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The pilgrimage church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro in Milan is the first major work built by Bramante. Although a small chapel to house a miracle-working image of the Virgin was begun as early as 1478, Bramante’s involvement is not documented until 1482, about when the chapel, parts of which can still be seen at the crossing when viewed from the Via del Falcone, was transformed into the present structure. Despite the building’s unusual shape, the design was probably conceived as a whole.

The church, attached to the small, round, 9th-century church of San Satiro (the exterior of which was refaced), is planned as a conventional Latin cross with aisled nave, domed crossing and three-bay transepts. Two doors lead into the transepts from Via del Falcone to regulate the throngs of pilgrims.

At the intersection of the right transept and the nave is Bramante’s remarkable octagonal sacristy, the interior view of which is shown on the photo. Apart from the octagonal sacristies at Loreto, its most immediate model is local: the chapel of Sant’Aquilino attached to the Early Christian church of San Lorenzo, Milan, both of which were then believed to be antique. The lower storey of the interior of Bramante’s sacristy has eight large niches that are alternately curved and rectangular, folded ornamental pilasters in the corners with exquisitely wrought stone Corinthian capitals, and an entablature with all’antica heads and reliefs in the tall frieze executed by Agostino Fonduli. A second storey is encircled by a gallery with two arched openings on each side; the lighting is from the vault above.

View the diagonal section of the sacristy.

During his first three years in Genoa, Van Dyck was paid for portraits of Marcello Durazzo and his wife Caterina Balbi (now in Genoa). The traditional configuration features celebratory elements, such as the column and drapes, but the relaxed execution and the nobleman’s insouciant pose point to a new and entirely individual sensitivity.

With his usual freedom, Van Dyck painted this Genoese marquis leaning against a pillar in a relaxed and negligent pose; yet the keen, forceful gaze also suggests the nobleman’s spirited, imperious character.

Johann Wilhelm Joseph Janaz of the Palatinate, also called “Jan Wellem” (1658-1716) was from 1679 Johann Wilhelm II, Duke of J�lich and Berg and from 1690 also treasurer of the Holy Roman Empire, Count Palatine Elector Palatine and Count Palatine-Duke of Palatinate-Neuburg. His equestrian statue is located at the Marktplatz in D�sseldorf-Altstadt.

The red chalk drawing on the recto of this sheet depicts a group of nude figures which appear as archers aiming at a herm in the guise of a youth. Strangely, the bows are not depicted in the drawing. The drawing can be interpreted as an allegory. The verso contains several notes from which it can be derived that the Archers belongs to Michelangelo’s presentation drawings.

By 1630, Poussin was moving towards the uncompromising statements about the moral condition of humanity that were to characterize his work. In that year he painted the Plague of Ashdod (Louvre, Paris), which sets the style and mood of his work for the next five years. The following year he painted the Empire of Flora, a more cheerful subject but with a similarly interlocking frieze of figures. It is round these two pictures, datable through documents, that the rest of Poussin’s pictures supposedly painted around 1630 have to be grouped.

This is one of the earliest paintings executed by Poussin in Rome. It was commissioned by the Sicilian nobleman Fabrizio Valguarnera.

A dark, handsome gypsy tells the fortune of a simpering young woman. Behind her a comic figure steals whatever the gypsy has hidden in her cloak, winking and signaling to an accomplice, who sports a ludicrously feathered fur hat and scraps of tattered finery. He points to the gypsy’s victim, but she, despite her foolish look, seems to win the day, as she gestures toward the spectator, and invites him to enjoy the spectacle of the deceiver deceived.

Vouet’s painting, with its three-quarter length figures, owes much to Caravaggio and Manfredi, but it is more farcical in tone.

Restraint and balance, softness and silence emerge from this bowl of plums which is quintessential of Jacques Linard’s refined art.

The painting is signed lower right: I. LINARD

Simpler versions of the tomb of Mary of Hungary are to be seen in the monuments for Charles, Duke of Calabria (d 1328) and his second wife Mary of Valois (d 1331) in Santa Chiara, Naples. In the artistic environment of Naples, Tino di Camaino adopted the highly prized, polychrome decorative style of Roman Cosmati work and attempted to combine it with his own, Tuscan style.

Lodewijk de Vadder became a master in Brussels in 1628 and depicted the Forêt de Soignes in spontaneous atmospheric vistas of sunken roads running between sand-dunes overgrown with heavy trees.The immediate character of his depiction of nature is suggested by his loose brush strokes.

