The great importance that Neo-classical designers placed on using approved design sources was stressed by Charles Heathcote Tatham (1772-1842) when, writing in 1806,' he quoted SirJoshua Reynolds's dictum that: 'Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory'.2 To this magisterial statement, Tatham added his own opinion that 'a familiar knowledge and study of the most approved antique Forms, are greatly wanting to modern Silversmiths . . .; indeed, good Models can never be too often resorted to; they enlarge the powers of Invention, and tend to produce originality of Design.' Such views about the nature of artistic creativity were central to Neo-classical design. Patrons neither expected nor sought complete originality in the modern sense; and most designers were content to work with a common visual vocabulary of images derived mainly from classical antiquity.

The monumental gilded Italian 'renaissance' chests so admired by English collectors during the nineteenth century are a curious and hitherto poorly understood phenomenon in the history of collecting and interior decoration. It will be suggested here that the taste for them was promoted - and probably initiated - by William Blundell Spence (1814- 1900), an Englishman of means who lived in Florence for over half a century and began dealing there in the early 1840s.' By 1856 or soon thereafter,2 he had a gallery in the Palazzo Giugni on the via degli Alfani, the interiors of which are recorded in two paintings (Figs. 14 and 15).3 He retained the gallery after 1861,4 by which time he had moved his residence to the Villa Medici at Fiesole.

There is little published information about the Brussels-trained painter, Carel Philips Spierinck' - known as Carlo Filippo after he settled in Rome - but a skeletal biography can be put together. He was said to be thirty years old when his death was registered in Rome in 1639, but Didier Bodart has pointed out that he was already a pupil of Michel de Boerdous in Brussels in 1612 and became a master in the guild there in 1622, so he is more likely to have been born around 1600 than in 1609 as is usually stated.2 He had moved to Rome by 1624, when a 'Carlo Filippo Spiringh' is recorded as living near the Piazza di Spagna together with two other Flemish artists,3 and he is said to have been a pupil of Paul Bril4 - though if there was such a relationship it must have been brief (Bril died in Rome in 1626). In 1634-35 Spierinck was paid dues to the Accademia di S. Luca, though not as an academician.5 He died five years later, on 22nd May 1639, and was buried in a somewhat prestigious location near the high altar of S. Maria presso il Camposanto teutonico,6 leaving incomplete paintings for the sacristy of S. Maria dell'Anima which he had begun at some time after 1637, and which have not survived.' Four pictures by him are known to have been owned by Flemish merchants in Rome: three Bacchanals are recorded in the inventory of Philips Baldescot in 1641 and a St Norbert (one of the S. Maria dell'Anima canvases) was listed on 2nd March 1643 in the house of 'Petri Pisca- toris' i.e. Peter Visscher.8

As part of the recent redecoration of the Throne Room in Dublin Castle (Fig.45), it was decided to clean the six paintings set high up on the east, north and south walls. Consisting of four roundels and two ovals, they had traditionally been ascribed to Giambattista Bellucci, an eighteenth-century painter from the Veneto known principally as a portraitist. The fact that Bellucci visited Ireland may explain this otherwise inscrutable attribution, which is found in recent guidebooks.'