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.'

Research on William Beckford's involvement in Orientalism has tended to concentrate on the writing of Vathek and Al Raoui and his translations of tales from the Arabian Nights, rather than on his collecting activities. l While it has long been known that Beckford had a considerable collection of Oriental manuscripts and miniature paintings, its full extent has never been properly documented.2 His albums of Indian miniatures probably constituted the largest body of such material in private ownership in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Little noticed amid the rest of Beckford's enormous library, they are barely mentioned in the reports of contemporaries or even in his own correspondence. Nevertheless, evidence for the collection is far better than for many others of the same period. Albums of Indian miniatures are listed in the catalogues of the sales of material from his library in 1817 and 1823, and a large part of the collection was acquired with his other manuscripts from the Hamilton Palace Library by the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin in 1882.3 The albums and Oriental manuscripts which went to Berlin, though later divided between institutions, include Indian miniatures which remain some of the finest of their type in Germany.

Exactly thirty years ago, Clive Wainwright published an article in this Magazine on items from Wllliam Beckford's collections that could be identified in the holdings of the Victoria and Albert Museum.l The works he discussed included pieces of furniture, such as the celebrated 'Holbein' cabinet, Japanese lacquers, a mounted agate cup and a book from Beckford's library. Some ten years later Michael Snodin and Malcolm Baker published their extensive research on Beckford's metalwork,2 which included two outstanding pieces acquired by the V. & A. since 1971. Research undertaken for a forthcoming exhibition devoted to Beckford's collections3 has afforded the opportunity to identify many more Beckford items at the V & A., most of which were acquired as a result of the dispersal of the collection through the Hamilton Palace sale in 1882. (Beckford's youngest daughter Susan married Alexander, Marquis of Douglas [1770-1852], who became 10th Duke of Hamilton in 1819. She inherited the bulk of her father's estate, much of which subsequently passed into the Hamilton collections.) Wainwright, Snodin and Baker have provided a thorough introduction to Beckford, the size and diversity of his collections, and the problems inherent in attempting to identify Beckford objects in museum collections, which will therefore not be discussed extensively here.

While William De Morgan's polychrome tiles for house interiors have survived in abundance,' those he designed for the public areas in ocean liners were thought to have been lost, as the result of the vessels being sunk during the First World War or subsequently broken up. A few photographs of the ships' interiors exist (Fig.66), but they give only a shadowy idea of their former splendour. Writers on De Morgan have lamented that 'nothing seems to have survived of the decorative work for the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company which had absorbed so much concentrated effort for a number of years'.2 There are, in fact, three extant panel sets at the South London Gallery (Figs.67, 68 and 69), which are believed to be either trial pieces or duplicates assembled for speculative sale elsewhere. The re-emergence of these works enables us to gain some idea of the original impact De Morgan's tile panels must have made on ship interiors, and to look closely at their origin, design and construction.