Research into the influence of the tapestry designs of Raphael and his pupils on Flemish artists during the second third of the sixteenth century has largely focused on the impact of the cartoons - rather than the tapestries woven from them - as it was the former which would have been most accessible in the Brussels workshops.' Indeed, the structure of the low warp loom on which the majority of tapestries were then made concealed the front of the tapestry during the weaving process,2 and completed hangings would have been seen only by the audience around the eventual owner. Yet, while these circumstances ensured that the tapestries themselves played a lesser role in the dissemination of aesthetic ideas to the Flemish artistic community, the opposite was the case with rich patrons and their circles elsewhere. Quite apart from the attention which the cost of high quality weavings would have elicited, the fact that such valuable hangings were often only displayed on special occasions would have dramatised their significance. Documented commissions are, therefore, an important reflection not only of the response of patrons to new designs but also of the visual influences to which they and their circles were exposed.

From the exhibition reviews of the mid-Victorian period, two artists called Frederic Leighton seem to emerge.* First, there is Leighton the High Artist, the ambitious and accomplished painter of serious subjects from history and scripture, including Cimabue 's celebrated Madonna carried in procession through the streets of Florence of 1855, Dante in exile of 1864 and the Old Testament subjects of the 1860s.  The critics found this Leighton easy to approve: adept at describing and evaluating works with significant narrative content and strongly-characterised figures, they delighted in writing about pictures such as the Dante (Fig. 16), explaining the historical circumstances that drove Dante into a cruel exile from his native Florence to the dissolute court at Verona and drawing out the moral implications of the story.  They delt particularly on the contrast between the austere figure of the poet and the frivolity of t the Veronese courtiers. Virtually all tlle critics of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1864 applauded these contrasting characterisations as demonstrating a valuable moral lesson.

Spain was the inevitable point of reference for the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Francesco I (1541-87) and Ferdinando I (1549-1609; Fig.48) were both half-Spanish by birth, through their mother Eleonora de Toledo. In 1562-63 Francesco spent a full year at the Spanish Court before assuming the powers of Prince Regent of Tuscany in 1564. Don Pietro de'Medici (1554-1604; Fig.49), the younger brother of these two Grand Dukes, made two Iberian marriages and lived much of his life in Spain as a political hostage.' In the next generation, Cosimo II (1590-1621; Fig.56) reinforced the Spanish alliance by marrying Queen Margarita's sister, Maria Maddalena d'Austria. Philip III contributed two hundred thousand scudi to his sister-in-law's dowry, and after much negotiation, agreed to address the Grand Duke as 'hermano'.

On 31st October 1864 Sir Charles Eastlake, Director of the National Gallery, climbed to the fourth floor of 55 boulevard Beaumarchais in Paris, to call on a M. Burger (Fig.57). Eastlake was on the lookout for the paintings of an artist whose rare works were as yet unrepresented in the National Gallery -Jan Vermeer of Delft. The French critic and historian was the recognised authority on Vermeer, and already acclaimed as the 'rediscoverer' of the little-known Dutch artist. Burger was also well known for his pioneering archival researches and championship of the seventeenth-century Dutch school generally and for his critical reappraisals of several lesser known painters - but none more remarkable than the mysterious Vermeer, whom he dubbed his 'Sphinx'.' When Eastlake consulted him, it was also for his first-hand knowledge of the art market - what was where, and at what price.