WRITING from an enviable vantage point in the mid- sixteenth century, Vasari had no difficulty in pinpointing the artists who had changed the course of Italian painting. Giotto had opened the way in the years around 1300 by overturning the 'maniera greca'. But it was to Masaccio that Vasari ascribed the crucial change: Masaccio, he wrote, 'entirely supplanted Giotto's manner of treating heads, drapery, architecture, nudes, colour, and fore- shortening, which he created anew, bringing into light the modern style that has been followed ever since by all artists'. The work Vasari had in mind was, of course, the cycle of frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, and he went on to note that 'all the most celebrated sculptors and painters who have come after Masaccio have become excellent and illustrious by studying in this chapel: that is Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, Fra Filippo [Lippi], Filippino [Lippi], who completed it, Alesso Baldovinetti, Andrea del Castagno, Andrea del Verrocchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Mariotto Albertinelli, and the most divine Michelangelo'.

THE DECISION to reconstruct Basel Town Hall in 1503 may be regarded as symbolic of the city's sense of enhanced prestige after its accession to the Swiss Confederation in 1501, and of' the citizens' efforts to throw off episcopal domination. Since the middle of the fourteenth century the city council had been successful in gaining basic political rights at the bishop's expense. It was against this historical background that the rear structure on the second floor of the town hall was built, and the Great Council chamber created between 1517 and 1521. The Great Council, which had previously met in the refectories of the Dominicans and the Augustinians, used the town hall for the first time on 21st March 1521. On that day the Great and Small Council jointly repudiated the bishop's authority over the city.

ANDRE CHASTEL, who died at the age of 77 on 18th July 1990, literally dominated art history in France for four memorable decades. His exceptional intellectual brilliance, his vast literary culture, his ironic openmindedness, were universally respected and admired. More than most of his colleagues he had a vivid curiosity about modern art, including film, but he was never swayed by fashion. Very much present on the Parisian scene, always aware of new trends, he nevertheless stood firmly apart from the notorious quarrels between French intellectuals. 'J'appartenais à la génération naïve et de bonne volonté dont la maxime, après tant de traverses, allait être: construire, à la différence du mot d'ordre inverse que la 'dialectique' a mis à la mode', he wrote with candid sarcasm in 1978. He had an aristocratic belief in the value of tradition, without being doctrinaire. Passionately fas- cinated by the great masters of the Italian renaissance - above all by Leonardo - he regretted in French academic culture an absence of sensuous response. He never forgot that French intel- lectual tradition encompasses not only Descartes and Voltaire, but also Montaigne and Rabelais.