 'the problem of Leonardo's botanical illustrations is still to be assessed properly,' that I realised so little attention has been given to the master's plant studies after almost five hundred years. Several books trace the life story of Leonardo (1452-1519) in so far as we know about this extraordinary fifteenth-century artist and inventor. Kenneth Clark's account Leonardo da Vinci [1959] is still one of the most concise and sensitive in English. It is Leonardo's drawings which to quote Clark, 'bring us closer to the sources of his genius than the wrecks of his great formal achievements in painting'. 

IT is well known that in the medieval city the practice of painting, like all other crafts, tended to be an inherited occupation rather than a vocational one.' This pattern of inheritance and the tendency of the communal societas to restrict new-comers by limitations on apprentices and sanctions against trading by non-members of the Guild, much as the commune itself restricted the privileges of foreigners, led to the dominance of a small group of men over the arte and close personal relationships between them. This is obviously an important factor in the creation of regional schools with distinct and to some extent homogeneous styles, within which art historians have traditionally organised the art works of a given period. This concept has recently been questioned, and rather fruitfully, by Rainieri Varese in his discussion of Ferrarese painting in the Trecento.

AFTER his rather precipitate departure from Florence in May 1859, Spence settled down quietly in London with his family and continued to deal, as he did every summer, from his studio in Newman Street. He even managed to import some pictures from Italy - for his forebodings about the active steps the new government would take to stop the export of works of art seem to have been unjustified, at any rate for the moment. However, he took the precaution of exporting through Rome where, of course, there had been no change of administration. Reports from Italy were increasingly reassuring and he would probably have returned in the autumn had not his father fallen seriously ill. He therefore stayed on through the winter. Early in the new year his father died and Spence came into a small fortune - over £3,000 a year. This changed his financial circumstances quite dramatically. On returning to Florence he immediately bought the Villa Medici at Fiesole and embarked on a correspondingly spacious and lavish mode of living.