NEXT YEAR IS the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Chippendale, an event that will be marked in his native county by an exhibition at Leeds City Museum.1 The story of the study of Chippendale, perhaps the only furniture designer and maker whose name is instantly recognisable to a majority of the public, would be an interesting topic to research as it would shed light on the development of furniture history as a scholarly discipline in Britain.

FIGURE-DECORATED POTTERY, produced in  great quantity in Athens and other centres  during antiquity, constitutes one of the most  challenging areas of study for scholars of  Classical art and archaeology.1 The black and red-figure examples provide the largest  surviving corpus of visual material from the  ancient Greek world.