1. For the story of Samson and a Philistine see Old Testament Book of Judges, Chapter 15.

2. Sir John Pope Hennessy in his autobiography Learning To Look (Heinemann) tells how he managed to stop its export to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and obtained it for the Nation for £25,000 (with the assistance of the National Art Collections Fund.)

3. York House, Strand, built sometime before 1237 for the Bishops of Norwich. Francis Bacon lived here and James 1’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. It was demolished in the 1670’s.

4. Hovingham Hall, North Yorkshire, is the home of Sir Marcus Worsley Bt, brother to the Duchess of Kent. A Palladian house designed 1760. The private cricket ground said to be the oldest in England.

5. For example there is a black chalk drawing in the British Museum of the Samson and a Philistine when it was at York House by Sir John Baptist Medina (1659-1710). Signed and dated 1690. He died in Edinburgh and was buried in the churchyard of the Greyfriars.

6. Aranjuez was the inspiration for the blind Spanish composer Rodrigo’s beautiful Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar written in 1938 as a hymn of love and prayer to his wife Victoria after she had a miscarriage and her life was in danger. He died recently aged 97 years and is buried at Aranjuez. Aranjuez is a town 30 miles to the south of Madrid and was said by the well known travel writer H V Morton to be famous for its summer palace, its nightingales, its strawberries and its asparagus. It is believed that the elms beside the river were brought by Phillip II from England. In the Royal Palace is a famous porcelain room in Chinese style probably completed in 1765, a Rococo fantasy complete with monkeys. Castilians believe Aranjuez to be an earthly paradise and what visitor would disagree.

7. Firm of provincial auctioneers, Tuesday, 8^th December 1992, lot 234.

8. Christie's sold a 16^th century bronze statuette of the Rape of the Sabine on Tuesday, 5^th December 1989.

9. A 19^th century bronze model of the Samson and a Philistine has been attributed to the workshop of H J Hatfield, information in the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute.

10. Sir John Pope Hennessy said that almost any judgement formed on a small bronze on photographs is wrong. Apollo magazine, May 1971, p 367.

11. Jacques Jonghelink born Anvers 1530. Died Anvers 1606. Appointed sculptor to Phillip II in 1563, also Master of the Mint at Antwerp.

12. Goldberg, Part II, see Bibliography.

13. Castello is north west of Florence at Monte Morello.

14. Melting point of beeswax is 63 to 65 degrees centigrade.

15. Owls that roost in the open are often bedevilled by persistent mobbing and this was put to good use by hunters who often used decoy owls to lure birds within range of guns or trap the birds with nets, cleft sticks or bird lime. In France, Italy and Spain live or mounted eagle owls were placed on long poles to attract birds. In Italy barn and little owls were also used as decoys for larks which are good to eat.

16. Adriaen de Vries, 1556-1626, exhibition catalogue Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Waanders Publishers, Zwolle.

17. Benvenuto Cellini, 1500-1570, sculptor, goldsmith, jeweller, gave the world one of the great autobiographies of all time. His treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture published in 1568 are invaluable.

18. The Uffizi pen and wash drawing was part of a collection of 12,461 drawings left to the Uffizi Gallery by the Florentine sculptor Emilio Santarelli 1801-1886.

19. The equestrian statue of Henry II was started by Daniele da Volterra who died in 1566. Michelangelo provided drawings and gave advice. Henry II was mortally wounded by the broken lance of Gabriel Montgomery, the splinters of which pierced his eye in the tournament held in Paris on 30^th June 1559 to celebrate the Peace Treaty of Le Cateau – Cambresis. The French withdrew their claims to Milan and Naples and the French armies were also withdrawn. Henry II, a man of limited intelligence, wished to end the war and throw everything into repressing heresy.

20. Goldberg, Part II, see Bibliography.

21. Professor George Thompson, BSc, PhD, DSc, FICorr, FIMF, of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology UMIST, Corrosion and Protection Centre, examined the monkeys for two hours with a colleague and confirmed they had not been outside for long and gave valuable advice on corrosion. He commented on the considerable afterwork.

22. The metal founders’ term for giving an artificial patina on bronze with acid is "pickling".

23. Michelangelo did not favour working in bronze. His large bronze statue of Pope Julius II three times life size made between 1506 and 1508 for the façade of S Petronio in Bologna was destroyed and turned into a gun called the Julius. This turned Michelangelo to stone.

