APART from a baptismal record of 1591, there is no evidence of Jusepe de Ribera in Spain; however, his early career in Italy is now beginning to be better understood.* A painting, recently acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is remarkable for its ingenuity of design and breadth of handling, is likely to be one of his earliest multifigured compositions to have survived (Fig.2). It provides the context for a fresh examination of Ribera's artistic development.

MUCH of the current debate about the origin and function of landscape painting has focused on the conceptual and visual similarities between landscapes and maps. This article concerns a painting which was created when the conventions of landscape and cartography were still being formed, and which has been assigned to both categories. It introduces several hitherto unpublished documents that reveal the name of the artist responsible for the painting and the specific context in which it was commissioned. From this, it is possible to draw conclusions about the painting's practical and symbolic functions, as well as its form.

LEONARDO'S friend, pupil, and later assistant, Gian Giacomo Caprotti di Oreno, called Salai or Salaino, died a 'violent death' on 19th January 1524: a document of March of that year informs us that he was shot, probably by the French troops laying siege to Milan at the time.

FIVE hitherto unpublished documents in Madrid archives, all dating from between 1624 and 1629 (see Appendix), throw new light on the early career of Diego Velazquez at the Spanish court. While four of them are of mainly biographical interest, the fifth concerns a previously unknown group of portraits produced for the Marques de Montesclaros.