An exhibition held at the Accademia Italiana, London, in 1993-94 included a small group of goldsmiths' work reput- edly commissioned or once owned by Lorenzo the Magnificent (d.1492).' Among these was a silver-gilt mounted rock-crystal reliquary from the church of S. Lorenzo in Florence (Figs.2 and 12), which has frequently been published2 and is attributed in recent literature to the fifteenth-century Tuscan goldsmith Francesco d'Antonio of Siena,3 presumably on the basis of a superficial ornamental similarity between it and a reliquary by Francesco in Siena.' It is, however, demonstrably untrue both that the S. Lorenzo reliquary was made by Francesco d'Antonio, and that it belonged to Lorenzo de'Medici, for the silver-gilt mounts bear clear London hallmarks for 1511-12 and a maker's mark of a cross within a shield, struck on the foot (Fig.8), lip and cover (Fig. 15). It is, moreover, richly decorated with ornament symbolic of the Tudor dynasty and, more specifically, of the union between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, who were married in 1509. Although the crystal body would naturally have lent itself to use as a reliquary, there is no evidence to suggest that it was originally mounted to be anything other than a secular object. As such, its importance to our understanding of early Tudor court plate is difficult to overstate.

Born in Forli in the Romagna, Giovanni Giardini (1646-1721) spent most of his working life in Rome, where he became the leading goldsmith of the late baroque era, holding the posts of maestro argentiere to the Vatican Palace and, from 1698, bronze founder to the papal camera. A steady flow of publications from the late 1950s - an entry in Costantino Bulgari's dictionary of goldsmiths of 1958, Carlo Grigioni's small but informative monograph of 1963, an article by Angelo Lipinsky of 1971 and a note by Marco Collareta accompanying the 1978 facsimile edition of the celebrated repertory of Giardini's designs, the Disegni diversi published in Rome in two editions in the eighteenth century, the first in 1714 - has greatly added to our knowledge of this exceptionally interesting figure.' Some newly attributed works can now be added to his oeuvre and a group of documents to the archival information published by Bulgari and Grigioni - neither of whom provided exact citations or full transcriptions and whose summaries are not always entirely reliable.

Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 4th baronet (1749-89), was one of the leading British patrons of the later eighteenth century, who began assembling his fine collection of paintings during his Grand Tour in 1768-69. He loved music and drama, and had a passion for architecture.' T.E Pritchard, James Gandon, Capability Brown and James Wyatt all worked at Wynnstay, his Denbighshire seat,2 and his London house, 20 St James's Square, was built by the Adam brothers in 1771-74.3 Sir Watkin was one of the wealthiest commoners in Britain, having inherited the extensive Wynnstay estates in North Wales and Shropshire at the age of six months. When he came of age in 1770, he gained control of an income of about £27,000, together with capital reserves accumulated during his minority. Over the next few years he spent so lavishly that by 1776 he had incurred debts of £100,000, a sum so large that for the rest of his life he was constantly in need of ready money. Many of his purchases of paintings, silver, furniture and ceramics are recorded in a series of personal account books running from 1770 to 1781 kept by his servant Samuel Sidebotham, and by bills of the same period.4 These indicate munificent, if conventional, tastes. Sir Watkin patronised, among others, Batoni, Mengs, Reynolds, Dance, Wilson, Paul Sandby and Nollekens. He acquired works by Luca Giordano, Guercino, Sebastiano Ricci, Guido Reni, Murillo, Pannini, Cuyp, Dughet, and van Goyen, and he astonished his contemporaries by giving £650 for Poussin's Landscape with a man killed by a snake, now in the National Gallery, London. He bought porcelain from William Duesbury and James Giles, was an important patron of Josiah Wedgwood, and acquired Meissen, Tournai, and Sevres services from the London china dealer Thomas Morgan. The accounts end in 1781, when Sidebotham was pro- moted steward at Wynnstay. By then Sir Watkin's affairs had reached the point of crisis, with growing impatience from his creditors and his estate income in decline. Over £40,000 had been spent on the St James's Square house,5 and recorded purchases of plate amount to £4,500 (the actual total was certainly higher), exceeding expenditure on works of art. Much of Sir Watkin's silver remained in the possession of his descendants until sold in 1946.6 This, together with the wealth of surviving documentation, both written and visual, permits an overview of his patronage of silversmiths, and in particular a reconstruction of his Adam service of 1773-75, which is the largest architect-designed silver service of the eighteenth century.