Rokeby Venus Venus looking into a mirror, and as both had had close ties to the Spanish court, their examples would have been familiar to Velázquez. However, "this girl with her small waist and jutting hip, does not resemble the fuller more rounded Italian nudes inspired by ancient sculpture". One innovation of the "Rokeby Venus", when compared to other large single nude paintings, lies in the fact that Velázquez depicts a back view of its subject who is turned away from the viewer. There were precedents for this in prints by Giulio Campagnola, Agostino Veneziano, Hans Sebald Beham and Theodor de Bry,
Rokeby (poem) J. G. Lockhart reported that bookshops in Oxford were besieged by customers wanting to read the poem, and bets were placed as to whether "Rokeby" would outsell Byron's recent "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage". Byron himself wrote urgently from Italy asking his publisher John Murray to send him a copy. In the event "Rokeby" sold ten thousand copies in the first three months, a figure which would have been the making of any other poet, but which was a marked falling-off from the sales of Scott's previous poems, and far less than he needed to pay his Abbotsford debts. One consequence of