THE LAUDARIO MADE around 1340 for the Compagnia di S. Agnese at the church of S. Maria del Carmine was among the most opulent Florentine manuscripts of the trecento. One of the last great projects of Pacino di Bonaguida, an exceptionally prolific and influential artist documented in Florence between 1303 and 1330, the Laudario was completed by a prominent illuminator of the following generation, the Master of the Dominican Effigies (active c.1325–55). For a century scholars have been reassembling its fragments scattered in public and private collections around the world after being looted during Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy and broken up and dispersed in 1838 at the London sale of William Young Ottley (1771–1836).

THE MOST SIGNIFICANT contribution to printmaking in Bologna made by Domenico Tibaldi (1541–83) was neither his small corpus of ascribed engravings nor his apprenticeship of Agostino Carracci, whose handling of the burin surpassed his own. Rather, it was the influence he exerted as a publisher, transforming the local print trade through his close association with Agostino from the late 1570s to c.1582. The attention given to Tibaldi’s role as Agostino’s teacher has eclipsed this important commercial underpinning of a collaboration that largely shaped the young Carracci’s early Bolognese output of prints. Only recently has the business of prints in sixteenth-century Italy been explored. Our current understanding of the provisions for publishing Agostino Carracci’s plates is still fragmentary, principally based on close readings of the inscriptions on his prints. From this evidence, we know of his reliance on the financial backing of publishers in Venice and Rome, and it has been plausibly argued that he set up a publishing business of his own in Bologna in the mid-1580s. What remains to be elucidated is how Agostino issued prints at the start of his career while he was under Tibaldi’s aegis.

LITTLE IS KNOWN about Carlo Saraceni as a draughtsman for only a very few examples of his drawings are known. A Venetian by birth, Saraceni (c.1580–1620) suffered, like many of his countrymen, from the verdict that he drew little, if at all, and because of his closeness to Caravaggio, he was thought to have followed him in not making preliminary drawings for his paintings. It was only in 1967 that Janos Scholz first identified in this Magazine a number of sheets by Saraceni. The famous cellist, collector and connoisseur was able to link a Martyrdom of St Erasmus, then in his own collection (now in the Morgan Library, New York), with a signed altarpiece of the same subject (Museo Diocesano, Gaeta). Similar in style, and close to Palma Giovane, Saraceni’s presumed teacher, are compositional studies for Joseph and Potiphar’s wife and a Mystical marriage of St Catherine (Morgan Library, New York). According to Scholz, both belonged to the collection of the Moscardo family in Verona. The single piece of paper on which the two scenes were originally drawn was later cut in two.

GUIDO RENI RECEIVED commissions from both the king and queen of Spain and the queen of France between 1627 and 1630, but these prestigious invitations gave both the patrons and the artist considerable grief. The most famous work to emerge from the complex sequence of events that followed their initial enquiries, the Abduction of Helen of Troy (Fig.24), was ordered by Philip IV through his ambassador to the Holy See, withheld by the artist himself who resented the pressure put on him to complete the work quickly, and owned briefly by two merchants and a cardinal before finally reaching Paris in the early 1630s. By then the French queen, Marie de’ Medici, who hoped to get it instead, had gone into exile and could no longer accept it. It was then acquired by Louis Phélypeaux de la Vrillière, a secretary of state for both Louis XIII and Louis XIV, who eventually commissioned nine other paintings of the same size by Italian artists that he installed in the gallery of his elegant new town house in Paris, completed in 1638.

‘AS A PAINTER Caillebotte ranks second among the Impressionists; but as a friend of the great masters of his time he has his place in history’. With this statement in the Thieme-Becker Künstlerlexikon of 1911 Otto Grautoff confirmed that Gustave Caillebotte was above all appreciated as a patron and that his art was falling into oblivion. Grautoff briefly discussed how Caillebotte painted under the influence of the Impressionists, but concentrated on the artist’s controversial bequest to the Musée du Luxembourg. He concluded with a note on Caillebotte’s prints: ‘Caillebotte has also worked as a printmaker; among his sheets mention must be made of: “The oarsmen”, “Old woman wearing a hat” and a portrait of Storelli’. This note stands in sharp contrast to Grautoff’s lack of interest in Caillebotte’s paintings, especially because today this aspect of the artist’s œuvre is virtually unknown: Marie Berhaut’s catalogue of Caillebotte’s paintings mentions only one drypoint, a mirror image of the artist’s painted portrait of Paul Hugot (Fig.32). How did Grautoff come to remark on the prints?

IN THE PENULTIMATE decade of his life, the engraver, painter and poet David Jones (1895–1974) produced one of the masterpieces of his career, Trystan ac Essyllt (he preferred the Welsh spelling to ‘Tristan and Iseult’), which he began just before Christmas 1959. In this work he expresses his own, hopeless infatuation with Valerie Wynne-Williams, who was thirty years younger than he, recently married, and who had gone to live with her husband in Wales. He had met her a year and a half earlier through an exchange of letters in The Times in which they came together in defence of Welsh culture. Earlier in 1959, he had painted for her a picture entitled The Lea Shore (Fig.34), in which Aphrodite embodies her in the posture of the Rokeby Venus with Valerie’s face visible in the mirror.