A visual and conceptual connexion between Sir Joshua Reynolds's painting of Ugolino, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1773 (Fig. 1) and Jacques-Louis David's Lictors returning to Brutus the bodies of his sons, first shown at the Paris Salon in 1789 (Fig.2), was proposed in an article of 1986 by Stefan Germer and Hubertus Kohle. They argue that Reynolds's picture was a prototype for the process of 'radical subjectivization' through which David offers the viewer a new freedom of interpretation, thus transforming the traditional conception of history painting. Thomas Crow has also recently argued that an important link between painting and liberal patriotism in the pre-Revolutionary decade resided less in the actual choices of subject matter and iconography made by artists than in 'modes or styles of narration that would themselves be lessons in emancipated conduct'. Germer and Kohle's perceptive comparison of the two paintings details this concern for the viewer's active rôle; but, in spite of useful references to Rousseau and Diderot to support their thesis, they are principally concerned with the evidence and meaning of the participatory relationship. The present article will seek to establish a more concrete historical relationship between the two paintings by invoking social, cultural, political and ideological factors. In addition to exploring whether David would have known Reynolds's composition during his work on the Brutus, why it would have been of interest to him, and how it might have affected the meaning of his picture, contemporary French interest in Michelangelo, Dante and Shakespeare will also be adduced.

, why it would have been of interest to him, and how it might have affected the meaning of his picture, contemporary French interest in Michelangelo, Dante and Shakespeare will also be adduced.

WILLIAM DYCE was a painter. He was also an art educator and, on occasion, was marginally involved in the public collecting of art. In addition he was interested in art history, and his views on this had a profound effect on his other activities. The concept of art history held by David Wilkie, Dyce's fellow countryman who was of an earlier generation, was what one might label the organic theory. Art was regarded as having, in its history, an infancy, childhood, and maturity, which were repeated in the career of the individual artist and again even in the progress of each picture, as it moved from the dry, flat, and linear forms of the preparatory drawing to the rich, atmospheric, and painterly. Wilkie's was, for him, a convenient kind of art history since it endorsed, within his own practice as a painter, his decision to change from a detailed to a broader manner- removing this from the realm of personal choice, and bestowing on it a kind of natural inevitability. To Wilkie, aerial perspective and chiaroscuro were devices that best procured for the artist the mental, emotional, and spiritual expression of his subject. These devices reached their full development only late in the history of art.

ON 21st May 1641 abbé Cesare Alessandro Scaglia di Verrua died in his house in Antwerp. He was only forty- nine, but had for nearly three decades played a leading role in the political and diplomatic life of Europe. His links with Van Dyck and Jordaens are familiar to art historians, but his interest in and patronage of the fine arts has not hitherto been known save in the vaguest outlines. A newly discovered document in Biella provides information on at least part of his collection at the time of his death (see the Appendix below), and provides the opportunity for a fresh assessment of this important figure.

THE exhibition Treasures of a Polish King recently on show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, provides the occasion to publish another of the pictures which once belonged to King Stanislaus Augustus of Poland. The red inventory number in the bottom right-hand corner of the Wallace Collection's Lancret, Fête in a wood (Fig.38), identifies the painting as no.23 in the Catalogue des Tableaux appartenant à sa majesté le roi de Pologne of 1795, where it is given to 'Vatteau', and briefly, but identifiably, described. An earlier, undated, description of the same picture in the Warsaw archives was published by Mankowski in 1932: