I went to the launch of the festschrift for Jean Michel Massing, who is retiring as a Professor of Art History at Cambridge after nearly forty years on the teaching staff, hired the year after I graduated.   It was an extraordinarily impressive occasion with paper after paper by his former students, exhibiting the formidable range of his learning, above all on the transmission of ideas through the medium of prints and the relationship of western to non-western art, including the image of the black and Oceania.   More than his own work, he is interested in his extended influence on the work of his students in a way which is wholly admirable:-