The collection of the Duke of Mantua cost Charles eighty thousand pounds--Buckingham being the agent, and probably the instigator of this purchase. The family of Gonzaga had been, in 1627, a hundred years in forming this noble gallery. Little inferior to the Medici in their liberality to artists, they were the patrons of Andrew Mantegna, of Guido Romano, of Raphael, of Correggio, and of Titian, successively. The “Education of Cupid,” by Correggio, was among King Charles’s purchases, as well as the “Entombment,” now in the Louvre,and the “Twelve Cæsars” by Titian. Rubens purchased for him the Cartoons of Raphael, which had been sent by Leo X. to Flanders, to be worked in tapestry, and left there. Then Charles received various presents; that especially commonly styled the “Venus del Pardo,” or more properly “Jupiter and Antiope;” the figures being set off by one of the grandest landscapes by Titian, known. This gem was given by Charles to the Duke of Buckingham.[152] It is now in the Louvre, as is also the “Baptist,” by Leonardo da Vinci, a present originally from Louis XIII. to Charles.[153] Footnote 152: Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painters; Art. “Charles I.” Footnote 153: In the work styled “Art and Artists,” by Dr. Waagen, there is a full and most interesting account of all Charles’s collection. It was during the residence of Buckingham in Paris that he became acquainted with Rubens. Eventually he bought the whole of the collection of statues, paintings, and other valuable works of art, which that master had formed at a cost of about a thousand pounds, and which he sold to the Duke for ten thousand. But it was not often that Buckingham increased his stores so easily; so early as the year 1613, he had in his household Balthazar Gerbier d’Ouvilly, of Antwerp, a sort of amanuensis, or, as Sanderson styles him, a “common penman,” whose transcribing the decalogue for the Dutch Church was one of his first steps to preferment. Gerbier became a miniature painter, and in that ostensible capacity went into Spain with the Duke; he painted, amongst other portraits of the family, a fine oval miniature of his patron on horseback, which, in Walpole’s time, belonged to the Duchess of Northumberland; the figure, dressed in scarlet and gold, is finished with great care--and the horse, dark grey, with a white mane, is very animated; underneath the horse is a landscape with figures, and over the Duke’s head is suspended his motto, “_Fidei curricula crux_.” It was in allusion to the well-known talents of Gerbier that the Duchess of Buckingham wrote to the Duke, when in Spain, begging him, “if he had leisure to sit to Gerbier for his portrait, that she might have it well done in little.”