The great importance that Neo-classical designers placed on using approved design sources was stressed by Charles Heathcote Tatham (1772-1842) when, writing in 1806,' he quoted SirJoshua Reynolds's dictum that: 'Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory'.2 To this magisterial statement, Tatham added his own opinion that 'a familiar knowledge and study of the most approved antique Forms, are greatly wanting to modern Silversmiths . . .; indeed, good Models can never be too often resorted to; they enlarge the powers of Invention, and tend to produce originality of Design.' Such views about the nature of artistic creativity were central to Neo-classical design. Patrons neither expected nor sought complete originality in the modern sense; and most designers were content to work with a common visual vocabulary of images derived mainly from classical antiquity.

The monumental gilded Italian 'renaissance' chests so admired by English collectors during the nineteenth century are a curious and hitherto poorly understood phenomenon in the history of collecting and interior decoration. It will be suggested here that the taste for them was promoted - and probably initiated - by William Blundell Spence (1814- 1900), an Englishman of means who lived in Florence for over half a century and began dealing there in the early 1840s.' By 1856 or soon thereafter,2 he had a gallery in the Palazzo Giugni on the via degli Alfani, the interiors of which are recorded in two paintings (Figs. 14 and 15).3 He retained the gallery after 1861,4 by which time he had moved his residence to the Villa Medici at Fiesole.