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Born in 1452 in Vinci, a village on the outskirts of Florence, Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a notary, Ser Piero, and a local farmer’s daughter, Caterina di Meo Lippi. His early life was both privileged and disadvantaged. Ser Piero was well-to-do, with a number of properties including a farm in Vinci. By the time Leonardo was in his late teens his father also had offices in the Bargello in Florence, where he offered his legal services to clients from important monasteries and Florentine businesses. But having been born out of wedlock, Leonardo seems not to have received the classical education that a family of Piero’s standing would normally have given their son. He grew up not having learned Latin or Greek, and occasionally referred to that lack in his notebooks. He called himself an ‘unlettered man’, and once signed himself ‘Leonardo da Vinci, disciple of sperentia’, which means both experience and experiment, Renaissance Italian for the ‘school of life’. For the introduction of his planned treatise on painting, which he never published himself, he drafted this opening paragraph:
I am fully aware that my not being a man of letters may cause certain presumptuous people to think that they may with reason blame me, alleging that I am a man without learning. Foolish folk! … They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labours, but by those of others … They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe – but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the word of others.
Leonardo had the Renaissance version of a chip on his shoulder. He turned this weakness into a strength by approaching his subjects without preconceptions or precepts, making the blank page the starting point for enquiry and creativity.
Fifty kilometres east of Vinci lay the ochre and red assemblage of roofs, domes, towers and crenellations of Florence, where the Renaissance was under construction. The dome of Florence cathedral, designed by Brunelleschi, built without scaffolding out of four million bricks, still the largest masonry dome in the world, was nearing completion; Leonardo was to be involved in its finishing touch, a gleaming bronze ball placed atop the lantern in 1472. Luca della Robbia was filling lunettes and decorating sarcophagi with his ceramic reliefs of pretty Madonnas and characterful saints, smoothly glazed in bright green, blue, white and yellow. In the evenings the low sunlight caught Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, a door with ten scenes from the Old Testament, cast in bronze but looking like burnished gold, completed in 1424 and given its popular name by an admiring Michelangelo. It was a beacon to the future of art, with its energetic crowd scenes full of billowing robes and flailing limbs, set within the arches and atria of monumental classical backdrops.
The basic laws of perspective, the representation of three-dimensional space on two dimensions, mostly forgotten since Antiquity, had been revived in frescos decorating chapels by artists Masolino and Masaccio, and in diagrams and text by the architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti. All these developments were so remarkable that, a century later, they prompted the first ever art history book, Vasari’s Lives of the most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, to give it its full title. This account of Italian art from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century distinguished between three phases in Renaissance art – early, middle and high – categories which are still widely accepted today. Vasari placed Leonardo at the start of ‘the third manner which we will agree to call the modern’.* Today this period is known as the High Renaissance.
Leonardo’s father was a friend of one of the busiest artists in Florence, Andrea Verrocchio. He ran a large workshop in premises previously occupied by the greatest Florentine Renaissance sculptor from the preceding generation, Donatello, showing how the baton of the Renaissance was handed down from one leading artist to the next. A team of assistants helped Verrocchio execute a mixture of large-scale commissions, statues, jewellery and small workshop paintings, which could be bought by customers coming in off the street. Leonardo had shown early ability with drawing, and his father took him into Florence to see Verrocchio. He was taken on as an apprentice in his mid-teens, around 1469.
Already by his early twenties, Leonardo’s style was so distinctive that art historians argue over which parts of Verrocchio’s paintings might be by the master and which by his precocious pupil. There is a deliciously shiny fish and an alert, fluffy dog in Verrocchio’s Tobias and the Angel (1470–75) which are sometimes attributed to Leonardo. The angel on the far left of Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, with his demure and elliptical expression, that tiny knowing smile and hint of gender fluidity, is said to be by Leonardo. In the background, a vast panorama of rolling hills, lakes and steep mountains unfolds, strikingly different from Verrocchio’s well-tended lawns, gentle slopes and neatly pruned trees. Another tell-tale sign is that this background is painted in oil. Leonardo liked to use the new medium of oil paint, which had arrived recently from the Netherlands, while Verrocchio used the old medium of tempera, based on egg yolk, so parts of his paintings finely executed in oils are generally thought to be by Leonardo.
In 1478 Leonardo left Verrocchio’s workshop and set up his own practice in Florence. His first major commission, from an order of Augustinian monks, the Adoration of the Magi, now hangs in the Uffizi. It was a breathtakingly inventive work for its time in how it set aside the conventional, flat depiction of this scene and instead offered a sweeping arabesque of a procession, which curves from the distance to the foreground, suggesting the passage of time and a distance travelled. The wise kings and their entourage gather in a semi-circle around the Madonna and child, evoking a deep foreground space. The recently restored Adoration shows the artist’s underdrawing, a dense web of constantly altered figures, gestures and details, which point to yet another distinctive characteristic of Leonardo: a striving imagination which altered his compositions with a freedom unknown to his contemporaries. The painting was never finished.
In Florence, Leonardo painted a dynamic and beautifully proportioned Annunciation, in which one finds his obsession with naturalistic detail in the flowery lawn and marble table. Close-up photographic study of the painting has also revealed the artist’s fingerprints, another distinguishing feature of his work. Leonardo had, it seems, an idiosyncratic way of occasionally using his fingers and palms to work the paint. At this time he also painted his first known portrait, of Ginevra de’ Benci. The painting’s realism, its glossy oil-painted sheen and austere atmosphere of introspection, show the huge impact on Leonardo of northern European Renaissance painters, whose fame had spread to Italy. In the St Jerome, which never went beyond the design stage, Leonardo conveys the suffering of the saint in the wilderness by his meticulous depiction of an undernourished anatomy. Leonardo’s drawings were as epoch-making as his paintings. On 5 August 1473 he drew in pen and ink what Martin Kemp has described as ‘simply the first dated landscape study in the history of Western art’1 (#litres_trial_promo) – a view of the Arno valley showing Montelupo Castle, just outside Florence.
Around 1482, Leonardo left Florence to begin the second phase of his professional life in Milan, not for the last time reneging on his contractual obligations to finish paintings when he saw the opportunity for a step up the professional ladder. The new Milanese ruler, Duke Ludovico Sforza, had consolidated his power after defeating the French army and poisoning his nephew. Now, like many a newly established despot before and since, he turned to culture as a tool of statecraft (today this is called ‘art washing’). Sforza wished to make Milan a northern city to rival Florence, but Leonardo appears not to have been aware of the duke’s new priorities. There is a draft of a letter to him in the notebooks in which Leonardo – a man on the make as well as a genius – seeks to reinvent himself as an engineer. He pitches hard that he could make ‘all kinds of mortars, most convenient and easy to carry, and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm’. He could dig tunnels under rivers, make ‘safe and invincible’ chariots, ‘big guns’ and catapults, and lastly – change of subject – ‘I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done.’ It was these last two talents that the duke would principally avail himself of.
