The King's Room at Knole, Kent (Fig. 1), has been celebrated since the eighteenth century for housing perhaps the most exceptional ensemble to be found anywhere of English and French seventeenth-century furnishings, which has been associated with the personality of Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (1638-1706), who in 1677 became the 6th Earl of Dorset. The pieces include: a sumptuous Royal State Bed (restored in 1974-87), which is believed to have been manufactured in France around 1672 and made for the Duke of York, the future James II; two arm chairs and six en suite foot- stools which display a unique combination of gilt and silvered wood elements;' a set of tapestries of the History of Babylon, produced in London by Thomas Poyntz; a large silver wall mirror without hallmarks; two pedestal tables made in London in 1676; a table with the monogram of the Countess of Dorset supplied by Gerrit Jensen in 1680; a toilet service made in London in 1673 which entered the Knole collections in the eighteenth century; and, finally, two mirror sconces with Parisian hallmarks (Figs.2-5). Up to now these last items have been very inadequately dated and analysed,2 and secure documentation for them has not been found. The aim of this article, and the accompanying piece by Gordon Glanville, is to establish their date, the identity of their makers and, finally, their provenance and the circumstances in which they may have entered the collection of the Earls of Dorset.

The pair of mirror sconces that now, somewhat incongruously, adorn the King's Room at Knole (Fig. 12) were identified by E. Alfred Jones in 1911 as 'doubtless acquired by ... the sixth Earl of Dorset on one of his several embassies of compliment to France'.' Now that Michele Bimbenet-Privat has firmly and convincingly put their making into the Paris hallmarking year 18th June 1669 to 11th July 1670, the task is to find out when, and by what route, they reached Knole. Their history will be seen to embody several stereotypes of the Restoration Court - amorous women, lavish silver furnishings and the Anglo-French intimacy of Charles II's inner circle. As to when they arrived in the King's Room, that is a matter for further research: as we shall see, they would be more appropriately hung in the 'Queen's Roome', elsewhere in the house.

The brief and tragic life of Don Carlos (1545–68), eldest son of King Philip II of Spain, has long fascinated historians and writers.' His unstable personality, affected by a legacy of mental illness from his great-grandmother Joanna the Mad, along with his difficult relationship with his father which led to his arrest, imprisonment and death in 1568, formed the basis of Schiller's drama Don Carlos and of Verdi's opera. Perhaps understandably, much less attention has been given to his activity as a collector of art. At his death, aged only twenty- three, Don Carlos owned a number of important paintings, sculptures and tapestries. He had his own household, from 1564 under the direction of Ruy Gomez da Silva, prince of Eboli, which even included a tapissier,Ganymede on parchment and painted genealogies of Castile and Aragon. Don Carlos owned several portraits of himself including at least four by Sanchez Coello. Among his various sculptures were fourteen marble busts of Roman Emperors and two of his grandfather, the Emperor Charles V by the Italian Juan Baptista Bonanome, and an elaborate gold crucifix by Pompeo Leoni, which he left to the Convent of Atocha. The best documented part of Don Carlos's collection, however, consisted of his tapestries.

In 1777-78 the Lucchese authorities were considering plans to renew the casket containing the body of S. Zita in the Fatinelli chapel in S. Frediano. An entry of 14th February 1778 in the books of the Cura sopra le Reliquie e Corpi Santi, an office of the Lucchese Republic set up to look after the city's sacred relics, records efforts to investigate a proposal to that end put forward by Don Domenico Fatinelli (see the Appendix below). The Cura's principal concerns were with the safe translation of the body and the design of the proposed casket, which had been entrusted to Lucca's foremost silversmith Giovanni Vambre il Giovane (1705-c. 1781), who is said to have trained with Giambattista Foggini in Florence and Ludovico Barchi in Rome; Vambre reckoned that at least 330 lire would be required to execute it. Having already spent a considerable amount of money on redecorating his family chapel, Fatinelli had originally approached the Cura in 1777 for financial assistance, on the grounds that S. Zita was patron of the city and could therefore command a strong following from the faithful. By the following year Fatinelli had altered his plans for the casket, and in his later plea to the councillors he submitted Vambre's drawing of the proposed design, which survives today as two loose sheets set within the bound volume of the Cura's deliberations (Figs.21 and 22). The design of the casket in Vambre's drawing corresponds to the description of it in the Cura report: it was to have a wooden core, faced with coloured stones and with ormolu decorations. The drawing, furthermore, indicates that the new decorative scheme would have been positioned in the recess between the white marble bases of the columns of the surviving late sixteenth-century altar.  This hitherto unpublished information is of interest on two counts: not only does it provide useful insights into the processes of a commission in the final decades of the Lucchese repubblica aristocratica, it also tells us of a previously unknown project by Vambre, whose family had been practising the silversmith's art in Lucca ever since his Flemish grandfather Giovanni Vambre il Vecchio set up shop there in around 1670.

A jewel in the Victoria and Albert Museum can be shown to be closely linked to a tragic massacre in Africa, part of the troubled vicissitudes of Italian foreign policy at the end of the nineteenth century. The piece in question (Figs.24 and 25) is a brooch produced by the celebrated Roman goldsmith Castellani, the form of which is taken from a German prototype of the beginning of the seventeenth century, a model repeated a number of times by Castellani with slight variations in the decorative elements and in the choice of stones used. This particular example is the only one to have in the centre, in place of the double flower setting of the other examples, one single large stone: a heart-shaped sapphire with a convex surface on which is an intaglio engraving of a battle scene. This has been generically interpreted hitherto as an event related to the Italian Risorgimento, and for this reason a date of c. 1865 has been assigned to the jewel, which can now be shown to be incorrect.