THE CA'D'ORO in Venice possesses a small but very valuable collection of Italian terracottas, some of which were included in Bianca Candida's catalogue published in 1981.1 Among these are four signed with the initials of Stefano Maderno - Hercules and the Nemean lion (Fig.1), Hercules and Cacus (Fig.2), Hercules and Antaeus (Fig.3), and Neoptolemus with Astyanax - in addition to two unsigned copies of antique sculptures, the Apollo Belvedere (Fig.4) and the Farnese Hercules (Fig.5), which Candida also ascribes to Maderno. Not included in Candida's catalogue, but studied by other scholars, are terracotta models of two of the figures from Bernini's Fountain of the Rivers, in the Piazza Navona, Rome - the River Plate and the River Nile. The exceptional technical quality of the last two allows no doubt about their author- ship; it is unanimously agreed that they are working models made by Bernini himself.

UNLIKE their over-confident predecessors, for whom Talavera was the only Castilian pottery of significance in the sixteenth century, present-day historians take a more measured view of this problematic subject.* Documents are few, and not always clear: indisputably documented pieces, apart from tile-panels, do not exist; and reliable archaeological evidence is extremely scanty. Certainly, in the last two decades of the century Talavera came to dominate the market, but before then it had to compete with the other thriving pottery centres, Puente del Arzobispo and Seville. The documents discussed here for the first time show that Toledo, well-known for its arista tiles, was also producing tin-glazed earthenware as good as that of Talavera and equally deserving of royal patronage. Although all authorities state that the tiles for Philip II's monastery- palace, the Escorial, were made in Talavera, in fact half of them, together with a large quantity of glazed wares for the gardens, were made in Toledo.

RECENT extension of the Ceramics Galleries at The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, County Durham - a project fostered by the late David Garlick - has allowed an opportunity to review the wide variety of eighteenth-century S6vres porcelains acquired in France in the 1860s and early 1870s by the Museum's founders, John and Josephine Bowes. There are more than five hundred pieces of Sevres in the Museum's collection of over 1500 examples of European (excluding British) porcelain. The range of items suggests that the Bowes's collecting strategy was to acquire a wide selection of material from across Europe and such a policy for ceramics would be consistent with other sec-ions of the Museum's collection. In contrast to collectors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who pursued the formation of specialist collections, the Boweses chose generalisation. The systematic study of porcelain was then still in its infancy, and they were collecting too quickly across the field of fine and decorative arts to take time to become experts. They depended for advice on their regular agents, the Parisian dealers Lamer and Lepautre, who dispatched consignments of objects to Josephine Bowes for approval or rejection.

PHILIP POUNCEY, who died on 12th November 1990 at the age of eighty, had achieved a pre-eminent position and an international reputation as an authority on Italian painting and drawings. He was above all a connoisseur, in the sense of one whose particular skill lies in distinguishing the hands of individual artists, and his grasp of the styles and artistic personalities not only of the great masters but also of the countless minor figures of all the Italian schools from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century was phenomenal. Apart from the three British Museum catalogues of drawings of which he was joint author and a short but invalu-able monograph on the drawings of Lorenzo Lotto, his published writings were confined to short articles and reviews of catalogues, in which he discussed specific problems of attribution; and the most substantial record of his life's work is in the innumerable annotations in his hand on the mounts of drawings in the European and North American printrooms. Outside a relatively narrow circle of academic art historians, museum curators and specialist art dealers and auctioneers, his name was little known. Within that circle it was revered, and his opinion accepted as a final judgement.

JOHN GORDON BECKWITH, who died on 20th February aged 72, was one of the most learned and certainly the liveliest of the historians of medieval and Byzantine art working in England in the decades after the last World War. He had had a strange childhood. His mother had died when he was aged two, giving birth to a younger son. Soon afterwards his father completely disappeared. John knew nothing of what had happened to him till, nearly fifty years later, the police made contact with him to ask him if a certain John Frederick Beckwith was his father. The old man had died living alone in a room in the East End; and the police had been able to identify him only because he had kept newspaper cuttings telling of his son's books and lectures. Meanwhile the boys were looked after by their paternal grandmother. But she died when John was still in his teens; and his brother was killed early in the War. John was left alone, apart from some cousins who were fond of him. However, the family was Catholic, and John won a scholarship to Ampleforth, which, for the rest of his life, he regarded as a second home.