On 13th May 1572 Gregory XIII Buoncompagni was elected pope and, with his sights on the Holy Year of 1575, began completing the decorations of the Vatican palace left un- finished by his predecessors. Foremost was the embellishment of the Sala Regia (Fig.4), which was entrusted to Giorgio Vasari who enlisted the collaboration of his friend Don Vincenzo Borghini for the programme and a host of painters and sculptors to expedite the execution. The newly enriched audience hall was unveiled on the feast of Corpus Christi, 21st May 1573,1 when Gregory immediately turned his attention to the adjacent Cappella Paolina (Fig. l).2 Here Vasari was commissioned to devise a decorative programmefor the vault and the narrow vertical fields flanking Michelangelo's last frescoes, the Conversion of Paul and Crucfixion of Peter on the lateral walls (Figs.2 and 3).3 Our knowledge of this project stems from ten well-known letters written by Vasari, Borghini, Gregory XIII's Secretary of State Cardinal Tolomeo Galli, his Cardinal Nephew Filippo Buoncompagni, and Alessandro Musotti the Bishop of Imola,4 including an undated letter from Borghini to Vasari detailing the elaborate invenzione, or iconographic programme which formed the basis for Vasari's decorative scheme.5

The visual culture of Spain was virtually unknown in eighteenth-century Britain. Few Grand Tourists ventured into the peninsula, where the roads and hostelries were uninviting and the capital was said to offer nine months of winter followed by three of infernal heat. Inevitably, therefore, the artists of Spain's Golden Age were underappreciated by Britons, though an awareness of Murillo had been stimulated by late seventeenth-century and, early eighteenth-century collectors such as Lord Godolphin, Sir Paul Methuen, Lord Harrington and Sir Robert Walpole.1 If Velazquez was admired at all, it was for his portrait of Pope Innocent X, which could be seen in Rome, rather than for the full range of his art, contained as it then was largely within the walls of the Royal Palaces of Madrid and in the churches and houses of Seville. Nor did prints serve to broaden the view, some later ones being positively misleading, so that while Velazquez's name may have been familiar from publications, his work was still far from being established in the British artistic consciousness. Indeed, when the Water-seller of Seville and the Young men at table arrived in Britain in 1814, they were listed as by Caravaggio in the first inventory of the Duke of Wellington's collection.2

The catalogue raisonne of paintings and drawings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti lists a water-colour of the Nativity produced in 1855 forJohn Ruskin, which has been thought to be a lost work.1 I shall argue that in 1856 it was converted into the central section of the water-colour sketch (Fig. 19) for The Seed of David, executed in oil for Llandaff Cathedral in Wales between 1858 and 1864 (Fig.20).2 I shall also discuss a hitherto unrecorded study for the composition in a British private collection (Fig.23). This drawing, although it has a provenance from friends of Rossetti, the artists Henry Tanworth Wells and Joanna Wells (nee Boyce), who owned a number of other works by the artist, has been overlooked in the literature.3