THE SMALL PAINTING (Fig.1) attributed to Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze (active 1346, died 1379), now in the National Gallery, London, is unique in shape and unusual in iconography. It was first connected with the Dominican church of S. Maria Novella in Florence by Millard Meiss who described it as a ‘sort of hagiographic compendium of the church’, and suggested that the dossal format was a deliberate repetition of a thirteenth-century design ‘motivated less by the artistic intention of the painter than by the wish of his patron to possess a sort of replica of a Dugento painting made memorable for religious or other reasons’, or possibly a replica of an altarpiece in the Gondi chapel in the same church. The painting was indeed a replica, but not of the kind envisaged by Meiss, and its shape and iconography can be explained by its unique function, deeply integrated within the church, perhaps reflecting Dominican practice in a way not so far discerned in any other Italian fourteenth-century work.

GIORGIO VASARI DESCRIBED Fra Angelico as an ‘excellent painter and miniaturist’, yet despite this, or perhaps because of Vasari’s evident inaccuracies, his activity as a miniature painter has received less attention than his work on a larger scale. While recent exhibitions have proposed new attributions and chronologies, one at S. Marco, Fra Giovanni Angelico pittore miniatore o miniatore pittore?, underlined the importance of his work as a miniaturist and the decisive influence of his figurative style on a circle of miniaturists working for the monastery of S. Marco and on other commissions around the mid-fifteenth century. These artists’ fidelity to their master’s style still makes it difficult to establish which are his autograph works or to assess the role of his collaborators. While some works, for example a gradual and two psalters (MSS 558, 530 and 531; all at S. Marco), have been almost unanimously accepted as Angelico’s work, more recent attributions, such as a choirbook (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence; corale 43) and a fragment with St Benedict in a private collection in Turin, are still the subject of debate. Thus the work of Angelico and his immediate circle as miniaturists has yet to be defined, in particular in regard to the accepted body of work, the question of autograph status and the establishment of a chronology.

AT THE END of her introduction to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Mantegna, 1431–1506 shown last winter at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, Dominique Thiébaut issues a generous invitation: by absorbing the content of show and book, visitors and readers should arrive at their own Mantegna. The exhibition gave munificent scope to do just that – not least because it contained such extraordinary loans, a marvellously different array from those seen in the 1992 exhibition in London and New York or even in the several Italian exhibitions of 2006. The show’s supreme feat was the reunion of the three predella panels from the S. Zeno altarpiece of 1456–59 (cat. nos.51–53), brought together for the first time since 1956, and seen with the London Agony in the garden (no.48; dated c.1453–54) and the New York Adoration of the shepherds (no.50; dated c.1455–56). But this was only the first of a sequence of many fascinating groupings.

THE ‘TRIUMPH OF LOVE’, recently acquired by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is a little-known work by Titian which has not always been accepted as autograph (Fig.34). Its restoration by Jill Dunkerton at the National Gallery, London, has revealed that the painting was originally rectangular in shape, and that the Cupid standing on a lion was shown in a fictive oculus (see Appendix below). Its provenance can now be traced to the collection of Gabriel Vendramin (1484–1552). The inventories and documents concerned mostly lack attributions, so that the Triumph of Love is described as Titian’s work only from the late eighteenth century. 

THERE ARE SEVERAL lacunae in the biography of Leonardo da Vinci. Among them there is little documentary evidence to record his exact whereabouts from late 1500 to mid-1502. This note proposes that during this period of turmoil and change, following the French invasion of northern Italy, Leonardo can be found working for Cesare Borgia earlier than is usually assumed.

‘THE TIME MAY COME when we shall require a complete study of Cézanne’s work, a measured judgment of his achievement and position’, wrote Roger Fry in this Magazine in 1917, reviewing Ambroise Vollard’s recently published biography of the artist, adding that ‘it would probably be rash to attempt it as yet’. Less than ten years later, Fry himself had done just that and produced a landmark book which is arguably still the most sensitive and penetrating of all explorations of Cézanne’s pictures. Written at a time when Cézanne was still not widely accepted in Britain as a modern master, and when the only published studies of him had been largely biographical and anecdotal, Fry’s study breaks new ground, peering over the artist’s shoulder to recreate his works, as though witnessing their very inception. ‘If one would understand an artist, one must sooner or later come to grips with the actual material of his paintings’, asserted the critic, ‘since it is there, and nowhere else, that he leaves the precise imprint of his spirit’. In so far as any writer could fathom the richness and complexity of Cézanne’s achievement, Fry succeeded; and his book on the artist remains the supreme introduction to a painter he justly regarded as the ‘greatest master of modern times’.