The present painting depicts a wooded landscape with figures on a path, and a village beyond.

Clotho is the youngest of the Three Fates or Moirai, in ancient Greek mythology. She was responsible for spinning the thread of human life.

This highly impressive plaster is one of Claudel’s most unusual figures: a haggard old woman, well marked by physical decay, her body is skin and bones.

The documented friendship between Meyring and the painter Carl Loth may account for certain affinities between some of Meyring’s sculpture and the work of the Tenebrist painters; knowledge of the figurative world of the painter seems to have fired Meyring’s imagination. This can be seen, for example, in the sculptural ensemble of the high altar in the church of San Mois�. The composition, centred on the mountain, is divided into stage scenes. The statues are grouped from the summit down its slopes to the bottom in order to suggest a narrative flow that articulates the biblical story. The Eternal Father, surrounded by angels, hands over to Moses the tablets of the law on Mount Sinai, while in Moses’s absence, following the instructions of Aaron, three figures prepare the jewelry that will be used for the golden calf. The story is concluded in the relief on the altar frontal with the episode of the Jews who after raising the golden calf onto the altar give themselves over to joyous abandon. The Eternal Father seems to refer back to Loth’s altarpiece in San Silvestro.

Santa Maria del Parto was founded by Jacopo Sannazaro, on land (Mergellina) donated to him by King Frederick I of Aragon in 1497. Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530) was an Italian poet, humanist and epigrammist from Naples. His tomb, made by Montorsoli assisted by Ammanati, is in the church.

At the sides, under the sarcophagus, are seated figures of Apollo and Minerva, in the centre is a mythological relief with Pan, Marsyas, Euterpe, Neptune and Amphitrite, and at the top is the laureated bust of Sannazaro, between two putti balanced on the lid of the sarcophagus.

An epitaph by the Venetian cardinal Pietro Bembo, secretary to Pope Leo X, on the tomb base reads: “From flower to sacred ashes, here lies the famous and sincere Sannazaro, near to Virgil in poetry as in sepulchre.” Virgil’s tomb is found nearby in Naples.

Both Montorsoli and Ammanati worked under the spell of Michelangelo, whose statue of Giuliano de’Medici was adopted by Ammanati as the basis of the Apollo on the tomb. Montorsoli’s two putti on the sarcophagus, each with its outer arm thrown expansively across the body, also stem from Michelangelo. The bust was worked up by Montorsoli from a cast of the poet’s face and skull.

Gabriele Riccardi was an important architect of his time in Lecce.

The church of Santa Croce (Holy Cross) was begun in 1549 from a sketch by Riccardi and completed two centuries after by Francesco Antonio Zimbalo and by Cesare Penna. Its Baroque fa�ade presenting an exuberant wealth of decorations is the maximum expression of the Baroque Leccese.

The interior of the church is a Latin cross with three aisles on columns, with pompous decoration of the capitals and with a wooden ceiling, gilded chests in the greater aisle where there is a cloth that represents the trinity.

The four paintings in the Royal Collection (Psyche Honoured by the People, Psyche’s Parents Offering Sacrifice to Apollo, Psyche Served by Invisible Spirits, and Venus Punishing Psyche with a Task) form part of a series of twelve, illustrating incidents from the story of Cupid and Psyche as recounted at considerable length by Apuleius in The Golden Ass (Books 4-6).

In general terms Apuleius tells how Venus sought to punish the young Psyche, whose beauty challenged even that of the goddess of love. Accordingly, Venus instructs Cupid to arrange for an unsuitable match for Psyche, but instead Cupid himself falls in love with her. He installs Psyche in his palace, but chooses to visit her only at night. Psyche’s sisters, however, overcome by jealousy, maintain that her lover is in reality a monster. Her curiosity aroused, Psyche, although strictly forbidden to look at him, observes Cupid by the light of a lamp, but taken by surprise she allows oil from the lamp to fall on Cupid and so wakens him. To punish Psyche for her disobedience Cupid disappears. He is sought far and wide by Psyche, but in vain. Both Cupid and Psyche thus incur the wrath of Venus. Psyche then tries to win back Cupid’s favour by performing numerous well-nigh impossible tasks set for her by Venus. These she undertakes successfully except for the last which involves the recovery of Persephone’s casket from Hades.

