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-7- leads us to Dosso Dossi's Jupiter, Mercury and the Virgin and Vermeer's Allegory of Painting. At what I hope turns out to be only a remote risk of being absurd, I believe that Kandinsky's Ambiguite should be seen in the light of this tradition - the painter's history of painting. It arrests attention as the first, and perhaps util now, only attempt to make an abstract painting function as a portrait of the artists at work, unless, of course, all abstract paintings are seen in this way. Although such an argument could be made, I think it would be incorrect, or merely accurate only as it defines the weakest cases of abstraction; tat is, simply accurate as a mean-pritited version of what one can see abstract painting as being. At any event, Ambiguite can be seen as a self-portrait of the artist painting a picture, moving outside of his studio, travelling in an unreal world of pictorial space. The well-known photographs of Kandinsky posing in front of an perhaps working o, his great painting Dominant Curve, surely are the models, direct or indirect, behind Ambiguite. Even thoguh the connection is distant there are a number of things in DOsso Dossi's paintings which are similar in feeling to those present in Kandinsky's Ambiguite. The acknowledgement of a domed, curved, prehaps spherically contained space behind Dossi's play on planitarlily (a picture surface within a picture surface), leads us to image Kandinsy in front his Dominant Cure about to launch himself confidently into a new pictorial space. the only problem is that the depression of central outlining triggers of fear that Kandinsky and his abstract figuration might be sent hurtling out into a space, a void from which they will be unable to return.