Charles Hope

Nicholas Penny refers to an ‘unwritten protocol’ involving the consultation of external scholars before a national institution exhibits works in private hands whose attribution might be controversial (Letters, 23 January). Regardless of the relevance of that protocol, the websites of the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum all indicate that these institutions...

Loan exhibitions are often supposed to contribute to knowledge by showing side by side pictures that are not normally juxtaposed. But as reservations are almost never expressed, in the catalogue or on the labels, about the traditional attribution of works that have been loaned, the impact of such comparisons tends to be rather muted. This seems to have happened with two of the pictures supposedly by...

‘Al-Qaida thought it had some reason to believe that the US would retreat from the Middle East in response to its attacks,’ Thomas Nagel writes, adding that ‘as it turns out, the US presence in the Middle East has not been reduced’ (LRB, 8 September). Whatever al-Qaida thought, Osama bin Laden gave specific reasons for the 9/11 attacks, in particular US support for Israel, UN sanctions against...

SIR: I fear that I quite failed to make it clear to Mr Rykwert (Letters, 20 December 1984) exactly what I found so difficult to accept in Leo Steinberg’s thesis. In his book Steinberg principally does two things. He draws attention to a change that occurred in European, and particularly Italian, art from about the middle of the 14th century – namely, the increasing tendency of artists to show the...

SIR: Jaynie Anderson is quite right to point out (Letters, 5 April) that I conflated the two Vischers, Friedrich Theodor and Robert, in my review of Edgar Wind’s volume of collected papers; and I apologise for my carelessness. But this mistake fortunately does not negate my claim that Wind’s review of Gombrich’s biography of Warburg was unduly tendentious. In his dissertation on Botticelli, Warburg...