24. Spanish rulers styled themselves Kings of Jerusalem and the commission for these plaques was routed through Madrid.

25. The Neptune Fountain in Bologna was a commission of Pope Pius IV.

26. The Laocoon (c.175-50 BC) now in the Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican, was discovered on 14^th January 1506 and bought soon afterwards by Pope Julius II. The story was from Virgil, Aeneid Book II, and tells how the Trojan Priest Laocoon and his sons were killed by two snakes because he had offended Apollo and warned the Trojans not to take the Greek wooden horse into Troy. By 1523 the earliest and most famous full size copy was being carved by Bandinelli. This copy is now in the Uffizi Gallery.

27. Bianca Cappello was from Venice. She had beauty, wit and vivacity and one night Francesco de Medici made his way to her room with the connivance of her husband who was made first gentleman of his wardrobe. Francesco neglected his wife, Joanna of Austria, who was slightly humpbacked, morose and melancholy. The affair was the scandal of Italy. Bianca’s husband was murdered in 1572. She pretended to be pregnant and on 29^th August 1576, simulated labour and smuggled in a baby born the night before. People who knew of this matter disappeared or were murdered but not before the story was out. Francesco de Medici married Bianca in 1579, two months after his wife’s death. Francesco died in October 1587 of malaria and Bianca also succumbed to the same illness. The brother of Francesco de Medici, Ferdinando, thought Bianca Cappello was evil.

28. Report R758/59 Department of Materials, University of Oxford, Dr Peter Northover.

29. The Auctioneers Christie's (Islamic Department) confirm that Dr Northover’s methodology in dating metal is reliable and generally accepted.

30. The Fortezza da Basso, Florence, the massive and grim fortress of St John the Baptist, was built by Alessandro de Medici to intimidate the Florentines. Alessandro was a great woman hunter, passing his nights in carousing and orgies. He distrusted his subjects and ground them down with taxation. The Fortezza’s pentagonal design was by the younger Antonio da Sangallo. Alessandro de Medici was murdered in 1537.

31. In the film "Room With A View" starring Helena Bonham-Carter and Judi Dench, Judi Dench comments on the equestrian statue of Ferdinand I, piazza della SS Annunziata, Florence, saying it was made from the metal of captured Turkish guns.

32. Such was the export trade that German merchants stored copper in the Fontego dei Todeschi, an enormous building on the Grand Canal near the Rialto, Venice

33. Between 1^st June and 7^th October 1445, 14,623 pounds of bronze were shipped from Bruges for the second set of Baptistry Doors.

34. The Augsburg banking family, the Fuggers, had two copper mines, one of which had silver and the other in Vienna, silver and gold.

35. Lead in nature consists of four isotopes (Pb204, Pb206, Pb207, Pb208) and the ratio of these four isotopes can be useful in distinguishing alloys produced in one area from another. A report 26^th November 1997 Daily Telegraph shows studies of a 9,000 ft ice core from the Greenland ice sheet revealed lead contamination which researchers were able to trace back to mines in southern Spain worked by the Carthaginians and Romans. The layer was laid down between 600 BC and AD 300. Researchers were able to show using the ratio of the lead isotopes the lead must have come from the Rio Tinto mine in the west of Spain between 150BC and AD50.

36. Vannoccio Biringuccio’s De La Pirotechnia Venice 1540 refers to brass as copper coloured by the action of calamine or cadmia (calamine is a zinc carbonate).

37. Arsenic as a hardening agent was used in the Christopher Fugger altarpiece by Hubert Gerhard in the Victoria & Albert Museum 1581-84 and the amount of arsenic used is recorded.

38. The seams or projections visible from the use of piecemoulds are called "flashing" and are usually chiselled and filed off.

39. Christopher Payne, Animals in Bronze, see Bibliography.

40. The Prince of Wales sat to Velazquez during his stay but the portrait is still to be discovered. The Spanish trip lasted from February 1623 to September 1623. Politically it was a disaster but it did awaken a genuine love of the arts in the future King Charles I.

41. It is not recorded who was happier, the elephant or the keepers, and the tradition of Royalty grazing camels in St James’s Park seems to have been discontinued.

42. The favourite of King James I, the Duke of Buckingham, who the King called "his kinde dogge Steenie", was arrogant, listened to no-one, a disastrous diplomat and his behaviour and over-familiarity with the Prince of Wales shocked the Spanish Court. The Duke highly unpopular in England was assassinated in 1628 in Portsmouth and his tomb is in Henry VII Chapel, Westminster Abbey, reserved at one time for none but anointed Kings.

43. James I’s policy towards Spain had led to the imprisonment of Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower of London, where he still managed to give instruction to Prince Henry, the future King Henry IX, and write his History of the World. He was executed in 1618 to appease the Spaniards.