A large number of documents concerning the construction and decoration of the Palazzo Magnani, Bologna, have - unlike those contained in the private Archivio Magnani Guidotti and published by Giancarlo Roversi in 19841 - gone almost completely unnoticed up to now in the Archivio di Stato in Bologna.2 Most of this huge bulk of unbound papers is of secondary interest for the art historian, consisting of lists of payments made to carpenters, blacksmiths and the like. However, the series of 'bilanzi del libro della fabrica' from 1576 to 1599, mentioned only briefly in a recent article on the architecture of the palace, deserves more attention.

Van Dyck's Italian sketchbook, housed in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, contains some two hundred sheets recording paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and people that he saw during his years in Italy between 1621 and 1627. The sketchbook has been extensively published and discussed, especially by Lionel Cust in 1902 and by Gert Adriani, who produced a facsimile of it in 1940.' This essay continues the work of these scholars by identifying further sources for Van Dyck's drawings, explores the problems of making such identifications, considers how the sketchbook's organisation reflects Van Dyck's goals as a painter, and raises the broader issue of how to interpret Van Dyck's selection in the context of his own work.

The figure of Jan or John Weesop casts the faintest of shadows across the field of painting in England in the early Stuart period. Little has been done to correct the legend transmitted to George Vertue by 'Sykes' (presumably the painter William Sykes) and recorded in a notebook containing information assembled by Vertue between 1713 and 1721.' Sykes apparently told Vertue that a painter called Wesop or Weesep had come to England in 1641, 'in the time of Vandyke' and had remained until 1649, when he stated that he would never stay in a country which had executed its king 'in the face of all the world & was not asham'd of the Action'. Sykes also stated that many pictures painted by Weesop 'pass for Vandyke' and that he had lived under the same roof as the father of the painter W. Wilson. In February 1723 Vertue found in the Register of Burials in the church of St Martin-in- the-Fields the name of John Weesop whose burial 'at Westminster' was recorded in 1652.2