DESPITE the scholarly attention received by Giovanni di Paolo's predella fragment in the Lehman Collection, New York, one aspect of its subject matter has been overlooked (Fig.1). The arrangement of the zodiacal signs and the location of the Sun in the cosmological diagram coincides with an established tradition of the thema mundi, an astro- logical depiction of the Creation of the World. This raises some interesting questions about the subject of the Lehman panel and about the use of astrological symbolism in late medieval and renaissance art.

A VOLUME of financial records of the Perugian Confra- ternity of S. Andrea della Giustizia, which notes what was owed to and by the Confaternity in the years from 1464 to 1510, records a commission to Bartolomeo Caporali and Sante di Apollonio for a 'tavola' and predella. Eighteen florins were disbursed to the two painters for this pupose, in a series of payments which include ones dated between October 1475 and April 1476 (see Appendix). It will be argued here that the work for which they were paid still survives and is to be identified with the triptych and predella in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, no.230, attributed to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and known as the Giustizia triptych (Fig.17).

SINCE the publication of Vincenzo Marchese's Memorie dei piu? insigni pillori, scultori e architetti domenicani in 1845 it has been known that Fra Bartolommeo visited Venice for a period of two to three months in the spring of 1508. In the light of this knowledge we have become accustomed to noting reflections of the artist's Venetian experience, in matters both of pictorial handling and of motif, in the group of works he produced immediately after his return to Florence. Sometimes - although more contro- versially - it has also been suggested that the Florentine himself contributed towards the formation of the heroic figure style of such early monuments of Venetian high renaissance painting as Sebastiano del Piombo's organ shutters for S. Bartolomeo di Rialto, or Giorgione's frescoes for the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. Yet the actual circumstances of Fra Bartolommeo's Venetian visit have hardly been discussed at all, not even in relation to the one work actually commissioned from him for a Venetian destination: the God the Father with Sts Mary Magdalen and Catherine of Siena, dated 1509 and now in Lucca (Fig.25).