At the time, Milan was a cultural backwater. The most popular local painters, Vincenzo Foppa, Bernardo Zenale and Ambrogio Bergognone, had barely left the Middle Ages, stylistically speaking. Their workshops were busy but the output uninventive. Thick halos of gold leaf encircled the heads of their saints, who stood stiffly in their heavy robes. Their complexions were pallid and their facial expressions dour and portentous. A wonky perspective in the depiction of a throne, canopy or manger in the foreground usually jarred with that of the architecture or landscape behind. By comparison, Leonardo was the avant-garde with his anatomical and botanical precision, his developing subtle tonality (aka sfumato) and his grip on storytelling.
Leonardo’s first commission in Milan was the most enigmatic painting of his entire oeuvre, the Virgin of the Rocks which now hangs in the Louvre (the National Gallery in London has a second, later version of the painting). Once again the traditional format for such paintings, in which the Virgin and child are seated on a throne on a podium, with saints on either side, has been unceremoniously discarded. Instead, the mother and child appear to have taken refuge in a mountain cave, along with a baby St John, who prays to Jesus, though the Bible never suggests that they met at this age. The group are perched on the edge of a rocky chasm which falls away in front of us, creating a gulf between the viewer and subject. The bizarre landscape of rocky pillars recalls the Surrealist paintings of Max Ernst four and a half centuries later. The painting is the epitome of the sophisticated but indecipherable symbology which Leonardo inserted into his compositions. The lake in the background on the left may symbolise the purity of the Virgin, and so may the foreground, since Mary is referred to in the Song of Songs as ‘the cave in the mountain’. Alternatively, the inhospitable terrain could refer to medieval biographies of St John the Baptist or St Francis, while the manner in which the entire rocky backdrop echoes the arrangement of holy figures could embody the belief, widespread in the Middle Ages and shared by Leonardo, that the earth with its land and water functioned much like the human body with its flesh and blood. Art historians have discussed the meaning of this painting for centuries, without reaching any degree of certainty or agreement.
In Milan, Leonardo introduced emotional transitions, suggested movement and implicit narratives into the static genre of portrait painting. The faces of his sitters show shifting and elusive emotions – moti mentali, as he described them – of acquiescence and resistance, of pleasure and fear. There is a strange atmosphere of serenity and intimacy in these portraits, whose subjects have the faintest of smiles, anticipating the Mona Lisa. The Lady with an Ermine is the most dramatic of them all. A young woman, not yet twenty, turns her head as if taken by surprise – perhaps even feigning surprise – as she hears someone approaching her from behind. She looks shy but inquisitive, demure but also coquettish. The painting was commissioned by the sitter’s lover, the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. The opposing directions of movement of her head and body belong to the already established Renaissance language of contrapposto, counterpoise, a way of articulating the body to create drama and volume, to which Leonardo has added a narrative purpose.
When Leonardo turned to The Last Supper, a commission for the dining hall of a Milanese convent, he was dealing with an established biblical narrative, in which gestures and facial expressions had long conveyed story and drama. However, he ratcheted up the excitement and action to new levels. He depicted the moment of greatest antagonism, when Christ tells his disciples, ‘One of you will betray me.’ Their reactions create an undulating wave of emotions on either side of Christ – postures and faces showing surprise, shock, denial (from Judas, clutching a bag of money), shame, anxiety, argument, and even fainting. ‘The painter who wants to have honour in his work,’ wrote Leonardo, ‘must always find the imprint of his work in the natural, spontaneous acts of men, born from the strong and sudden revelation of feelings, and from those make brief sketches in his notebook, and then use them for his purpose.’
In the 1490s Leonardo began to write and draw entries in his notebooks, of which only a quarter are estimated to have survived. These codices and manuscripts constitute one of the most important historical archives of all time, a cross-section of the European intellect and imagination at the doorstep of a new world of discovery and experiment, and proof that Leonardo possessed one of the most active and analytical minds of all time, ‘undoubtedly the most curious man who ever lived’, as Kenneth Clark called him.
Across the notebooks’ pages a dazzling array of thoughts unfold about the natural world and the sciences. The art historian Ernst Gombrich remarked how ‘Posterity had to struggle with that awe-inspiring legacy of notes, jottings, drafts, excerpts, and memoranda in which personal trivia alternate with observations on optics, geology, anatomy, the behaviour of wind and water, the mechanics of pulleys and the geometry of intersecting circles, the growth of plants or the statics of buildings, all jostling each other on sheets that may contain sublime drawings, absent-minded doodles, coarse fables, and subtle prose poems.’2 (#litres_trial_promo) To be sure, Leonardo was as idiosyncratic as he was intelligent: all the text was written in right-to-left mirrored handwriting, which suggests to our imagination a desire to withhold secrets from all but the most dedicated students, but which may also be a sign of Leonardo’s ‘unlettered’ if not obdurate pragmatism. It was easier for the left-handed artist to write backwards because there was less risk of smudging the ink.
Leonardo appears to have been a highly unconventional character. He had a distinctive taste in clothes – his early biographer Anonimo Gaddiano wrote that he ‘wore a rose-coloured cloak, which came only to his knees, although at the time long vestments were the custom’. A list of his clothing in his notebooks itemises a pink cap, two rose-coloured gowns, a purple-velvet hooded cape, and two satin coats, one crimson and one purple again.3 (#litres_trial_promo) One supposed portrait of him, which may hint at his character, is by his friend Bramante, who, the artist Gian Paolo Lomazzo wrote, used Leonardo’s face for a fresco of the melancholic Greek philosopher Heraclitus. We see a straggly-haired forty-something man, his face running with tears, perhaps from sadness, but also possibly from drunken mirth. Leonardo appears to have been, or to have become, a vegetarian. The Florentine traveller Andrea Corsali wrote a letter to a friend in 1516 in which he mentioned that Leonardo ‘lives on rice, milk and other inanimate foods’. That was a highly unusual diet for a Renaissance European.
Leonardo seems to have had a high sense of self-worth. His pictures did not come cheap by the standards of the day – The Last Supper cost 200 ducats. He could be short-tempered if he felt he was not being accorded the respect he was due: on one occasion he told a client’s cashier haughtily, ‘I am not a penny painter.’ But at the same time he apparently often felt dissatisfied with his achievements, and some early biographers cite that as the reason he left so many of his paintings unfinished. Lomazzo, who spoke to Leonardo’s assistant Francesco Melzi, wrote that ‘He never finished any of the works he commenced because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.’
In this first Milanese period, Leonardo was commissioned to make a monument to the Duke of Milan’s father. He designed the largest equestrian statue in the world, and built a clay model three times life-size. But before he could cast it in bronze, the French crown had turned against the Milanese duke. The duke reassigned the metal that had been intended for the statue to the production of cannons, but with little effect. The French King Louis XII invaded northern Italy and occupied Milan. The world lost a masterpiece and Sforza his dukedom. There is a touching description in the notebooks of how Leonardo hid his money in small bags around his studio as the foreign army approached. When they arrived, French archers used Leonardo’s giant clay prototype for target practice and destroyed it.
Leonardo had now lost his great benefactor, and there followed several years of uncertainty, if not poverty. He travelled to Mantua and Venice, reduced on one occasion to making drawings of crystal and amethyst vases for Isabella d’Este, who was considering buying them, and on another to sketching the villa of a Florentine merchant for the Duke of Mantua, who wanted to build his own country mansion.
