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his volume comprises works by a group of painters of the miniaturist - or non-Giottesque - tendency active in the first half of the fourteenth century. Some of them are anonymous artists whose personalities were first recognised and reconstructed by Offner, such as the Biadaiolo Illuminator, the Master of the Dominican Effigies or the Master of the Medici Chapel Polyptych. Others, such as Pacino di Bonaguida and Jacobo del Casentino were already known to scholars before him, but Offner's contribution in the Corpus was decisive for establishing a catalogue of their oeuvres. Today, when the validity of deductions based on connoisseurship is frequently questioned and sometimes plainly dismissed as an "attributionistic game", it is gratifying to observe that Offner's idea of these masters still remains valid after more than 50 years and that many of his suggestions based on his personal intuition have been corroborated by subsequent research. He possibly over estimated the importance of elements like the Sienese or Roman influence on the masters in question and his way of discriminating between autograph and workshop production may have been too strict; but very little remains to be objected against his attributions which, more than not, were made when the paintings were covered with smoke and darkened varnish or misleading restorations that made them barely legible.

Even in cases where we tend to disagree with him today, Offner's opinion usually proves to be illuminating and helpful toward reaching a more satisfying solutions. One may or may not like his term "miniaturist tendency" coined by him but one has to agree that it aptly defines this group of artists who shared certain ideals and characteristics of style.

Technical Features: cloth bound volume (size 31.8 x 24.5 cm) printed on ivory coated paper with coloured dust jacket; 264 pages, 111 black and white illustrations. The volume is priced at $US175-.