DURING THE EIGHTEENTH and nineteenth centuries, the Luck of Edenhall (Fig.1) was one of the most famous medieval objects in England. It is a perfectly preserved example of Near Eastern glass-making, and survives along with a protective leather case made for it in western Europe, most probably in England (Fig.2). The glass comes from Edenhall, the Cumbrian seat of the Musgrave family, which gained the estate via marriage in the mid-fifteenth century. Today, the Luck is a key object in the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Nothing has hitherto been known of the object’s history in England before the eighteenth century, but new evidence sheds light on its use and provenance.

IN 1518 Francesco da Castiglione (1466–1542), a canon of S. Lorenzo, Florence, paid about 66 florins to Antonio del Ceraiuolo, also known as Antonio d’Arcangelo (died c.1527), for a panel depicting Christ on the road to Calvary (Fig.6). The painting was for the high altar of the church of the convent of la Crocetta in Florence in the section of the church reserved for the laity (hereafter called the exterior church; see Appendices 1 and 2 below). The money was paid on behalf of Francesco’s spirit ual charge, Suor Domenica da Paradiso (1473–1553), who founded the convent in 1511.

IT CAME AS a surprise to learn from Francesca Fiorelli Malesci’s book on the church of S. Felicita in Florence that the St Matthew tondo currently in a pendentive in the Capponi chapel is a twentieth-century copy of the original painting, which is now in the Laboratorio di Restauro of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence (Fig.10). Records there indicate that, together with the other three tondi of Evangelists from the chapel, the St Matthew had been held in deposit at an unspecified location since 1971 and brought to the Laboratorio di Restauro in 1973. The copy of the painting, which has an identical provenance, was installed in the Capponi chapel in 1975, probably together with the other three Evangelists. The St Matthew is expected to be returned to its original site.

HORACE WALPOLE RECORDS that in the winter of 1787 his favourite cousin and goddaughter, the Hon. Anne Seymour Damer (1749–1828; Fig.24), ‘at the desire of her uncle Lord Frederick Campbell, [. . .] modelled for the new records office at Glasgow [sic] a statue of King George III seven feet high in clay, which she desires to execute in marble’ (Figs.25 and 26). In 1787 Damer was already an established amateur sculptor who in 1781 had executed Niobe, her first work in marble, and had been an honorary exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, since 1784. She had also only recently completed what were to become her best-known works, the masks of Thame and Isis for the keystones of the bridge at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire (c.1784–86). Until then her works had comprised reduced-scale portrait busts – mostly of women or boys – animal sculptures and reliefs. Following the public success of her colossal masks, Damer’s talents were to be fully tested by what was to be her only over-life-sized freestanding full-length portrait.

IN A DISCUSSION of Jackson Pollock’s three sketchbooks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Lisa Mintz Messinger describes the third sketchbook as being ‘distinctive from the two earlier pads, even though they all may be relatively close in date’. Messinger underlines the evidence of Pollock’s ‘acute stress’ in tandem with his ‘overwhelmingly positive’ responses to the work of the Mexican muralists, in particular to José Clemente Orozco, and notes that ‘rather than making copies after other people’s work, as he did in sketchbooks I and II, Pollock now devised original compositions with stylistic and thematic elements broadly based on contemporary Mexican paintings’. In particular, Messinger champions Pollock’s triumph in Sketchbook III because he has made ‘a departure from conventional ideas about composition’ and because the body of work presents an ‘important transition that led Pollock to work from Benton and Orozco, through Picasso and Surrealism, and finally to Abstract Expressionism’. Pollock’s work undoubtedly draws on all these sources, and scholarly attention in recent years has focused on his relationship to the Mexican muralists and to Picasso and Cubism. But in many ways it becomes apparent that Pollock’s work was fuelled by his study of several European painters from the past. While this has been recognised from his drawings in Sketchbooks I and II, it has not been discussed in relation to Sketchbook III. In fact, Messinger’s essay in the Metropolitan Museum catalogue chooses to distance the drawings in Sketchbook III from the old masters, and in so doing glosses over those roots of the Abstract Expressionist movement that were decidedly un-American, specifically in regard to earlier European art.

WHEN ALFRED H. BARR, JR. was appointed founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1929, he abandoned his Harvard dissertation, ‘The Machine in Modern Art’. After being fired from that job in 1943 he changed the topic of his thesis and, three years later, Harvard accepted his book Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art as the first United States doctorate on a living artist.