twelfth by Giulio Romano himself.[22] Brought to England with the rest
of the Mantua pieces purchased by Daniel Nys for Charles I., they
suffered injury, and Van Dyck is said to have repainted the _Vitellius_,
which was one of several canvases irretrievably ruined by the
quicksilver of the frames during the transit from Italy.[23] On the
disposal of the royal collection after Charles Stuart's execution the
_Twelve Cæsars_ were sold by the State--not presented, as is usually
asserted--to the Spanish Ambassador Cardenas, who gave £1200 for them.
On their arrival in Spain with the other treasures secured on behalf of
Philip IV., they were placed in the Alcazar of Madrid, where in one of
the numerous fires which successively devastated the royal palace they
must have perished, since no trace of them is to be found after the end
of the seventeenth century. The popularity of Titian's decorative
canvases is proved by the fact that Bernardino Campi of Cremona made
five successive sets of copies from them--for Charles V., d'Avalos, the
Duke of Alva, Rangone, and another Spanish grandee. Agostino Caracci
subsequently copied them for the palace of Parma, and traces of yet
other copies exist. Numerous versions are shown in private collections,
both in England and abroad, purporting to be from the hand of Titian,
but of these none--at any rate none of those seen by the writer--are
originals or even Venetian copies. Among the best are the examples in
the collection of Earl Brownlow and at the royal palace of Munich
respectively, and these may possibly be from the hand of Campi. Although
we are expressly told in Dolce's _Dialogo_ that Titian "painted the
_Twelve Cæsars_, taking them in part from medals, in part from antique
marbles," it is perfectly clear that of the exact copying of
antiques--such as is to be noted, for instance, in those marble
medallions by Donatello which adorn the courtyard of the Medici Palace
at Florence--there can have been no question. The attitudes of the
_Cæsars_, as shown in the engravings and the extant copies, exclude any