THE recent discovery at the college of a number of inventories and documents relating to the early plate of Magdalen College, Oxford, has made it possible to reconstruct the history of the so-called Founder's cup and of an early Tudor flagon, the only pieces to have survived the otherwise total loss of the College plate during the Civil War.

FOLDED like books with carved decoration on the out-side and messages inscribed on a wax field on the inside, ivory diptychs were sent by newly appointed consuls to friends and members of the senate to announce their accession to the year-long position. Richard Delbrueck assumed that these ivory diptychs could be dated to the year of office of the consul whose name is inscribed on them. In 1929 he established a core group of thirty-two consular ivories whose inscriptions bear the names of consuls from the beginning of the fifth to the middle of the sixth centuries. Those diptychs commissioned by Eastern consuls, whose inscriptions begin on the right panel and continue on the left, Delbruck attributed to workshops in Constantinople. Those of Western consuls, whose inscriptions generally read from the left panel to the right, he assigned to Rome. For each of these centres of artistic production, the consular ivories are among the few datable objects. As such their importance for dating other monuments of the period in various media has long been recognised.

IN May 1682 the court of Louis XIV took up official residence at Versailles, despite the fact that the building and decoration were still unfinished. The well-known description of the Grands Appartements, published in the Mercure Galant in December of that year, mentions the dazzling array of silver furniture, amazing both for its size and quantity. The majority of these splendid pieces were produced at the Manufacture des Gobelins; some had been made recently for Versailles but others dated from considerably earlier.

CURRENTLY on exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum is a large silk and wool tapestry showing the arms of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Fig.31). Sixteen quarterings are flanked by lions rampant, with his motto droit et loyal and crest of the bear and ragged staff. On either side are ornamental garden fountains, also topped by his distinctive crest, framed within floral wreaths and strapwork cartouches of northern mannerist style. Two smaller tapestries from the same set, but without fountain scenes, have been in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow since 1932, when they were purchased from Drayton House, Northants.

THE recent discovery by Jane Clark of documentary evidence linking the Earl of Leicester's tapestries with Richard Hickes, whether he was working at William Sheldon's looms or in the Queen's Great Wardrobe, together with the similarity of their guards to those of the small tapestry panel from Chastleton, virtually confirms these important tapestries' English origin. Any further evidence adduced from design sources is not likely to add much weight to the argument one way or the other, for in the cosmopolitan world of the later sixteenth century any prints used on the continent would probably also have been available in England. However, as virtually no attempt has been made to identify the design sources used for these and for other contemporary tapestries, some comments might be of interest here.

IN 1978 the Manchester City Art Galleries acquired an unmarked silver-gilt two-handled cup and cover of superb design and craftsmanship (Fig.39) to form the centre-piece of their collections of English rococo plate. It is of an unusual shape, not conforming to the bombé design favoured by London goldsmiths of the mid-eighteenth century (when it must have been made), but the most striking feature is the profusion of cast and applied ornament.

TEXTILES in any form are very rarely documented, few bear signatures or marks and they can seldom be related to surviving designs before the present century. Those which can be thus attributed are therefore all the more precious. Since this department of the V. & A. serves the designer as well as the scholar, the art student as well as the school child, the furnishers of historic houses as well as individual groups with a special interest in a particular craft, the aim of the collection is always to be as comprehensive as possible, omitting only the types of material which are better represented elsewhere. For the purposes of this note illustrations have been selected to give an impression of the Department's collecting policy rather than a comprehensive account of it.

IN 1900 Sir George Donaldson (1845-1925), who had in 1894 presented a collection of musical instruments to the Royal College of Music, generously proposed to buy furniture from the Paris Exhibition for the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria and Albert Museum). Having been on the furniture jury at the Paris 1889 Exhibition and its vice-president in 1900, Donaldson had good qualifications for this role; his own furniture collection included the Walpole cabinet (now V. & A.) and a Dalou table similar to that now in Toledo. As a result of his efforts in 1900 the V. & A. Museum possesses an important and well documented group of furniture by Bing, Galle, Majorelle and other French manufacturers, together with some Hungarian furniture by Edmond Farago and two Norwegian chairs by C. G. Christiansen. When this group of 'New Art' furniture went on view in the Tapestry Court at South Kensington in 1901 the Council of the Royal College of Art, including Walter Crane, protested vehemently that 'if these pieces of furniture ... are offered to Art students and furniture designers as patterns of work to be studied or imitated, they will do nothing but harm'. A letter to The Times [15th July 1901] from Belcher, Blomfield, Macartney and Prior made the same point. Although Donaldson counter-attacked in The Magazine of Art [1901], the trend in England was towards insularity and the Museum did not add to the Donaldson gift.