Leonardo moved on to Florence in 1500, and spent the next six years there. He was given a studio in the large halls of the Santa Maria Novella church. A measure of stability returned, notwithstanding a curious brief interlude in 1502–03 when the notorious warlord Cesare Borgia employed him for two years as his military architect and engineer, although, beyond drawing a map, it is not clear what work the artist actually carried out for the commander.
In Florence Leonardo began his second great phase of works, distinguished by their intense sfumato effects, which included the Mona Lisa and Virgin and Child with St Anne. His storytelling reached its apogee in The Battle of Anghiari, a prestigious commission for the Signoria, the seat of the Florence town council. He had technical problems with this fresco, as would later emerge with The Last Supper. Before he had finished it, his paint started slipping and flaking off the walls of the council chamber. He blamed a freak rainstorm, but the cause was more likely his technique of trying to use oil paint on plaster, to which it could not adhere. Leonardo could be slow at some times, but rushed and careless at others. He could have avoided the decay of his largest works, The Last Supper and The Battle of Anghiari, if he had first tested his technique out on a smaller scale. The original Battle no longer survives, but there is what is thought to be an accurate copy in the form of a large drawing, which probably began life as a copy of Leonardo’s cartoon, which was then reworked or retouched by the great seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rubens – an example of how complicated and how hybrid the authorship of Old Master drawings and paintings can be. The scimitars of mounted soldiers clash, while the heads of their horses butt against each other in a tight, violent circle of a composition which shows that Leonardo, for all his apparent disdain for learning, must have studied Graeco-Roman battle friezes and free-standing sculptures.
In 1506 Leonardo returned to Milan, lured there by its new French rulers, leaving the Battle unfinished, much to the fury of the Florentine town council. In Milan he continued to work on paintings designed or begun in Florence, the Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Madonna of the Yarnwinder among them, although the latter may have been partly executed by assistants. Here he and his assistants probably also finished painting the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks.
The Salvator Mundi was probably begun in this period, possibly for a client from the French court. The painting compresses into its modest format a summation of many, but not all, of the techniques, themes and passions of Leonardo’s oeuvre. His Christ is not like the bright and youthful Jesuses of Raphael, or the strong athletic ones of Michelangelo. He seems a level above such mortal and physical attributes. He floats towards the onlooker like a mystical vision. He transcends time, harking back to the images of a blessing Christ that are found in early Christian catacombs and on the mosaic ceilings of Byzantine churches, but upgraded with a Renaissance makeover that is both realist and idealising. The Salvator’s eyes, eroded as they undoubtedly are, seem to look straight through us, with a gaze as piercing as it is ethereal. Christ’s expression hovers, in that Leonardesque way, between a range of contrasting emotions: serene, placid, wise, resigned, resolute, or implacable and unmoved. On the almost imperceptibly upturned corners of Christ’s lips, damaged as they are, is the slightest trace of a smile. The facial typology of the Son of God seems eerily modern, like those of the Nazarenes or Romantic painters, evidence of the realism and originality of Leonardo’s portraiture.
Leonardo is known for the intricate and precise way he painted hair, so different from the patterned and schematic rendering of his Renaissance contemporaries. In the Salvator, Christ’s long curls glisten with highlights of varying intensity as they catch the light. Amidst the best-preserved strands on the right you will find a double helix, a shape that we find in Leonardo’s drawings of coiled ropes, machines and waterfalls. In his notebooks he wrote of the similarities between the way hair fell and water flowed. There were ‘two motions, of which one responds to the weight of the strands of hair and the other to the direction of the curls; thus the water makes turning eddies, which in part respond to the impetus of the principal current, while the other responds to the incidental motion of deflection’.
These curls may also be carnal. Leonardo’s notebooks contain sketches of curly-haired boys, which are often said to be portraits of his teenage assistant and almost certainly his lover, Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, whom Leonardo nicknamed Salai, or ‘mischievous one’. In April 1476, a week before his twenty-fourth birthday, Leonardo was arrested by the zealous Florentine vice squad, which patrolled the city streets at night. The accusation was of sodomy with a male prostitute, though the artist was acquitted.
Along the edges of Christ’s garment runs filigree embroidery in golden thread, forming a geometric pattern of knots, sparkling like his hair with reflected light. Leonardo was fascinated by knots, in which his passions for mathematics, geometry and art intersected. He copied and owned the knot patterns of artists, and he also invented his own, far more intricate, ones. Prints of his ‘Vincian knots’ were sold across Europe. Vasari remarked how Leonardo would ‘waste his time in drawing knots of cords, made according to an order, that from one end all the rest might follow till the other, so as to fill a round’. In fact, mathematicians from the University of California analysed Leonardo’s knots a few years ago and found that they were made up of several broken strands, not a single one. Where necessary illusion trumped science in Leonardo’s art.4 (#litres_trial_promo)
The hands and the orb provide further evidence of Leonardo’s keen observation, obsession with detail and willingness to replace the tiringly conventional with the marvellously real. The orb held by the Salvator Mundi was commonly depicted in European Renaissance paintings as brass or bronze, sometimes with a cross above it. Sometimes it was painted as a globe of the earth. In some northern European paintings it is transparent, and within it you may see an unforgiving biblical landscape. Leonardo, however, has painted his as a large, solid rock crystal.† Despite the severe damage this part of the Salvator Mundi has suffered, you can see tiny defects in the orb, known as ‘inclusions’, and air bubbles, each exactingly painted with a dark ring of shadow and a dab of white highlight. Leonardo has added more careful highlights around the fingertips, as if lit by ‘lustre’, as he called bounced light, here reflected off the crystal orb.
Meanwhile, the Salvator’s other hand, raised in blessing, displays a balletic grace and solid volume. It is painted with a faultless foreshortening (a kind of perspective for objects and bodies, when seen front-on) so that it seems to project itself out of the picture towards us. Leonardo has added soft trails of lead white paint along the edges of the fingers, in the creases of the palm, and a dab at the bottom of the thumb, suggesting the softest of broken light from the upper left. Equally, veils of shadow of subtly varying darkness are painted on the parts of the hand facing away from the light, like the third knuckles of the bent fingers. The thumb curves inwards – previously rare in paintings of this type – so that the entire gesture forms an elegantly elongated pyramid, a geometric form Leonardo often used for his compositions of figures.
All these elements cohere in the sfumato style in which the painting is executed. While Leonardo’s peers favoured bright colours and strong lines, Leonardo, a maverick within the Renaissance avant-garde, took painting in the opposite direction towards tonality, building up from dark undercoats to light highlights. Raphael, Michelangelo, Perugino, Piero della Francesca and other Renaissance masters painted scenes that were flooded with light. Their saints, temples and porticos have bright hues. They painted lighter colours on first, in general, and then modelled the figures and architecture with darker shades. But Leonardo worked the other way round. The Salvator is painted up from gloomy underlayers of dark vermilion and black paint. Areas of light are built up from this darkness in thin, transparent layers of very carefully graduated oil-based mixtures, known as glazes. Leonardo advised: ‘Paint so that a smoky finish can be seen, rather than contours and profiles that are distinct and crude.’
