From 1871 to 1872 this instrument was on loan to the Museum from the Comte de Sartiges, who had been the French Ambassador to the Holy See in the 1860s. At the same time Sartiges lent the 'Golden Harpsichord' from Michele Todini's Galleria Armonica in the Palazzo Verospi in Rome, which entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1889 as part of the Crosby Brown collection. In 1872 the Museum purchased the virginal for £140, presumably from Sartiges. When the Museum acquired it, the instrument was described as a spinet and was thought to have been made at Murano, near Venice. However, it is now thought to have been made in Northern Europe; its decoration bears a close relation to that of a casket in the Museum's collection (C.20-1923). The wood casket is decorated with glass rods, whorls and florets and lamp-worked glass reliefs set against faded red silk, directly comparable to the virginal, and was probably made in Venetian glassworks in Hall-in-Tyrol, Austria, in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The similarity between virginal and casket was noted in 1946 by W. B. Honey, who linked them to a third object in the V&A, a glass relief of the Last Judgment (C.105-1947) with lampworked glass figures, probably made in Innsbruck, Austria, in the seventeenth century. When acquired by the museum this instrument had a traditional association with Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, the daughter of James I of England, however this claim cannot be substantiated. The virginal has also been linked with a description written in 1598 by the German visitor Paul Hentzner, translated from the Latin by Horace Walpole, of a musical instrument at Hampton Court: 'Here besides is a certain cabinet called 'Paridise' where besides that everything glitters so with silver, gold and jewels, as to dazzle ones eyes, there is a musical instrument made all of glass except the strings.' However, another description of the instrument at Hampden Court by Baron Waldstein in 1600 rules this out, by mentioning jewels as well as glass, the Queen's cypher, and two Latin couplets as part of its decoration.