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 Caesars were sold by the State—­not presented, as is usually asserted—­to the Spanish Ambassador Cardenas, who gave L1200 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 Caesars, 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 Caesars, as shown in the engravings and the extant copies, exclude any such supposition.  Those who have judged them from those copies and the hideous grotesques of Sadeler have wondered at the popularity of the originals, somewhat hastily deeming Titian to have been here inferior to himself.  Strange to say, a better idea of what he intended, and what he may have realised in the originals, is to be obtained from a series of small copies now in the Provincial Museum of Hanover, than from anything else that has survived.[24] The little pictures in question, being on copper, cannot well be anterior to the first part of the seventeenth century, and they are not in themselves wonders.  All the same they have a unique interest as proving that, while adopting the pompous attitudes and the purely decorative standpoint which the position of the pictures in the Castello may have rendered obligatory, Titian managed to make of his Emperors creatures of flesh and blood; the splendid Venetian warrior and patrician appearing in all the glory of manhood behind the conventional dignity, the self-consciousness of the Roman type and attitude.