In 1634 Herman van Swanevelt was condemned by an ecclesiastical court for not observing a fast day and, according to Giovanni Battista Passeri, was imprisoned by the Holy Office.' After assuring the Inquisition of his willingness to observe the rules more rigorously in future, Swanevelt was held in the sacristy of the Dominican church of S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.2 While there, he painted two fresco lunettes, only one of which survives (Fig. 1).3 A drawing by Swanevelt in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (Fig.2) bears such similarities in format, style and theme to the sacristy fresco that it appears likely to have been a preparatory work for the lost lunette. I intend to show, by an analysis of com- position and subject matter, that this was indeed so.

Recent archival discoveries make it possible to document the presence in Milan of the Flemish portraitist Jacob-Ferdinand Voet, and throw further new light on the hitherto obscure last phase of his career. These documents establish three new fixed points in the Antwerp-born artist's biography - a stay in Milan in 1680, a period of residence in Paris as court painter to Louis XIV and, finally, his death in the French capital in 1689, over ten years earlier than was previously supposed. In addition, a study of the inventories of Milanese collections in the eighteenth century reveals a substantial group of works by the Flemish artist, and enables us to identify sitters of two extant portraits, which show that Voet had a privileged relationship with the family of bankers and prelates from Como resident in Rome, the Parravicini.

In recent years research on Van Gogh's oeuvre has been much in the limelight. The belief has somehow taken hold that the works officially ascribed to him include many more forgeries and spurious attributions than was previously thought, but the resulting controversy has not always illuminated the problems surrounding attribution or rejection.' This article presents the current state of research concerning one of the disputed paintings, Van Gogh's Garden of the Asylum in Amsterdam (Fig. 17; F 659). Doubts as to the authenticity of this work arose as long ago as the 1950s and, despite voices raised to the contrary, have never been dispelled.