However, the sfumato which we admire in Leonardo’s paintings today is never only the work of the Renaissance master. Part of the effect derives from the decay of the art. Leonardo’s fresco paintings, The Last Supper and The Battle of Anghiari, fell apart in his own lifetime because he tried to find a way to paint with oils on plaster; the paint did not stick. In other paintings, most famously the Mona Lisa, the colours have faded and the varnishes darkened. Restorers dare not clean the painting, lest the general public not recognise the work of art which emerges from underneath. The St Jerome once had the saint’s head cut out, and it was only glued back in decades later. Of all Leonardo’s paintings, the Salvator is, relative to its size and regarding the most important areas of the work, the most damaged of them all. Leonardo’s paintings often carry the enhanced atmosphere of an ancient ruin, a work of genius placed slightly beyond reach by the ravages of time. The texture itself prompts a spiritual reflection on the transitory nature of material things, combined with an irresolvable yearning for something lost forever.
While we see so many of the above Leonardesque attributes in the Salvator, other notable aspects of the painting are not very Leonardo. The composition, for one thing, is uniquely flat within the artist’s oeuvre. Christ has none of the movement and contrapposto we see in the figures in Leonardo’s other paintings, despite the fact that he had written ‘Always set your figures so that the side to which the head turns is not the side to which the breast faces.’ Rather than reinvent the composition of this traditional subject, Leonardo seems to have produced, for the first and only time in his life, a carbon copy of the static one that scores of other early Renaissance artists used. The typology of the Salvator Christ, with its long nose and sombre expression, is remote from the delicate, androgynous charm of the Christ he painted in The Last Supper and of a drawing of Christ he made around 1494. In fact, the facial features don’t resemble any of Leonardo’s drawings of other young men. The orb presents another problem. Its realism is undermined by the absence of any notable optical distortions in the drapery behind it, and of the reflections of the surroundings which would logically be visible in such a piece of crystal. Leonardo studied and wrote about optics at length in his notebooks; it is unlikely that he would paint such an object in such an unrealistic way.
After Martin Kemp accepted Robert Simon’s invitation to examine and research the Salvator Mundi, the Oxford art historian embarked on years of study of the painting in all its aspects, from its style to its iconography, and from its overall effect to its smallest details. The painting merits attribution to Leonardo, Kemp has elegantly written, because of
… the soft skin over the bony joints of the fingers of Christ’s right hand, implying but not describing anatomical structure; the illuminated tips of the fingers of his left hand, the glistening filaments of vortex hair, above all on the right as we look at the picture; the teasing ambiguity of his facial features, the gaze assertively direct but removed from explicitness; the intricately secure geometry of the angular interlace in the neckline and cross-bands of his costume; the gleaming crystal ellipse on the pendant plaque below his neckline; the fine rivulets of gathered cloth on his chest.5 (#litres_trial_promo)
The painting has, in short, ‘Leonardo’s magic’. Kemp finds great significance in the contrasting ways in which the face and hand were painted, the former softly, the latter crisply. Leonardo was the first artist to write about aerial perspective – the way colours and outlines fade the further away they are.‡ Kemp notes that the way the blessing hand comes forward in sharp focus towards the onlooker, while the face hovers in a mist of sfumato, is an application by the artist of his observations on the ‘perspective of disappearance’.
Kemp views the painting as Leonardo’s spiritual manifesto. The sign of this is the replacement of the conventional brass orb plus cross (the globus cruciger), with a transparent globe. Through this adaptation Leonardo was representing the cosmology of the Graeco-Roman mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy, who believed that the earth was surrounded by a transparent ‘crystalline sphere of the heavens’, in which the stars were situated. ‘So what you’ve got in the Salvator Mundi is really a Saviour of the cosmos, and this is a very Leonardesque transformation,’ Kemp has said.6 (#litres_trial_promo)
In regard to some of the un-Leonardo-like aspects of the picture, Kemp has developed explanations. The flat composition can be understood as the influence of the Veil of Veronica, an image of Christ’s face, not dissimilar to the Turin Shroud, left when the eponymous saint wiped Jesus’s face with a piece of cloth. The subjects of the Salvator Mundi or Christ Pantocrator, which were very popular in Renaissance Europe, always showed Christ flat-on, looking straight towards the viewer. It was a serious subject, Christ as God, which demanded an austere and sombre treatment. If Leonardo’s painting had been made for a client, a conservative format might well have been insisted on. The explanation for the lack of optical distortions in the orb, Kemp suggests, is that Leonardo was making an artistic decision to break a rule in the interests of the overall impact of his painting. Distortions in the orb would be distracting. The artist was exercising the Renaissance virtue of decorum, or propriety.
But there are shortcomings in Kemp’s analysis. Regarding the significance of the orb, there is no evidence that Leonardo was a neo-Platonist, or even understood what the term meant. Certainly his paintings sometimes contain signs and symbols that refer to the name of the sitter or client, but suggestions that he referenced philosophical ideas as he did the names and coats of arms of his aristocratic patrons remain speculative. As for Leonardo’s depth of field, the alleged blurriness of Christ’s face is contradicted by the sharpness of the curls of his hair, which are in the same plane. One excerpt from Leonardo’s notebooks actually tells painters that if they are painting a figure in the distance, ‘do not single out some strands of hair, as the distance nullifies the shine of the hair’. It is a great mystery why a painting by an artist who studied optics, perspective and light with such intensity should contain two glaring optical inconsistencies. But that is not the greatest mystery of all.
For there is one feature of the Salvator Mundi about which neither Martin Kemp nor any other art historians have said anything at all. Perhaps they have dismissed it, or perhaps they haven’t noticed it. This feature is so individualistic that it can neither be associated with Leonardo’s painting nor disassociated from it; it belongs neither to the pictorial traditions of medieval Italy, nor to the symbology of early Christianity, nor to the classicising project of the Renaissance. The Salvator’s garments are of only one colour. In every other Italian Renaissance depiction of Christ he wears red and blue, almost always a red tunic and a blue robe. The Salvator wears only a blue garment, adorned with gold filigree embroidery. For the moment we have no explanation for this. Let us call it the blue clue.7 (#litres_trial_promo)
* (#ulink_6763d334-d629-58d5-8ad6-e4d56f1c8e62) Vasari explained why he thought Leonardo belonged to the third phase of the Renaissance: ‘In addition to the power and boldness of his drawing, not to mention the precision with which he copied the most minute details of nature exactly as they are, he displayed perfect rule, improved order, correct proportion, just design, and a most divine grace.’
† (#ulink_934a8a15-85db-5b4b-b86c-5988ed3635bd) He probably saw rock crystal orbs of this transparency and size in Milan in the early sixteenth century. There is a large one in a museum in Dresden which was made in Milan in the 1570s, by which time Milan had become the centre of rock crystal carving in Italy – another reason to date the Salvator Mundi to Leonardo’s second Milanese period.
‡ (#ulink_abb9bbd7-86dc-5e8e-b313-33d329f08ff4) Leonardo wrote: ‘The nearest objects will be bounded by evident and sharp boundaries against the background, while those more distant will be highly finished but with more smoky boundaries, that is to say more blurred, or we may say less evident.’
