THE Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence possesses two statuettes, of which the male one can be recognised from bearing and gesture as Christ blessing whilst the female by reason of its attributes of palm-frond and coronet, may probably be S. Reparata. This saint was the patron of the earlier cathedral, recently revealed by excavations under the floor of the present one. Agreement of size and proportion, technique and style, permit no doubt that the two figures belong together. 

LOMBARD sculpture of the renaissance presents vexing problems at the most elementary levels of study. The persistence of a collaborative tradition of producing sculpture in Milan and its province during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has made it unusually difficult for students to assess or even identify the styles of individual artists. Documents and visual evidence confirm that the sculptors whose names have come down to us as leading masters of the Lombard school were in fact the proprietors of large botteghe and that their signatures on monuments, more often than not, must be considered as having corporate rather than individual significance. 

IN October 1975, we found a piece of sculpture in an attic of the former Hospice of the Muneghette, near the Arsenal of Venice. The sculpture had been heavily painted and swathed in drapery and decorations, which gave it the appearance of a devotional work of humble origin or perhaps an extremely poor cast of another sculpture. Our motive for restoring the work lay at first in removing the drapery and studying the abrasions caused by the detachment of some layers of paint and gesso. We soon discovered that the singular nature of the sculpture was such as to rule out a simple work of popular manufacture. 

Despite its conspicuous location, the high altar of the Pantheon in Rome is little studied and its history much misunderstood. The facts, supported here by archival and photographic documentation, may now be stated clearly. The altar was designed and built by Alessandro Specchi, beginning in 1715 during the pontificate of Clement XI (1700-21). It was dedicated exactly ten years later by benedict XIII (1724-300. In the twentieth century during the Fascist era the altar was dismantled and rebuilt so that it hardly reflects Specchi's design which has remained, like the dates and circumstances of this papal commission, all but completely forgotten. A project for the altar is the first documented example of the drawing style of the architect Specchi (1668-1729) and provides a starting point for the consideration of other drawings associated with him. In addition, new documentation clarifies the history and dating of the over-life size statues of Saint Rasius and Saint Anastasius located next to the altar. 

THE discovery of the bill for the monuments to the second Duke and Duchess of Montagu in Warkton Church, Northamptonshire, has revealed the unexpected fact that Roubiliac was responsible for creating the setting for the monuments which have long been recognised as being amongst his greatest works. 

BY 1924, when the publishing house of A & C Black Ltd commissioned the journalist Isabel McAllister to write Alfred Gilbert's biography, his name had been almost forgotten in England. If the public remembered the seventy-year old artist at all, it was not only as the sculptor of the Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus and the tomb of the Duke of Clarence at Windsor, but for the scandals and controversies that surrounded both monuments. Like his contemporaries James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Oscar Wilde (1856-1900), he departed in a blaze of publicity into self-imposed exile abroad.