Although expressly told not to open it, Psyche is again overcome by curiosity and opens the casket only to find that it does not contain beauty, but a deadly sleep that overwhelms her. At this point Jupiter, encouraged by Cupid, takes pity on Psyche and consents to their marriage in heaven.

Even though the series by Giordano amounts to twelve scenes, the Neapolitan artist by no means depicts the narrative in full, and in this respect the series appears to have been left incomplete. The four scenes chosen here illustrate different parts of the story.

Psyche honoured by the People and Psyche’s Parents offering Sacrifice to Apollo are consecutive incidents from the beginning of the sequence. They refer respectively to the open acknowledgement of Psyche’s beauty that provokes the initial jealousy of Venus, and the anxiety felt by Psyche’s parents on suspecting that the goddess has been angered.

The story of Cupid and Psyche was open to several interpretations, some of which during the Renaissance were of a philosophical disposition, but it would appear that Giordano has concentrated more on the narrative elements. The first composition (Psyche honoured by the People) is possibly derived from the sixteenth-century engraving of the subject by the Master of the Die, which forms part of an extensive and influential series of prints designed by Michael Coxie and illustrating Apuleius’s text with a certain degree of literalness. Several of the subjects treated by the Master of the Die were not included by Giordano. An essential difference is that Giordano depicts Cupid as a youth rather than as a child.

The paintings are late works by the artist dating from 1692-1702, the years when he was in Spain at the court of Charles II. The fluidity of the brushwork, the sheer liquidity of the paint, the spirited inventiveness of the compositions, together with the delicate, refined colours are highly characteristic of Giordano at the height of his powers. The charm of the paintings is enhanced by the reduced scale which Giordano so often eschewed in favour of large decorative schemes. Essentially, the story of Cupid and Psyche was a suitable subject for a court artist. The series may indeed have been painted for Queen Maria Ana, the wife of Charles II of Spain, since they were apparently given by the queen to the Duc de Grammont after the death of the king in 1700.

This engraving is usually called, not quite accurately, Moses Surrounded by the Patriarchs. Its theme is a variant of one common in medieval cathedral porches, the ancestors and antitypes of Christ, and the arrangement of the figures on truncated columns against a vaulted recess is also a direct echo of the practice of the Middle Ages. In certain details, moreover, the figures seem to go back to medieval models. The Abraham and Isaac group, and the Melchizedek, are both types best known in the north porch of Chartres, and some of the other figures with their cross-legged dancing poses almost suggest that Duvet had in mind models such as the sculptures of Moissac and Souillac.

The painting, now in the St Anne Chapel of the St. Nicholas Church, originates from the Carmelite Monastery in Ghent.

The subject is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XI: 100–145). In gratitude to Midas, King of Phrygia, for saving the life of Silenus, his foster-son, Bacchus offered to grant the king whatever he wished for. Midas unwisely wished that “all that my body touches turn to gold,” but was soon dying of thirst and hunger as a result. When he returned to Bacchus to ask him “to undo the favour that he had done for him,” Bacchus told him to wash in the source of the Pactolus, which from that day carried grains of gold in its waters. Midas can be seen washing himself at the centre left, while the figure of a large, reclining river god, a personification of the Pactolus, dominates the foreground.

The fact that in his more mature religious works Vittore Carpaccio sees Giovan Battista Cima as a close and reliable point of reference, because Cima was another artist who was unwilling to keep constantly up-to-date with the latest innovations in the art language, is noticeable also in altarpieces like the St Thomas in Glory between St Mark and St Louis of Toulouse, a panel painted in 1507 for the church of San Pietro Martire in Murano and now in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

The painting belongs to the series of four entitled Scenes from the Life of Joseph the Hebrew, now in the National Gallery, London. These works, together with others by Andrea del Sarto, Francesco Granacci, Bachiacca and Franciabigio, were intended for the decoration of the nuptial chamber of Francesco Borgherini and Margherita Acciaioli, who married in 1515. The group of fourteen paintings, broken up at the end of the 16th century, was contained within a wooden decoration made by Baccio d’Agnolo.

In the Punishment of the Baker, as in the Joseph Being Sold to Potiphar, the artist uses the arrangement of figures to guide the onlooker’s gaze from the foreground towards the background of the painting. In the latter the action follows a serpentine course, in the former a zigzagging one. From the pardon of the cup-bearer, newly admitted to serving the pharaoh, the various stages of the baker’s punishment are simultaneously represented.