DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51585#0146
142
EARLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.
effects for 300/. We had very nearly lost them
again in the reign of Charles II., for Louis XIV.
having intimated through his ambassador, Barillon,
a wish to possess them at any price, the needy,
careless Charles was on the point of yielding them,
and would have done so but for the representations
of the Lord Treasurer Danby, to whom, in fact,
we owe it that they were not ceded to France.
They remained, however, neglected in one of the
lumber-rooms at Whitehall till the reign of Wil-
liam III., and narrowly escaped being destroyed
by fire when Whitehall was burned in 1698. It
must have been shortly after that King William
ordered them to be repaired, the fragments pasted
together and stretched upon linen ; and being just
at that time occupied with the alterations and im-
provements at Hampton Court, Sir Christopher
Wren had his commands to plan and erect a room
expressly to receive them,—the room in which
they now hang.
In the Vatican there is a second set of ten tapes-
tries, for which Raphael gave the original designs,
but he did not execute the cartoons, and the style
of drawing in those fragments which remain is not
his. A very fine fragment of one of these car-
toons, The Massacre of the Innocents, is in our
National Gallery. It is very different in the style
of execution from the cartoons at Hampton Court,
and has been painted over in oil, when or by whom
EARLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.
effects for 300/. We had very nearly lost them
again in the reign of Charles II., for Louis XIV.
having intimated through his ambassador, Barillon,
a wish to possess them at any price, the needy,
careless Charles was on the point of yielding them,
and would have done so but for the representations
of the Lord Treasurer Danby, to whom, in fact,
we owe it that they were not ceded to France.
They remained, however, neglected in one of the
lumber-rooms at Whitehall till the reign of Wil-
liam III., and narrowly escaped being destroyed
by fire when Whitehall was burned in 1698. It
must have been shortly after that King William
ordered them to be repaired, the fragments pasted
together and stretched upon linen ; and being just
at that time occupied with the alterations and im-
provements at Hampton Court, Sir Christopher
Wren had his commands to plan and erect a room
expressly to receive them,—the room in which
they now hang.
In the Vatican there is a second set of ten tapes-
tries, for which Raphael gave the original designs,
but he did not execute the cartoons, and the style
of drawing in those fragments which remain is not
his. A very fine fragment of one of these car-
toons, The Massacre of the Innocents, is in our
National Gallery. It is very different in the style
of execution from the cartoons at Hampton Court,
and has been painted over in oil, when or by whom