By the early 1560s, the ceramics workshop of Urbino had begun decorating maiolica in a grotesque style on a white ground. This style came to be identified by critics with the kind seen in the frescoes by members of Raphael's school, especially Giovanni da Udine, in the Vatican Logge and Loggetta. It ultimately derived from Roman domestic murals, whose subterranean state gave rise to the term 'grottesche', and whose rediscovery had helped to stimulate all'antica trends in ornament from the late fifteenth century. The sudden appearance of the white-ground grotesque style in Raphael's birthplace forty years after his death was not only a new departure for the pottery industry there, but for maiolica decoration in general - although maiolica had been painted in other kinds of grotesque styles from the beginning of the sixteenth century. So successful was the style that it l displaced historiation in services for particularly important clients, and dominated the decoration of Urbino ware well into the seventeenth century.

With the end of Napoleonic rule in Italy, Venice and all its territories passed for the second time to the Austrian empire.l However, the new regime brought few effective changes to official artistic structures: the Imperial Regia Accademia di Belle Arti, which had been transferred from the Fonteghetto della Farina to the ex-convent o fthe Carita in 1807, contin- ued in its role as supervisory institution.2 Neo-classical taste had been imposed with difficulty in Venice, and only in the last years of the eighteenth century did it replace the tenacious strand of rococo that had given the city its last splendid and autonomous artistic flowering- above all in the works of Tiepolo and his school. From the time of the Venetian republic's fall to Bonaparte in 1797, through the first decade of Austrian domination (1797-1806), the second French period (1806-14) and the installation of Habsburg government, there was only one real artistic star who was, of course, Antonio Canova- almost always shining at a distance. Thanks to Canova's works in Venice, few though they were, and to the mythic status he had acquired through writings on him, prints after his work, and the training he gave young Venetian sculptors in his Roman studio, Venetian artistic production in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century conformed more and more to what might be called a kind of 'Canovan mannerism'.

The relationship between John Flaxman and his patron George O'Brien Wyndham, the 3rd Earl of Egremont, is well known. Together with William Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire and John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford, Egremont played an important role in the evolution of a taste for modern, ideal or poetic sculpture in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Among the sculptors from whom he commissioned works were, in addition to Flaxman, Francis Chantrey, J.E. Carew and Charles Felix Rossi, while C.R. Leslie, Thomas Phillips and J.M.W. Turner were among the painters he most favoured.'