ON 20TH JULY 1709 Louis XIV dispatched a brevet from Versailles appointing Pietro Ottoboni Protector of France at Rome. It marked the end of an anxious period for the great collecting cardinal (Fig.1). His unexpected trip to Florence the previous month had been widely interpreted as involving negotiations on this matter with Grand-Duke Cosimo III, to whom he presented a thorn from Christ’s crown in an elaborate gold monstrance and from whom he received a sumptuous though secular casket. The day after Ottoboni’s return to Rome, Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici, Cosimo’s dissipated brother, announced his intention to renounce the purple in an attempt to prolong his ailing dynasty. When he did so on 19th June the French protectorate fell vacant. Ottoboni had much to be wary of: Venice, of which republic he was a patrician, was implacably opposed to its citizens holding such an office and there was uncertainty as to its compatibility with the Vice-Chancellorship of the Holy Roman Church to which his great-uncle Alexander VIII had appointed him in 1689.

WHEN THE MUMBAI-BASED Tata Group, India’s largest industrial house, recently outbid its rivals and acquired Europe’s second biggest steel producer, the Anglo-Dutch firm Corus, analysts remarked on the budding ‘reverse-colonisation’, especially because British Steel had become part of Corus. In fact the Tata’s Anglo-Indian affair, economically, socially and culturally, is much older, due in large part to the activities of Sir Ratan Tata (1871–1918).

VLADIMIT TATLIN'S PAINTINGS of 1913–14 have been celebrated for their rich and vibrant colour. The nude (Fig.37), for instance, represents a powerful combination of the three primaries: the female body, in ochre, sits on a red cube against a blue ground. The colours are saturated and unmodulated (save for the stylised black shadows and white highlights) and are dramatically orchestrated to create a rhythmic and monumental composition. Yet in 1914, within eighteen months of completing this particular canvas, Tatlin started to assemble three-dimensional works from an extensive range of everyday materials. In creating such assemblages, he was clearly responding to the Cubist experiments in collage, papier collé and construction that he had seen that spring in Picasso’s studio in Paris. Bringing together in a new way the worlds of painting and sculpture, Tatlin’s reliefs were built up from ‘wood, metals, glass, plaster, cardboard, gesso, tar, etc’, while ‘the surfaces of these materials were treated with putty, gloss paints, steam, sprinkled with dust, and other means’. Between 10th and 14th May that year the artist presented in his studio for the first time his ‘synthetic-static compositions’ and ‘pictorial reliefs’ to the public.