The significance of the tapestry commissions which Pope Leo X gave to the Brussels workshop of Pieter van Aelst during the second decade of the sixteenth century has long been recognised.' Apart from the beauty and importance of the so- called Acts of the Apostles, the Grottesche degli dei and the Giochi di putti sets in their own right, the cartoons from which they were woven were to exert a tremendous influence on subsequent tapestry design and on the Flemish artistic community in general.2 In addition, the fact that the Acts of the Apostles cartoons, or copies of them, remained at Brussels after completion of the papal set ensured that during the 1530s and 1540s the French, English, Habsburg and Mantuan courts were able to acquire almost identical reproductions of a series which then, as now, was widely seen as epitomising the work of Raphael and his school.

During his visit to the Royal Palace at Aranjuez in 1626 Cassiano Dal Pozzo described what we may assume to be Titian's so-called second Prado version of the Entombment in a letter to Cardinal Francesco Barberini: 'Si vidde in un stanzino che serve d'Oratorietto un quadro alto da tre braccia in circa e Largo cinque in circa d'un Pieta o sia Christo morto con la gloriosa Vergine e le Marie, opera bellissima di Titiano della quale si vede la stampa'.' This painting had arrived in Spain in 1572 as a gift from the Venetian Senate to the diplomat Antonio Perez, and it soon entered the possession of the Spanish Royal Family.2 In describing the picture, Dal Pozzo was able to refer to a reproductive print - 'si vede la stampa' - made in 1563 by Giulio Bonasone (Fig. 7).3