CHAPTER 7
Vinci, Vincia, Vinsett (#litres_trial_promo)
The word ‘provenance’, borrowed from French, describes a branch of art historical research the dictionary definition of which is ‘a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality’. It means the history of the collecting of a painting after it has been painted, as it passes from collection to collection. The study of provenance serves a practical economic purpose, since the value of a painting rises according to how important its previous owners were. Kings, queens and emperors are at the top of the scale, while middle-class factory managers are close to the bottom. The role of provenance in the economy of art was already recognised at the end of the seventeenth century. It attracted the curiosity of the Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard de Mandeville, who, referring to a series of Raphaels at an English royal palace, remarked:
The value that is set on paintings depends not only on the name of the Master and the time of his age he drew them in, but likewise in a great measure on the scarcity of his works, and what is still more unreasonable, the quality of the persons, in whose possession they are, as well as the lengths of time they have been in great families; and if the Cartoons now at Hampton Court were done by a less famous hand than that of Raphael, and had a private person for their owner, who would be forced to sell them, they would never yield the tenth part of the money which with all their gross faults they are now esteemed to be worth.1 (#litres_trial_promo)
There is also a second use for provenance studies. If the authorship of a painting is in doubt or contested, provenance can offer clues.
The inventories and archives of rich collectors often contain documents with dates and places, which allow one to trace a picture from collector to collector, in reverse chronology, to a time and place close to when and where it was made. This, in turn, can indicate who painted it. The provenance researcher may also consider whether a collector tended to buy originals or copies (sometimes difficult to tell apart connoisseurially, if the copyist is good), or if works by a particular artist were on the market in a particular place during a particular period. If the painting is genuinely a high-quality work, it is more likely to have been in the collection of a ruler or nobleman. An artist was less likely to offer a royal client a painting made by his assistants (though it did happen from time to time), and a ruler, with his team of eagle-eyed art advisers, was less likely to accept one. Often the inventories state in which room the work of art was displayed, and this detail can also become very important. If it was hung in an official hall or reception room, then it was probably an important painting; if it was placed in a corridor, on the stairs, or worse, in a storeroom, it was probably thought of as a second-rate work.
At the heart of this research are the inventories, handwritten on parchment or thick crusts of paper. These can be catalogues of collections compiled by the owner’s clerks or ‘keepers of pictures’. They may be itemised lists of works of art available for purchase from a hard-up merchant, or troves of freshly acquired art that are about to be shipped out of Italy, or the valuables that a bride took with her to her new home. In an age when money was not kept in banks, you were what you owned. You didn’t want your possessions, spread across your many-roomed mansions, to slip away. Largely ignored as a source of information until the late twentieth century, inventories have become the coalface of one of the most fashionable fields of art history today, rich seams of data from which deductions, speculations and occasionally conclusions can be extracted.
While inventories are vital to building a case for attribution for thousands of Renaissance paintings, the raw material is challenging. The fragmentary nature of the records means that most histories have gaps. The names of artists are spelt in many ways, and attributions can change from list to list. Descriptions of the paintings are, until the late nineteenth century, only textual, with scarcely a visual reference. That is an immense problem, because the range of subjects – especially biblical and classical – was limited, the titles are often similar, artists often made several paintings of the same subject, and the descriptions in the inventories are brief. Dimensions are rarely supplied, and sometimes there is only a title without a painter’s name attached. The result is that provenance histories for works of art from before the nineteenth century are frequently assembled from a range of probabilities, which reinforce each other. Such structures can be precarious, wobbling between the likely and the hypothetical. The evidence is often circumstantial, but art history is a discipline that studies the products of the imagination; a certain flexibility is permitted, while the marvellous objects themselves have been known to inspire the most rigorous of academic minds to meld fact with fantasy.
Since the author and the date of Robert Simon’s painting were unknown, he began to research its provenance within weeks of acquiring it. By his own account he spent an hour a day, every day for six years, studying the Salvator. Every Old Masters dealer has to present an account of the provenance of artworks they wish to sell. Most of them subcontract this work to specialists and academics, but Simon is a particularly scholarly dealer, who enjoys the archives and takes pride in his abilities. He had done provenance research many times before the Salvator arrived in his gallery.
The first clue was two initials and a number on the back of the painting: ‘CC 106’. Simon traced that back to the important nineteenth-century Cook Collection, belonging to a British cloth merchant. Some claim that Sir Francis Cook assembled the greatest art collection in private hands in Britain at that time, with the exception of Queen Victoria’s. A three-volume catalogue of his treasures was published in 1913. There, Simon discovered his painting, listed as ‘cat. number 106’, on page 123 of Volume I, which was entitled ‘Italian Schools’. However, it was not attributed to Leonardo but described as a poor copy, and there was no photograph of the painting in the catalogue. Simon turned to the photo archives.
It was the technology of photography that made modern art history possible. From the mid-nineteenth century specialised photo studios, most famously Alinari in Rome, methodically, accurately and beautifully photographed every notable work of art they could find, supplying an ever-growing market with perfect images, albeit in black and white. Museums and institutions built collections of thousands of photos, while art historians and connoisseurs amassed their own private stockpiles – it was a way for them to keep images of all the art they studied and loved close to them, in their homes. The previously uncontainable – a vast sea of images spread across many thousands of kilometres, too large and diverse to be committed to memory – could now be held in one’s hands, spread out on a table or stored in a cupboard.
For art historians, photography was like the spear that enabled cavemen to hunt woolly mammoths. The scholars scribbled notes on the backs of their images, with dates, authorship, and what they knew of the ownership of the painting. By laying out a selection of photographs on their desks they could study, for example, the drapery folds or facial features in a hundred anonymous Renaissance altarpieces and group them according to stylistic traits. They could then associate those stylistic traits with documented works by this or that artist, thus defining his or her oeuvre and, if they had some dates, stylistic development. They could pull out all the pictures they had on a particular subject, like the Last Supper, or the Madonna and Child, or indeed the Salvator Mundi, and, if they knew the dates, arrange them chronologically to see how the treatment of that subject evolved over time, which artists innovated, and which copied those innovations. Thus was born an art history of style and symbol. Acquired over many decades, many of these photographs have survived while the pictures they record have been destroyed or gone missing. They are not just a record of the art we have; they are also a record of the art we have lost.
Robert Simon visited the Witt Library photo archive in the basement of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. There he accessed all the folders of images marked ‘Salvator Mundi’. Soon he found a photograph of the Cook Collection’s Salvator, where once again it was listed as a copy. Simon was not surprised by that. Sleepers were almost always miscatalogued, otherwise they would not have ‘slept’ so long. On the bottom right of the photograph was a typed text reading ‘(Cook Coll. Richmond)’, and underneath, handwritten, ‘Whereabouts unknown (1963)’. So nobody had known where this picture was in 1963.
Parts of the Cook Salvator looked different from the painting Simon had bought. In the Cook photo, Christ had a moustache and facial hair that made him resemble a Mexican bandit in a 1950s B-movie. That indicated that Simon’s Salvator had been restored or repainted in some way since the date of the photo. However the blessing hand, embroidery, orb and other features of the Cook were identical with Simon’s painting. Now he could narrow down his search. Before this discovery the painting could have come from any European country, but Simon now had a focus: Britain.
