UCCELLO's Hunt in the forest in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Fig.1), is an exceptional work in a number of respects.* No picture painted in the period between 1400 and 1900 represents a more sustained attempt to subjugate a natural scene to the kind of pictorial ordering normally reserved for architectural subjects or settings. Secular, non-historical panel paintings of comparable dimensions rarely survive from the middle years of the fifteenth century, though contemporary inventories suggest that they were relatively common features in the interior decoration of Italian palaces and villas by the 1490s. As a surviving painting of a contemporary hunting scene by a major master, the Hunt has no precise parallel in the Quattrocento as a whole. Since the Ashmolean picture, which had been part of the Fox-Strangways gift in 1850, entered the Uccello canon only in 1898, and no direct documentation or early provenance is definitely known, all the main historical questions must be answered on the basis of the appearance of the picture itself. Not only has the conservation work undertaken on the Hunt by Ann Massing at the Hamilton Kerr Institute of the University of Cambridge provided new evidence about Uccello's technique (including his methods of perspectival construction), but it also presents an ideal opportunity to reassess other aspects of the form and function of Uccello's delightful masterpiece.

ALTHOUGH they form one of the most important painted cycles of the Florentine Quattrocento, Uccello's three panels depicting the Rout of San Romano (Figs.38, 39 and 41), remain far from comprehensively understood, and uncertainty about their original shape has resulted in several unsatisfactory attempts at reconstructing their former set- ting in the Palazzo Medici in Florence. Paul Joannides's recent Shorter Notice in this Magazine has added some useful observations, but some incorrect assumptions and preconceptions should be corrected and the physical evidence thoroughly reviewed.

SANO DI PIETRO's three large panel paintings depicting Bernardino of Siena preaching in the Piazza S. Francesco in Siena (Fig.54), Bernardino ascending into heaven (Fig.53), and Bernardino preaching in the Campo of Siena (Fig.55) are first listed in their present location, the chapter-house of Siena Cathedral, by Ettore Romagnoli in his guidebooks of 1836 and 1840. Since that time, attention has focused on the novel pair of preaching scenes. Dating from some time around the middle part of the fifteenth century, they have been seen as exceptional because they record actual events, and hence are of a type very rare for their time. It has also been noticed that because their renderings of the Palazzo Pubblico and church of S. Francesco are so accurate, they are vital documents for reconstructing the building his- tories of these important places. Their intended setting and function, however, have remained a mystery. Other than the fact that they are said to have come to the chapter- house from the private collection of Antonio Palmieri Nuti, their original provenance, which one might otherwise sup- pose to have been Siena Cathedral, is unknown.

IF EVER a man of our time was 'life-enhancing' it was David Piper, who died on 29th December 1990. As museum director, as man of letters, and as a family man and friend, Piper contributed positively and lavishly, with the same apparent insouciance that enabled him to survive jungle warfare and three years in a Japanese prison camp. He described some of this experience in an article for the Observer, 'I'm well, who are you?', curiously reprinted as a Dutch reading-book, and in a novel, Trial by Battle, both of which contain much of his personal ideals. Fellow- survivors have also described how Piper, then in his early twenties, encouraged the camp inmates with his verse, his theatrical productions, and his general air of civilised acceptance of a particularly horrendous experience.