For buffs of Old Master shows, the first startling thing about the Rosso show at the National Gallery in Washington is that it was possible to have it.[1] Rosso was a brilliant and unusual painter of the era of Michelangelo, working at first in Florence and Rome, later in France, in the early sixteenth century. For artists of that era, full-scale one-man shows, with loans from museums of many different countries, seem virtually to have ceased. It has been thirty years since we saw the last one devoted to either of the artists commonly linked with Rosso as the creators of Mannerism: Pontormo and Parmigianino. No barrier of this kind seems to apply against the seventeenth century, however, as the Caravaggio and Zurbarán exhibitions have recently illustrated. There appears to be a line drawn somewhere around 1600; to reach earlier seems to breach a feeling about rarity or fragility of objects, if only when it involves a lot by one artist, a feeling which does not reach a disturbing level for works after that date, or for just a few Donatellos or other great earlier objects.

To be sure, there is an argument that the Rosso exhibition is really not so exceptional, because its main focus is on drawings and prints. There is continued acceptance for that kind of limited loan show of a sixteenth-century master, most obviously in the case of Raphael, the artist of that age probably most exalted through an emphasis on his great