The second clue led back to Britain as well. Everyone in the Old Masters business knows of an etching made by the seventeenth-century print-maker Wenceslaus Hollar which bears an inscription by the artist, ‘Leonardus da Vinci pinxit’, the word ‘pinxit’ testifying that the print was a copy of a painting by Leonardo. It is an image of Christ as saviour of the world, orb in one hand, the other raised in blessing, with flowing curly hair remarkably similar to that in the Simon and Cook painting. The original Leonardo had long been presumed lost. Simon compared his painting to this print. It looked so similar in significant clues – its drapery and its blessing hand, even if – a significant clue in the contrary direction – Hollar’s Christ had a curly beard with a central parting, and his didn’t.
Simon knew where to go next. There was a particular volume on his shelf which many dealers have, and which is often a first port of call for researching the history of potentially important unknown paintings. One day in 2006 or 2007 – he can’t remember which year exactly – Simon pulled out his copy of the Walpole Society Journal, 1972. In it, the keeper of the British royal collection, Oliver Millar, had published an inventory of King Charles I’s art collection, meticulously turning a few slightly differing seventeenth-century handwritten manuscripts into a hundred-odd pages of neat type. Simon soon came across a description of a work that might match his painting: page 63, item number 49, a ‘Peece [sic] of Christ done by Leonard’. Now he had found a record that Charles I had owned a painting of Christ most likely by Leonardo, and that painting was, in all probability, the one he had bought a 50 per cent stake in for the decidedly unprincely sum of $587.50.
At the recommendation of Martin Kemp, Simon contacted a young art history graduate, Margaret Dalivalle. She had been a student of Kemp’s at Oxford and was writing a PhD about notions of the copy and the original in seventeenth-century painting. Simon asked whether she could, as she recalls it, ‘contribute to the research into the provenance history of a newly discovered painting’.
Dalivalle was born in Ayrshire in Scotland, and showed an artistic bent from an early age, encouraged by her godmother, who worked in a gallery. She studied fine art at Glasgow School of Art, then ran her own business as an exhibition designer. After a few years she returned to study, doing a Master’s degree followed by a PhD at Oxford. She now teaches at a number of Oxford colleges as a non-tenured tutor in Renaissance and early modern art history and the history of ideas.
Searching for the Salvator in British archives, Dalivalle thumbed through reams of rarely-consulted documents on thin, yellowed paper, written in faded brownish ink. Under the vaulted sixteenth-century timber ceiling of the Duke Humfrey reading room in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where each panel is painted with an image of an open book, she pored through manuscripts. She ordered obscure volumes in the Rare Books department of the British Library, the quietest reading room of them all. She went to the archives of the Houses of Parliament, placing old bound volumes of their proceedings and reports between triangular wedges of grey foam so the books could not open flat, to protect their thick spines from damage. She examined bundles of documents in the archives of the royal family.
She hunted through inventories in which Leonardo da Vinci could be written as ‘Leonard’, ‘Leonardus’ or ‘Lionard’, and Vinci as ‘Vince’, ‘Vincia’ or ‘Vinsett’, and in which there was always the risk that his authorship had been mistaken for that of another Italian Renaissance artist like Raphael, Correggio or Zambelin – a strange spelling for Giovanni Bellini. She worked on these complex materials over several years to assemble the illustrious provenance for the Salvator Mundi, which would lead to the auctioneer at Christie’s confidently beginning his sale: ‘Lot 9b. Leonardo da Vinci. Salvator Mundi, Saviour of the World. The property of three English Kings, Charles I, Charles II and James II.’
Margaret Dalivalle declined a face-to-face meeting, but we exchanged many emails. She wore her learning a little heavily, to coin a phrase, and was defensive about what she had discovered, which, she said, would be published for the first time in a forthcoming, long-delayed peer-reviewed book. The fact is, a colleague of hers explained to me, her hopes for a permanent university post are dependent on this research, to which she has devoted the last eight years, entirely self-funded.
I learned from Dalivalle how much pride she took in the skills required for her research, and how wary she was of the layman’s ability to understand the intricacy of her subject. Individual facts, she advised me, did not matter much on their own in provenance research; one had to consider the whole construction. That was good advice, which could be applied, in ways Dalivalle did not intend, to the broader framework of the Salvator Mundi project. Dalivalle’s work on the Salvator cannot escape the over-arching context of its origin, which was one of commercial interest in a certain outcome. She was given her task over a decade ago by a dealer who wished to sell his painting as a Leonardo, and had been recommended by a professor of art history who had nailed his colours to this cause.
Since its beginning, the art market has always monetised scholarship. It is the scholars who appraise a work of art, and it is customary – quite rightly so – to pay them for their opinions. Museum boards have always been stuffed with wealthy patrons who privately collect works by the same artists that the museum supports. Dealers have always hobnobbed with curators of public collections – the former relish the prestige of selling to a public institution, the latter revel in the excitement of a new discovery. The danger that scholarship can be compromised by showmanship and salesmanship has always been clear and present in the arena of art history. In the case of the Salvator Mundi, such familiar interrelationships were built into the project in a particularly intimate and perilous manner.
PART II (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8
The King’s Painting (#litres_trial_promo)
The windows were so small, and the light in the palace so poor, that when pictures arrived they were examined by candlelight. On 30 January 1636 the papal emissary, Gregorio Panzani, and a few footmen carried the paintings down the corridors of Whitehall Palace, a higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of banqueting and reception halls, chambers, chapels, breakfast rooms and bedrooms – two thousand rooms in all – plus tennis courts, gardens and cockpits. They climbed the stairs to the private rooms, or ‘closets’, of Queen Henrietta Maria. Her Majesty was already in bed, perhaps because of the winter temperature in the palace rather than the lateness of the hour, and she had the pictures ‘carried to her bed one by one’, as Panzani wrote in his detailed account of the encounter. The art was a gift from Cardinal Antonio Barberini at the Vatican in Rome. The cunning cleric was hoping that the queen’s husband, the Protestant Charles I, could be induced back to the Catholic faith, and was wooing him with Italian Renaissance paintings, which he knew the king loved. Or perhaps he could at least convince the king to moderate the oppression of Catholics in England. Of that fateful evening Panzani wrote, ‘Especially pleasing to the Queen was that by Vinci, and that by Andrea del Sarto.’ However, the queen said ruefully that she would not be able to keep them for herself, because they were so good that ‘the King would steal them from her’.
Meanwhile, Charles had been informed of the newly arrived masterpieces. He came hurrying down the corridors with a few of his courtiers, including the brilliant architect Inigo Jones, who shared the sovereign’s enthusiasm for Italian painting. Charles and Jones then played a game. Charles removed the labels bearing the names of the artists which Panzani had attached to each picture, and Jones attempted to identify the works’ creators, based on the style and technique. Thus began the discipline of connoisseurship in Britain, a parlour game for the wealthiest strata of society, but also, let us not forget, the sine qua non of the discipline of art history.
Inigo Jones, wrote Panzani, ‘threw down his riding cloak, put on his spectacles, took hold of a candle and turned to inspect all of them minutely together with the King’. The candle flickered over the outlines of portraits of noblemen and women, lighting up the spidery lace of their collars and cuffs, the sheen of their buckles, buttons and scabbards, and flourishes in their moustaches. Jones ‘accorded them extraordinary approval’, then pointed to one, and – Panzani writes with a trace of the suppressed smirk that one would expect from a citizen of the birthplace of the Renaissance watching the efforts of an English novice – ‘The King’s architect Jones believes that the picture by Leonardo is the portrait of a certain Venetian Ginevra Benci and he concludes it from the G. and B. inscribed on her breast. As he is very conceited and boastful he often repeats this idea of his to demonstrate his great knowledge of painting.’
