IN considering the oeuvre of Agostino Tassi (1580/85 - c.1644) we shall find that the least known period of his activity is that of his youth, which appears, according to the sources (Mancini, Passeri, Soprani), to have been spent mainly in Tuscany and Genoa. The works he painted there, which consisted mostly of decorations on the facades of buildings and some interiors of Genoese villas, are all lost.
AS the most productive in the field of seventeenth-century Bolognese ceiling decoration, Angelo Michele Colonna (1604-1687) has not been the subject of a general essay for a great many years. Increasing efforts at lifting the veil obscuring the work of the Bolognese decorative school have, however, been made from several sides in recent times, and a fuller picture of these ceiling frescoists is beginning to emerge.
ONE of the most celebrated collections in sixteenth-century Venice was that of Gabriel Vendramin, who is remembered today principally because he was the first recorded owner of Giorgione's Tempesta. Our knowledge of what his collection contained has until now been based on Marcantonio Michiel's tantalisingly laconic notes of 1530 and a later inventory compiled some fifteen years after Gabriel's death on the instructions of his heirs. This article is prompted by the discovery of a further inventory of the collection made in 1601, together with a collection of documents from other sources.