In recent years Antonio del Pollaiuolo's panel painting of the Elevation of the Magdalen (Fig. 1) has enjoyed better fortune in the town for which it was painted - where it is housed in a special museum - than in the literature on the Pollaiuolo brothers, where it has been relatively neglected. In this arti- cle I shall be reassessing the significance of the painting and the evidence for its patronage.*

It was rare for an artist in pre-nineteenth-century Europe to execute a fresco-cycle single-handedly, from conception to completion. To speed the decoration of a building in late sixteenth-century Rome, the commission would often be divided between several painters,' each of whom might bring in his own team of frescoists and stucco workers. Or a single artist might be appointed as director, who would then select and co-ordinate a group of painters of equal standing.2 Since clear documentation is seldom available, however, the interaction between artists has traditionally remained difficult to study. The team employed by Pope Sixtus V Peretti (1585- 90) was notoriously large, involving some twenty painters at different points in time. In addition to Cesare Nebbia and Giovanni Guerra who superintended the projects, we find Baglione mentioning, among others, Ferraui Fenzoni, Paul Bril, Andrea Lilio, Giacomo Stella, Giovanni Battista Pozzo and Paris Nogari. The present article will focus on several frescoes attributed to these painters in the Sistine Chapel in S. Maria Maggiore and the Scala Santa in Rome. It aims to shed light on the circumstances of their creation through the analysis of several newly discovered preliminary drawings.

The programme of the high altar-piece painted by the young Fra Angelico for his own convent, the Observant Dominicans at S. Domenico, Fiesole, still reserves a few surprises. Astonishingly enough, not all the saints have yet been correctly identified, and the new identifications here proposed may yield some useful general rules to aid in the decipherment of the programmes of other Italian high altar-pieces.

A drawing (Fig.27) sold in 1910 from the Prague collection of Adalbert Freiherr von Lanna, with an old - and in my opinion correct - attribution to Perugino, seems to have escaped the attention of scholars.' After the 1910 sale at Stuttgart, the sheet made its way to the collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein in Vienna and Vaduz, and thence to a private collection in New York, where I had the opportunity to examine it. Drawn in metalpoint on brownish- cream paper, with the outlines indented, it is the study of the face of a bearded man, looking up.2 A less skilful but, in my view, contemporary hand has made additions and emendations with brush and white heightening - filling in the eyeballs, highlighting several parts of the face, and strengthening some areas of the beard.

Around 1522 Bartolomeo Panciatichi the Elder (1469-1533), a Florentine merchant living in France, commissioned from Andrea del Sarto an Assumption for his chapel in Notre-Dame-de-Confort, Lyon (Fig.31).' According to Vasari, the picture was not even finished before its improperly seasoned panel began to split, so it remained, abandoned and incomplete, in Sarto's studio at his death in 1531. We know that the work was acquired by the patron's son, Bartolomeo Panciatichi the younger (1507-82) at some later date,2 and in around 1537-42, the Anonimo Magliabechiano records the picture as in his house." The first edition of Vasari in 1550 also cites the Assunta there,4 but in 1568 Vasari writes that the work was then at the Villa Baroncelli (now Poggio Imperiale) in a chapel which Piero di Alamanno Salviati (1504-64), the owner of the villa from 1548 until his death, had built 'per ornamento di detta tavola'.5 Vasari tactfully omits to mention that in 1565 Cosimo I had confiscated the villa from Piero's estate, as punishment for the crime of his son Alessandro, executed in 1555 for taking up with the fuoruscitiAssumption and the rest of its furnishings, to his daughter Isabella and her husband Paolo Giordano Orsini. Sarto's panel passed with the villa through various further changes of hands, until 1687, when it entered the Grand-ducal collection in the Palazzo Pitti, where it remains today - still visibly unfinished, and with its old cracks showing.

under Piero Strozzi.6 Immediately after the confiscation, Cosimo gave the villa, with the

It has previously gone unnoticed that three double-sided drawings by Federico Barocci in the Uffizi (Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe inv. nos, 1419E, 11453F, and 11564F; Figs.32, 33, 34, 35 and 36) have at some point been cut apart from a single original sheet. All are on similar white paper, and their rectos and versos are primarily executed in pen, ink, and wash.' From the comparable technique and medium it appears that the drawings on both sides were executed at around the same time. When they are brought together and the original sheet is reconstituted, the collective verso presents a sketch of a Florentine cityscape (Fig.33). On the collective recto are three related studies for a Madonna and Child with the young John the Baptist (the upper left study also includes Joseph asleep in the background; Fig.36). These drawings were all listed in Harald Olsen's 1962 catalogue raisonne of the artist, but until now have not received the consideration they deserve.2