Jones got the artist more or less right. This was a painting attributed by everyone at the time to Leonardo, although today it is ascribed to his most sensitive pupil, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio. But Jones got the identity and gender of the sitter wrong – perhaps understandably, given the gloom. He was in fact looking at a beautiful and ethereal image of a young man, his hand inside his cloak covering his heart, gazing slightly askance as if lost in a daydream. The sitter was probably the Italian poet Girolamo Casio. Today the picture hangs at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.
From Charles I’s passion for art and for Leonardo da Vinci sprang the birth of the international art market, which has evolved to the business we know today. It began thirteen years earlier, in 1623, when Charles was heir to the throne. He had travelled to Madrid with the intention of returning with a bride, the Spanish Infanta Maria. He failed to win the hand of the Spanish princess, but he did return with a new love – art.
According to an account by the English author and diplomat Henry Wotton, Charles had set off for Spain with his friend the courtier George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was then in his early thirties and, according to many who set eyes on him, ‘the handsomest-bodied man of England; his limbs so well compacted and his conversation so pleasing and of so sweet disposition’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) Charles and Buckingham travelled incognito, ‘with disguised beards and borrowed names of Thomas and John Smith’2 (#litres_trial_promo) and with only three servants. The journey was not as secret as they pretended, however. Charles’s father, King James I, had sanctioned this romantic quest after having spent years trying to negotiate the marriage of his son to a Spanish princess, all in vain. Christian Europe had been split in two by the Reformation, with the Roman Catholic empires and the pope on one side, and the Protestants and an assortment of nationalist kingships and independent-minded mini-states on the other. The Catholic Spanish king was loth to marry his daughter to a Protestant prince. Charles’s youthful ardour was the last card his father could play.
Charles and Buckingham’s planning was slipshod. They didn’t have the right small change to pay the ferry across the Thames at Gravesend – ‘for lack of silver, they were fain to give the ferryman a piece of two and twenty shillings’3 (#litres_trial_promo) – and this immense overpayment aroused suspicions. At Canterbury they were stopped by local officials, but made their escape after Buckingham, who was Lord Admiral of the Fleet, pulled off his beard, revealed his true identity and said he was on his way to perform a surprise inspection of the navy. In Paris the pair bought wigs and charmed their way into the French royal palace, surely with French officials winking at each other over the Englishmen’s poor disguises. There they set eyes on Henrietta Maria, the daughter of the French King Henry IV, who would one day be Charles’s actual bride. But she was Plan B.
Charles and his minimal retinue made their way on horseback through Spain. To the young tourists it seemed a harsh place. An English diplomat of the time, Sir Richard Wynn, observed how poor rural Spain looked compared to England: windows had no glass, meat was scarce, people used planks for tables, and there were no napkins. Spanish men dressed for all eventualities, wearing capes and carrying swords.4 (#litres_trial_promo) But everything changed when the royal party arrived in Madrid. Charles was put up in the towering fortress-cum-palace of Alcazar. The English king hastily upgraded his son’s trip into an official mission and dispatched diplomats. Spain’s King Philip IV laid out the red carpet and organised festivities. ‘All the streets were adorned, in some places with rich hangings, in others with curious pictures,’ wrote one contemporary.5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles rode alongside the Spanish king, under an ornate canopy, through the streets of Madrid, the capital of a freshly baked empire that stretched from North Africa to Latin America. The air reverberated with fanfares of trumpets and drums, while tapestries and carpets hung in decorative celebration from crowded balconies, wafting slowly in the spring breeze. The King of Spain temporarily relaxed the rules that limited the cost of clothing a subject might wear, and offered his nobility loans of up to 20,000 ducats so his court could impress the visiting English prince. There was jousting and bullfighting in the city’s enormous central square, the Plaza Mayor. Charles sat in a balcony neighbouring that of the Spanish princess, as close as decorum allowed, and seemed smitten. The spectacle was so expensive that locals joked that Charles had managed to sack the city without an army.
But after the festivities had subsided, Charles found himself locked in a diplomatic pas de deux, with the princess kept out of sight. The problem was still the prospective bride and groom’s religious incompatibility. If this was to be overcome a special dispensation would be required from the pope, and concessions from the English towards their Roman Catholic subjects, neither of which were forthcoming. Spanish ministers worked to keep Charles in Madrid for as long as possible, in the hope that he would succumb to the artistic and moral superiority of the Roman Catholic faith and consider converting. They contrived for him to be present when King Philip was kissing the feet of the poor, and tipped him off about an English Jesuit who was distributing the enormous sum of £2,000 in charitable donations to hospitals and religious institutions. The Spanish king gave him paintings with unmistakable messages which laid it on with a gold-plated Catholic trowel, such as Titian’s glittering Portrait of Charles V with Hound, painted to celebrate the pope’s coronation of the then Spanish monarch as Holy Roman Emperor in 1530.
Charles, for his part, was trying to engineer a private encounter with Princess Maria. At one point he climbed over a palace wall and ‘sprang down from a great height’ in order to come face to face with her. But when the princess saw him she ‘gave a shriek and ran back’. Her chaperone told Charles to leave at once, and he withdrew.6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles spent eight months hanging around in Madrid, waiting for a breakthrough in the marriage negotiations. He had time on his hands, and he spent it in the company of Buckingham and assorted courtiers and art advisers, visiting the magnificent palaces of the Spanish sovereign and the mansions of his nobles, and shopping for art. In the seventeenth century Spain held much the same power over the English psyche as Paris did in the twentieth: it was the epitome of sophistication. As Ben Jonson wrote in The Alchemist, ‘your Spanish Stoop is the best garb; your Spanish beard is the best cut; your Spanish ruffs are the best Wear; your Spanish pavin the best dance; Your Spanish titillation in a glove the best perfume …’, to which he might have added, ‘and your Spanish art collection is the best curated’.
By this time a small number of English aristocrats and royals, notably the Earl of Arundel and Charles’s older brother Prince Henry, had built up collections, sometimes travelling to Europe to see and buy art. Charles had already ordered the purchase on his behalf of cartoons by Raphael in Italy; famous tapestries based on these would be made in London. He also had accepted gifts of pictures from Peter Paul Rubens, Europe’s most famous living artist. Now the prince’s experiences in Spain would supercharge his appreciation of both the beauty of art and the thrall in which it could hold men.
At the time, King Philip IV had the largest art collection in the world, consisting of about two thousand works; by the time of his death forty-two years later that figure would have doubled. A thousand of them were in his enormous palace, the Escorial, on the hills just outside Madrid. Spanish noblemen collected art too, some owning up to six hundred paintings. Their taste was overwhelmingly for Italian Renaissance artists. Titian’s glamorous portraits, voluptuous mythological scenes and dramatic renditions of biblical stories, with brushwork that gave the impression of spontaneity, dexterity and speed, were the most fashionable; and he was also Charles’s favourite painter. Raphael, Michelangelo, Andrea de Sarto and Leonardo da Vinci were almost as highly regarded, but slightly less flashy. The northern Europeans, comparatively dour realists like Memling, van Eyck, Dürer and others, formed a third group. Art was the educated entertainment that held this elite together.
