ON 2nd June 1789 Queen Charlotte was driven to Ranelagh by the King's body coachman in the play coach harnessed to a pair of the creams and attended by two of the King's footmen. The occasion was a gala which was being offered by the Spanish Ambassador, the Marquis del Campo (Bernardo del Campo y Pérez de la Serna), in celebration of King George III's recovery from a serious bout of illness, now diagnosed as por-phyria but then regarded as an attack of madness.

FOR some time past, our knowledge of Florentine court furniture in the second half of the seventeenth century has been considerably enriched by the publications of K. Aschengreen-Piacenti and A. Gonzales-Palacios concerning the cabinet-maker Leonardo van der Vinne. It appears from accounts in the Medici archives that he also applied himself to floral marquetry, and the pieces of furniture that are now known to be his clearly reveal his special talent in that area. As his name indicates, he was of Netherlands origin, and from an early date his work was associated with Antwerp, where there were many important workshops in his time. Consequently there is at the present day a tendency to attribute to him tables and cabinets with floral marquetry and columnar legs in his customary style, and to regard such furniture as having been produced in the southern Netherlands, and particularly Antwerp. To take a single example, an exceptionally fine cabinet recently acquired for the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 1), with columnar legs and floral marquetry on an ivory ground, has been regarded as necessarily originating in Antwerp. In my opinion, however, such conclusions are unsound, especially as they take no account of the Paris workshops, which began to set the fashion soon after 1650. It therefore seems to me desirable for the publication of this interesting acquisition by the Museum to be preceded by a short account of the reasons for this opinion.

recent years the direction of the Museo degli Argenti has more and more turned its attention to the problems of textiles. Through various stages the interest and scope have increased. The first outward manifestation was a small exhibition held in 1977 in the Sala Bianca showing tapestries, textile fragments, costumes, and a selection of fabrics from the deposits. Two years later the much larger exhibition entitled Curiosità di una Reggia again called attention to textiles. In 1981 a small exhibition was held in the Sala di Giovanni da San Giovanni, showing forty-three pieces of velvet, restored and studied for the first time, with explanatory panels dealing with the history of the technique. Finally last autumn the new Costume Gallery was inaugurated (see p.378). As the interest in the study of textiles grew, a laboratory for their conservation and care was set up.

THE library at Longleat House contains one of the finest and most understudied private collections of illuminated manuscripts in the British Isles. Two of the most lavishly illuminated of the manuscripts at Longleat, a Psalter and a Breviary, both of the fourteenth century, have recently been published and the history of the library itself has also been briefly described. The catalogue of the library's contents made in the nineteenth century has not, however, been published and many of the library's treasures remain unknown to scholars. One such manuscript is the copy of the Apocalypse with commentary of Berengaudus, Longleat House MS 2. It has been noticed as a manuscript of the period c. 1100 by Neil Ker, but the fact that it contains a unique prefatory illustration by an Anglo-Norman artist has gone unnoticed until very recently (Fig.25).

THE purpose of the first part of this note is to add a postscript to Svend Eriksen's article on Lalive de Jully's furniture à la grecque. That article identified a bureau plat and cartonnier once at Hamilton Palace and now at the Musée Condé, Chantilly, as those designed before 1758 by Louis Joseph Le Lorrain for Ange-Laurent de Lalive de Jully's cabinet flamand (Fig.33). Eriksen also illustrated a clock in a private collection as possibly that made to stand on the cartonnier: this clock was subsequently acquired by the Musée Condé. The identification of Lalive's furniture was made possible by descriptions in the 1769 catalogue of the sale at which his collection was dispersed in 1770.

AMONG the great collection of Royal Plate at Windsor Castle is a small goblet made in 1814 for the Prince Regent to a design by John Flaxman (Fig.38). It bears the mark of Paul Storr, who was at that time a partner in the firm of Rundell, Bridge and Rundell in Dean Street, Soho. Its quite exceptional, indeed unique, characteristic, however, is that, deeply engraved on the underside of the base, there are the words 'Galvanic Goblet', indicating that it was gilt by electroplating, using the new form of electricity discovered first by Luigi Galvani of Bologna and then by Alessandro Volta in Pavia. In deference to his friend, Volta always referred to his own invention as the galvanic current.

AN unknown painting, the Choirboy by Georges de La Tour, was acquired by the Leicestershire Museums and Art Galleries at the end of 1983, on a tax-exempt basis from an anonymous owner, with the aid of a central government grant and the help of the Friends of the Museum Fund of the City of Leicester (Fig.39).