When Lodovico Gonzaga learned in 1471 that Leon Battista Alberti's designs for the choir at SS. Annunziata in Florence would cause serious complications for the Servites, he responded by asserting his right to spend his money as he liked 'without having to justify ourselves to others'.' The patron had his way, but the decision of the friars in 1500 to commission the largest Florentine altar-piece of the renaissance shows their need, in the wake ofthe choir's completion, to organise better the liturgical spaces within their church. The history and reconstruction of the altar-piece informs us about the functions which this double-sided structure served within the Annunziata itself, as well as illuminating the development of high altar-piece in the Cinquecento. An analysis of new documents and published sources also clarifies how the Servites aimed to glorify the Virgin and their own order through commissions to four of the most prominent artists active in Florence: Baccio d'Agnolo, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, and Pietro Perugino.

There has been much scholarly conjecture about the date and early history of Bronzino's Pieta with Mary Magdalen in the Uffizi (Fig. 16). ' Earlier this century its attribution was disputed between artists as diverse as Pontormo and Santi di Tito and, although Bronzino's authorship is no longer in doubt - his signature emerged during restoration in 1989 - central questions about the work's original location, patron, and function have remained unanswered. All that has hitherto been known is that the Pieta was removed from S. Trinita, Florence, in 1810, and reached the Uffizi between 1870 and 1925. However, newly-discovered documents (see the Appendix below) now reveal its date and patron as well as its original site in the church. This information opens the way to an understanding of some of the panel's more striking and anomalous features.

It cannot be often that a romantic novel provides the clue for the rediscovery of an important series of works of art, but this is the case with the group of late sixteenth-century Florentine paintings which is here published for the first time. The book in question, by Monsignor Giovanni Maria Vignolo, has the unpromising title La regina e il re della fava, ossia Teodolinda ed Accaccio, and appeared in Turin in 1867. Its plot- the peripatetic adventures of a pair of betrothed lovers through the Val di Susa in the company of their parish priest - is little more than a pretext for an artistic and historical guide to an area of Piedmont particularly rich in rnonuments and works of art. At one point the art-loving priest, Don Vignolo, recounts a visit to Reano, a feudal possession of the Dal Pozzo family, and describes the fine new neo-gothic parish church recently erected by Don Carlo Emanuele Dal Pozzo, Principe della Cisterna, in which, he states, there are valuable old paintings, brought there from Pisa.l This is a somewhat surprising claim, but it proves not to be unfounded, for the paintings remain there to this day (Figs.28-38).