LOVERS of the National Gallery will inevitably have mixed feelings about William Coningham. On the one hand he presented to it two beautiful panels of Adoring saints by Lorenzo Monaco (nos.215 and 216; Figs.7 and 8) which have come sensationally into their own in the new Sainsbury wing and it was, indirectly, from his collection that the Gallery was able to acquire some of the very finest Old Masters now to be seen there. On the other hand he was a spiteful and vindictive critic of all its policies at the very time when knowledgeable support was most needed: and as a Member of Parliament and an exceptionally cultivated man he could have provided both knowledge and support.

FITZWILLIAM MS 330 consists of six miniatures cut from a  Psalter designed by the illuminator W. de Brailes. The manuscripts attributed to de Brailes combine exquisite technical finesse and boldly decorative geometric layout of pages with quirky but nonetheless sympathetic pictorial narratives from the Bible. The origins of his style and iconography go back to the early thirteenth century. The design of leaf 1 of Fitzwilliam MS 330 (Fig.9), for example, shows intimate knowledge of the great prefatory page to Genesis in the Lothian Bible, now in New York. De Brailes's figure of God the Creator, like that in the Lothian Bible, is flanked by neat rows of angels, bust length, encased in undulating gold wrappers like expensive chocolates. Beneath God's feet in the Lothian Bible four rebel angels have turned ugly and naked as they tumble out of heaven. They leave vacant an eye-catching space among the gold clouds at God's right hand. De Brailes lays much more emphasis on the purge of the angel host, but he does not indicate any particular place from which the rebels have fallen. He leaves an interesting ambiguity hanging over the loyalty of the ranks of angels above God's head. The uppermost central angel has gilded wings, higher than those of the other angels, and it is to him that the eyes of his companions are turned. The great angel might well be proud Lucifer, and the placing of the personification of Humilitas in the margin above him would then be ironical. That rebellion and errancy are underway in the upper com- partment of the miniature is signalled by the angel at the extreme left top corner, whose head is turned away from his companions, and from God.

A RIGID classification of Italian illumination according to regional schools makes less sense as the fifteenth century progresses. There were still indigenous schools of manuscript illumination based on a flourishing book trade located in the major centres, Florence, Milan, Venice and Naples, and in many lesser cities too. These urban centres had recognisable local styles with their own traditions of transmission and development, especially in varieties of ornamental vocabulary, whether 'white-vine' used mainly for humanistic and secular texts, or foliage scroll used for Christian texts. On the basis of these local variations manuscripts can be assigned to particular centres with a fair degree of confidence.

IN A NOTEBOOK which begins late in 1741 and covers more than eleven years, George Vertue recorded seeing, in the Master's Lodge of Queens' College, Cambridge, 'large flat paintings in oyl after the manner of Albert Dure representing several of Our Saviours Miracles'. In 1891 the three panels, representing respectively the Betrayal of Christ, the Resurrection and Christ appearing to the Apostles, with respectively St Catherine, St Barbara and St George on their reverse sides (Fig.24-29), were included by Frederick Bodley in his design of the east end of the new College chapel, having, according to Thomas Dinham Atkinson, been transferred there from the old one. It was only in 1951 that their first serious art historical assessment appeared when A.D. Browne and C.T. Seltman, in their history of the College, tentatively attributed them to a painter from Cologne called Schoene. For them 'the style recalls Burgundian and North French art, but [it] has a coarseness of conception, though not of execution, which is characteristic of the Cologne School ... The colouring, however, is exceptionally fine and shows a debt to Flemish art.' Although Nikolaus Pevsner, in his volume on Cambridgeshire 1954, describes the paintings as South German, the volume of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments considers them Rhenish, probably from Cologne; the only agreement between the various authors is about a late fifteenth-century dating.

CALLISTO PIAZZA has only recently been studied as a draughts- man, by Giulio Bora in a notable essay in the catalogue of the recent exhibition at Lodi. The drawings Bora assembles, some of which were formerly given to Romanino and Altobello Melone, are characterised by a fluidity and rhythm of line that speak clearly of Piazza's Brescian experience; and, with the exception of a finished modello for an altar-piece in the British Museum, they are exploratory in character. They thus are very different in expression and function from the modello for the lower part of an Assumption published here (Fig.30), which is exceptional both in size and for being heightened not with white but in gold. The calibre of the drawing was recognised by Noel Annesley, who quite correctly pointed to technical analogies in the work of the younger Holbein; analogies which reflect the regular cross currents between north and south that were inevitably felt in all the artistic centres of the Lombard plain.

IN 1797 the great collector Sir Abraham Hume gave to St Laurence, the parish church serving his estate at Wormley in Hertfordshire, a painting of the Last Supper (Figs.32, 37 and 38). Purchased in Milan by Hume's agent Giuseppe Maria Sasso, it was rumoured to have come from a suppressed convent in a village near Verona, that of the 'Rochelin Canons'; if true, this may have been a confraternity dedicated to St Roch, much ven- erated in the Veneto. The canvas, measuring 117 by 316 cm., was placed above the altar, immediately below the east window. In 1842 the painting was removed so that the chancel could be rebuilt and in 1858, when it was re-installed after a petition by the villagers, it was restored.' The Last Supper is painted on a coarse canvas and, apart from fairly widespread pitting, some buckling in the upper left corner and the repair of a small candle-burn lower left (appropriately, on the leg of Judas), seems to be in fair condition under discoloured varnish. There is no re-painting of any consequence.

FROM his youth Rubens was fascinated by the Roman emperors, and sought to capture their characters as well as their likenesses in paint. This is already evident in the early portrait of Nero, published by Michael Jaffe in 1971, part of a series mainly recorded in replicas. Rubens's original of Commodus also sur- vives, and shows the megalomaniac emperor disguised as Hercules. At this period, just before his journey to Italy, Rubens was interested in assimilating human and animal features and char- acters, under the influence of della Porta's De humana physiognomia of 1586; and the Galba from the emperor series, based on an ancient bust, was included in the lost Pocketbook as a bovine type," a circumstance which accounts for the protuberances above the eyebrows in the version of the portrait that has recently come to light (Fig.39).

THERE are still discoveries to be made concerning the oeuvre of Georges de La Tour. Virtually nothing is known of the man himself- neither of his character nor his habits, his religion nor his loves – although an image of him as a rich and rather malevolent country squire has now gained ground, ousting earlier notions of a holy layman, a Lorraine patriot or protector of the poor and oppressed. His painted work appears more astonishing with each new discovery, and although his place is now secure among the great artists of his century, he still needs to be better understood and more securely located in his own times. One cannot tell with certainty whether he was an isolated provincial, scarcely familiar with the great artistic developments of his century, or a painter sure of his own technique who refused to comply with fashion.

PIETRO TESTA was famous among his contemporaries for his original inventions, whether of subjects never before seen, or of more familiar themes enriched with his own capricious ideas. The original invention of the scene represented in a sheet recently acquired by the Princeton Art Museum, therefore, might in itself seem to strengthen its tentative attribution to Testa (Fig.51). To the right St Jerome, accompanied by his lion, writes with a quill on a piece of paper supported by a putto. Two books cast aside by the saint appear in the foreground, one with the name of Cicero written prominently in capitals on its spine. To the left nymphs dance with satyrs to the music of Pan's pipes. Two reclining nymphs direct Jerome's attention to the dancers, but he pays no attention and continues his work. The scene is set in an open landscape with a delicate, leafy tree framing the composition to the left. The contours of a steep mountain range are briefly indicated against the sky beyond the river to the right.

BOTH the early biographers of Mattia Preti agree on the im- portance of the frescoes of St Andrew tied to the Cross, the Martyrdom of St Andrew, and St Andrew carried to his tomb, painted between 1650 and 1651 in the apse of S. Andrea della Valle (Fig.54).' Both emphasise Preti's nervousness in competing with the paint- ings by Domenichino on the vault above, and by Lanfranco in the dome, but in all other respects they differ fundamentally in their account of the enterprise, and their evaluation of the results.

A GREAT inscription above the west door of the church at Staunton Harold in Leicestershire commemorates its foundation 'In the yeare 1653 when all thinges Sacred were throughout ye nation Either demolisht or profaned', by Sir Robert Shirley 'Whose singular praise it is to have done the best things in ye worst times and hoped them in the most callamitous', an encomium applicable to others who have maintained imperilled standards of excellence, and thus fitting to this present context. Although Shirley died a prisoner in the Tower in 1656, his church was completed by the guardians of his son and heir, Sir Seymour Shirley, the fifth baronet, in the early 1660s, and stands a monument to his constancy and their piety.