OF the seven poesie painted by Titian for Philip II of Spain, none has had a more disturbed history than the Perseus and Andromeda now in the Wallace Collection. The recent cleaning of this great picture revealed how much it had previously suffered and inevitably posed the question how and why had such negligence occurred? While the basic provenance has been published by Wethey, this note fills out his account beyond the necessary limits of an oeuvre-catalogue and adds points which seem of interest. It cannot, alas, put an end to all speculation concerning the first half of the seventeenth century.

THE decision to proceed with the cleaning of Titian's Perseus and Andromeda, taken by the Trustees of the Wallace Collection and by its Director John Ingamells, followed a lengthy period of examination of the painting at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge. In the course of this investigation and the subsequent cleaning and restoration, new material emerged allowing some discussion of Titian's painting procedure.

ONE of Cellini's most familiar works is the great bronze relief in the Louvre known as the Nymph of Fontainebleau. It is familiar first because it was commissioned for the principal entrance to the palace, the Porte Dorée, second because the artist himself left an account of the circumstances in which it was produced, and third because, despite damage inflicted on it in 1793 and two subsequent restorations, its content, the nymph with her right arm resting on a stag, the hinds drinking from the spring, and the hounds on the right facing their quarry opposite, is evocative and poetical.

IN 1927, Leo Planiscig published his huge monograph on Andrea Riccio, consisting of 504 pages, with 586 illustrations and an oeuvre-catalogue listing 258 different models. No other renaissance bronzist has ever had so compendious a work dedicated to him. It has, however, become obvious in the years which have followed that Planiscig's monograph was grossly over-inclusive. Reckoning with- out the powerful influence which the extraordinary artistic personality of Riccio exercised over his contemporaries and followers, Planiscig produced in effect a survey, not of the work of a single artist, but of a whole north Italian school of bronzists, which flourished throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century. As we are now coming to realise, Planiscig included in Riccio's oeuvre much of the production of the large family foundry headed by Severo Calzetta of Ravenna, some of the work of Agostino Zoppo, and probably much of the production of Riccio's immediate successor in Padua, Desiderio da Firenze, together with all kinds of derivative pieces by bronzists whose names we may never know.