PAOLO VERONESE'S ‘Portrait of Count Joseph da Porta of Vicenza with his Son’ (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; Fig.2) is first mentioned in a 1913 catalogue of the Sedelmeyer Gallery at 6 rue de La Rochefoucauld in Paris, with a provenance from the Palazzo Porto in Vicenza. By 1924 it was in the collection of Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, and in 1927 baron Detlev von Hadeln published it in connection to the portrait of ‘a lady with her little daughter’ by Veronese, which Henry Walters had acquired from Paolo Paolini in Rome in the early 1900s (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; Fig.1). The portrait of Count Porto was displayed in the Veronese exhibition at Ca’ Giustinian in Venice in 1939 and, in the accompanying catalogue, Rodolfo Pallucchini recorded unpublished research by Giulio Fasolo, according to whom Giuseppe da Porto had married Lucia Thiene in 1545. Pallucchini and Fasolo claimed that Giuseppe and Lucia had seven children, the eldest ones being Adriano and Porzia, but did not provide any specific dates of birth. The identities of the four sitters in Veronese’s portraits in Florence and Baltimore were maintained in all later studies, until Erik Forssman’s 1973 book on Palladio’s Palazzo Porto in Vicenza. Forssman confirmed the identity of Count Porto in Veronese’s painting by illustrating an anonymous sixteenth-century portrait in the Castello di Thiene, which clearly derives from Veronese’s picture and is inscribed: ‘iosephvs portvs. anno domini mdlii. aetatis vero svae xxxii’. He also corrected the names of the adults in the portraits – and first owners of the palace – as Iseppo and Livia, but he still recognised the two children as Adriano and Porzia. All ensuing publications on Veronese, including recent ones, repeat the same identifications and variously date the portraits between 1551 and 1556. The most complete biography of Iseppo da Porto still records 1545 as his wedding date, and Adriano and Porzia as the eldest children from the marriage. However, a significant archival document, long known to Palladio scholars, proves that the usually accepted wedding date and the names of the children are wrong. Thanks to this text it is possible to give the children in the Porto portraits new names and to date the paintings more precisely.

IN THE SIXTEENTH and seventeenth centuries, the album amicorum, or Stammbuch, was especially popular among educated Germans. Begun in the universities, where students obtained memorial signatures of their fellow students and professors, these small, pocket-sized books soon became part of a traveller’s paraphernalia, accompanying him abroad, where he not only obtained the autographs of foreign dignitaries but also commissioned picture-shop artists to make watercolour paintings on its pages. Among the most intriguing of the several thousand surviving albums is that once owned by Jakob Fetzer, now in the collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. The dates of the signatures in this album indicate that Fetzer, from Nuremberg, was in England between July 1618 and May 1620, making trips to Edinburgh in 1619 and Dublin in 1620. While in London, he apparently visited the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey, where he was sufficiently impressed by the grand burial tombs of the first Tudor king and the legendary Tudor queen to commission what may well be unique watercolour paintings of them, each remarkably detailed, and published here for the first time.

IN 1989 SIMON JERVIS heralded in this Magazine the discovery in the National Art Library, London, of the famed connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette’s extensively annotated copies of the cat alogues accompanying the sales of two highly regarded eight eenth-century collections – that of the duc de Tallard in March–May 1756 and that of Jean de Jullienne (Fig.6) in March 1767. Jervis published a tantalising selection of Mariette’s annotations, which hinted at the significance of his marginalia. Upon closer reading, Mariette’s comments on the quality, attribution and authenticity of the artefacts, or asides about their price and provenance, often prove essential in understanding the true content of these collections which, however prestigious, often included copies masquerading as originals. No one at the time would have been a more able judge than Mariette, who knew both collections well and had accumulated decades of invaluable experience as a connoisseur, art historian, dealer and collector. Therefore his erudite critical remarks on individual works offer precious insights into the history of collecting, the art market and connoisseurship. The present article is accom panied by a full transcription of his annotations to the paintings in the Jullienne sale (lots 1–320), which is available online on this Magazine’s  website. A separate article and accompanying transcription concerning the drawings in the same sale (lots 321–1017) will follow.

QUEEN VICTORIA'S AUDIENCE Room at Windsor (Fig.11), lying on the south side of the Upper Ward of the Castle in the heart of the sovereign’s private apartments, provided the setting, at once formal and intimate, for the Queen to conduct official business with her government ministers, ambassadors and senior members of her Household when she was in residence in the Castle. Towards the end of her reign, it was noted that this was the room where the Queen ‘has received all the great men and women of the world, and the walls of which, if they have ears, have listened to many wise words and secrets more sacred than were ever uttered in the most closely tiled Masonic Lodge’. As such, it was the successor to the King’s and Queen’s Audience Chambers in the old State Apartments of the Castle, given up by George IV when he moved the royal apartments from the north to the east and south ranges of the Upper Ward of the Castle in the 1820s. It was also the last, the most elaborate and the most highly finished of a series of projects undertaken by Prince Albert in collaboration with the sculptor, decorator and architect John Thomas (1813–62). Although now somewhat altered, it is perhaps the best surviving but least known example of the Prince’s mature taste in interior decoration. At the same time it stands as one of the most carefully thought out, elaborate and ingeniously constructed pieces of royal iconography in any British royal residence. This article provides an opportunity to reappraise a now largely forgotten interior.

BETWEEN RIVULETS OF colour at each end of a long canvas there is a vast expanse of emptiness. This is Beta Nu (Fig.22), painted in 1960 by the American Morris Louis, one of the longest and certainly the emptiest of over 120 paintings known as Unfurleds. A common view is that the longest Unfurleds, which are over twenty feet in width, are less successful than those, like Gamma Upsilon (Fig.21), at around fourteen feet long. Diane Upright refers to a loss of ‘compositional tautness’ in the longer works. Kenworth Moffett writes that ‘they can seem too long and fall into two distinct but beautiful sides, which only occasionally come together’, and John Elderfield says that Louis ‘courted failure by pulling the areas of colour too far apart’. According to Elderfield, in the best Unfurleds, ‘Louis stretched out the edges not to some indeterminable point of visual concealment, but to the precise point of pictorial unity’. Is there such a precise point? A work of art that seems initially to be devoid of unity, unstable, often over time settles back and is accommodated as a picture, as art. Standards of unity are not static, and Louis saw a new form of unity in advance of his audience. As a result, Beta Nu has been overlooked, even by scholars, critics and artists generally sympathetic to Louis’s work.

‘MAKING PRECEDES MATCHING’: with this famous formula, the epitome of his Art and Illusion (1960), Ernst Gombrich proposed that artists, before they ever dream of copying what they see before them, make pictures by manipulating inherited ‘schemata’ that designate reality by force of convention. At some point an artist compares a pictorial schema to direct observation of the world, and on that basis presumes to correct the schema. This then enters the stock of available formulae until some later artist holds it up to the world and ventures a further adjustment. In this way art may come to have a history. Beholders, in turn, make their own sense of pictures by collating what they see on the canvas with what they know about the world and with what they remember of other pictures.