IN LATE 1582, as recorded at the end of part I of this article, Gonzalo de Liaño returned to the Spanish court in Madrid, after nearly two years in Rome and Florence, bringing with him a number of gifts that the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Francesco I de’ Medici, wished to be presented to Philip II. Prominent among them were ‘a ciborium in Volterra alabaster with four Evangelists painted on glass who fit into the empty spaces’ and ‘an Our Lady in porphyry’. Francesco prudently warned his agent in Madrid, Luigi Dovara, that these gifts were ‘paltry things’, and although Gonzalo had assured him that the king would be pleased with them, he instructed Dovara to apologise to him for the poor quality of the items, which had been sent on the dwarf’s advice. Expressions of inadequacy often recur in court correspondence regarding diplomatic gifts. They served to underline the sender’s inferiority and to express his esteem and respect towards a sovereign of superior rank. According to Gonzalo’s account, the gifts were delivered to Philip by Bartolomé de Santoyo in April 1583, and the king was very pleased with the ciborium and ‘took infinite delight in the image of Our Lady’.

FEW ART HISTORIANS are well acquainted with the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Parrasio Micheli (c.1515–78). Given the patchy and intermittently derivative nature of his output, this is understandable. However, as the illegitimate son of a prominent local patrician, Salvador Michiel, he moved in the best social, artistic and literary circles of his day. Originally a disciple of Titian, in later life Parrasio befriended Paolo Veronese who supplied him with drawings and compositional ideas. Parrasio was able to command exceptionally high prices for state commissions and, according to one recent theory, he also swapped designs with another ex-pupil of Titian, the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano.

ON 23rd OCTOBER 1702, Juan Tomás Enríquez de Cabrera, 7th Duque de Medina de Ríoseco and 11th and last Almirante de Castilla (1646–1705; Fig.23), arrived in Lisbon. His exile was a consequence of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) that followed the death without issue in 1700 of the last Habsburg king of Spain, Charles II.

THE MONOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION devoted to Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) recently at the Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna, where it was seen by this reviewer, and now at the Chiostro del Bramante, Rome (to 6th May), is the first to examine all aspects of the career of this most gifted and influential of Bolognese artists. The exhibition consists of sixty-seven paintings (not all present at both venues), a remarkable liturgical vestment, many of the artist’s most beautiful drawings and impressions of most of his prints. The integrated hang in Bologna allowed for the direct juxtaposition of preparatory studies with the paintings to which they relate. Preparatory drawings were also selected to represent important projects, notably the fresco cycles, that could not be present in the exhibition. The Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, mounted a small complementary exhibition highlighting its holdings of works attributed to Annibale, with a separate catalogue. Public access was also arranged to the Carracci frescos in the Palazzi Magnani and Sampieri, although unfortunately not to the early friezes in Palazzo Fava, which are awaiting long overdue conservation. Since Annibale’s drawings have featured prominently in several recent exhibitions, this review will focus principally on the paintings.

IN SEPTEMBER 1893 James McNeill Whistler painted three oils by or on the sea in Brittany: Violet and Silver: A Deep Sea (Art Institute of Chicago); Dark Blue and Silver (Hillstead Museum, CT); and a small panel, Violet and Blue: Among the Rollers (Fig.42) which, until recently, was in a private collection. The artist wrote to his picture restorer, Stephen Richards, that he had ‘painted the panel out in the full sea – and some of the spray got upon it – and the salt made it a very long time in drying – and the last time I examined it – some two or three months ago, the surface seemed to me still sticky’. The technical difficulties must have been great, although the panel is comparatively small (18 by 25.4 cm.) and Whistler’s paints, pre-prepared, would have been in tubes, with a small rectangular palette in a paintbox that may have been of a size to contain the panel safely when completed (his surviving paintboxes in the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, are smaller, but could certainly contain several panels in separate partitions).

ON 10th MAY 1916, three months after the opening in Zürich of the Cabaret Voltaire (Fig.43), Tristan Tzara wrote a letter to René Gaffé (see Appendix, document 1), the Belgian bibliophile, journalist, collector and author of Giorgio de Chirico, le Voyant (1946), Peinture à travers Dada et le Surréalisme (1952) and A la verticale. Réflections d’un collectionneur (1963). Gaffé’s numerous friends among twentieth-century artists and writers included Paul Eluard, André Breton, Max Ernst, Picasso, Miró and Magritte (who in 1942 painted Gaffé’s portrait), but there is no evidence that at the time of Tzara’s letter he and Gaffé had met, or that they ever met at all. The reason why Tzara wrote to Gaffé is suggested by Richard Huelsenbeck’s observation in En Avant: A History of Dadaism that ‘Tristan Tzara was devoured by ambition to move in international artistic circles as an equal or even a “leader.” He was all ambition and restlessness. For his restlessness he sought a pole and for his ambition a ribbon. And what an extraordinary, never-to-be-repeated opportunity now arose to found an artistic movement and play the part of a literary mime!’