We know much about this Spanish art world thanks to the vivid Dialogues about Art and Painting, written contemporaneously by the Italian-born, Spanish-resident artist, critic and courtier Vicente Carducho. Carducho’s treatise takes us on an eye-opening tour of the best collections in Madrid, where he crossed paths with Prince Charles and his entourage.
His most serene highness King Charles Stuart was determined to acquire paintings of excellent originality. His emissaries are sparing neither effort nor expense searching for the best paintings and sculpture in all of Europe and bringing them back to the English Court … They confirm that the King is going to expand his Palace with new galleries, decorating them with these ancient and modern Paintings and with Statues of foreigners and citizens of that Kingdom, and where he cannot obtain the originals, he has sent artists to copy the Titians in the Escorial.7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles and Buckingham were assisted by a number of art advisers. The most prominent was Balthazar Gerbier, a scheming Franco-Dutch courtier, painter and miniaturist whose Leonardesque list of side jobs included mathematician, military architect, linguist, pamphleteer, cryptographer and double agent. Charles’s aide Sir Francis Cottington, a less colourful but more reliable individual, kept accounts of the money the prince was spending on art. Charles frequented estate sales, called almonedas, or bought from collectors, or was gifted artworks by noblemen, all to be packed and shipped back to England.
Vicente Carducho’s treatise was intended primarily not to paint a picture of the Madrid art world for posterity, but to promote a new theory of art. He was determined to elevate the status of painters and sculptors from that of craftsmen to the same level as poets. He argued for the superiority of painting over sculpture owing to its more scientific and speculative nature, and its ability to create optical illusions. These were arguments Leonardo had made in his notebooks. From Italy to Spain, Leonardo’s ideas about art underpinned not just the way people made art, but the way they looked at it.
Among the houses Charles and Carducho both visited was the villa of Juan de Espina, a character later described as ‘the Spanish Leonardo’. Charles would have passed through an unprepossessing door in a building in the centre of Madrid and found himself inside a high-walled villa full, as Carducho described it, of beautiful and miraculous things: artworks, rare books, musical instruments, stuffed animals, wooden automata, a telescope designed by Galileo, and historical memorabilia that included a collection of knives that had been used to execute the great and the not-so-good. Espina, a man of ‘eminent and erudite wit’,8 (#litres_trial_promo) was not himself an artist, but he was a mathematician and a virtuoso on the lyre and the vihuela (a kind of guitar). He threw parties that lasted until 3 a.m., at which magic tricks were performed, or mock bullfights or giant puppet shows took place. At one party in 1627, as chronicled by Don Juan himself, there was a three-hundred-course banquet at which ‘fruit, china, pastries, ceramics’ appeared to rise off the table and ‘all flew through the window’. There were hydraulic machines, influenced by the ideas in Leonardo’s notebooks, that could make music and storms. And there was a lot of art, as Espina described in his Memorial, written to the Spanish king:
When it comes to rare, curious and beautiful artwork made by the most famous masters from these and other kingdoms and nations, my house in this court can compete with all the extraordinary things worldwide, and even leave them behind, as the experts of all major disciplines have already certified in writing.9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles must have thought Espina eccentric, for he called him ‘a foolish gentleman’, but as a collector he had something the future king wanted. Espina owned two notebooks, now known as the Madrid Codices, full of Leonardo’s notes and drawings of machines, engineering and geometry. They had been brought to Spain by an Italian sculptor, Pompeo Leoni, who had acquired them from the son of Leonardo’s pupil Francesco Melzi. Charles tried to buy them while he was in Spain, but Espina refused. As Carducho wrote of his visit to the collector’s home:
There I saw two books drawn hand-written by the great Leonardo de Vinci of particular curiosity and doctrine, which Prince of Wales so loved that he wanted them more than anything when he was in this Court: but [Espina] always considered them worthy only to be inherited by the [Spanish] King, like everything else curious and exquisite that he had been able to acquire in his life.10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Years later, Charles spotted another opportunity. One of his art advisers, Henry Porter, heard that Espina had been arrested by the Spanish Inquisition on the grounds that his automata were ‘white magic’. Porter wrote swiftly to London: ‘The owner of the book drawn by Leonardo has been taken by the Inquisition and exiled to Seville … I will try my utmost to find out about his death or when his possessions are sold.’ Espina was, however, released, and later bequeathed his Leonardo notebooks to the Spanish crown. Charles and his courtiers were eventually able to buy some Leonardo drawings from Pompeo Leoni, who had inherited them before he moved to Madrid.
After nearly a year in Spain, Charles and his entourage returned to London infused with Madrid’s enthusiasm for art. A year later he was king. He and his friends formed a circle of aesthetes and collectors, known as aficionados – revealingly, a Spanish word – which translates as connoisseurs. Dubbed the Whitehall Group, they were determined to import the Leonardesque sophistication of Madrid’s art world to London. They sent their agents to Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands to find and buy Italian paintings and classical sculptures. They gifted each other paintings, or swapped them, and especially with the king. Art was, as the art historian Francis Haskell noted, ‘the continuation of politics by other means’.
Among the artworks collected by the aficionados were several Leonardos. Charles’s constant companion the Duke of Buckingham owned three by the time he died in 1628, including the Virgin of the Rocks now in the Louvre. However, the duke’s efforts to persuade the King of France to part with the Mona Lisa while he was negotiating Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria in 1625 failed. Charles himself owned three paintings he thought were Leonardos, though only one, the St John the Baptist, is now thought to be the genuine article.
Important visitors to Whitehall Palace, whatever their rank, were marched around on a ceremonial tour of Charles’s art collection. At the palace’s heart was the two-hundred-foot Long Gallery, in which the king hung around a hundred of his best Renaissance and northern European paintings, including van Dyck’s Cupid and Psyche and Dosso Dossi’s Virgin, Child and Joseph. The king’s apartments contained another array of masterpieces by Titian, Correggio, Giorgione and others. Seventy-three smaller pictures were displayed in the intimate cabinet room, along with thirty-six statues and statuettes, as well as books, miniatures, medals and curios. By the time of his death in 1649, Charles I had collected almost three thousand paintings, drawings and sculptures. When Rubens arrived in London in 1629 he wrote:
I must admit that when it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-class masters, I have never seen such a large number in one place as in the royal palace and in the gallery of the late Duke of Buckingham.11 (#litres_trial_promo)
And so it was that, thanks to the collecting of Charles and his comrades, England could now be counted among Europe’s most magnificent monarchies.
It is easy to recognise the art world we know today in Stuart England; the art market emerged from the womb of the late Renaissance almost fully formed. New record prices were being set for art in seventeenth-century Europe, as established collectors from Italy and Spain sold works to new collectors like Charles’s circle. Old money was profiting from new money, just as European and American dealers in our era have been able to raise prices for Russian oligarchs and Asian and Gulf billionaires. The historian Edward Chaney writes, ‘The craze for the collecting of pictures grew more dramatically in the 1620s and 30s than in any other period in British history.’12 (#litres_trial_promo)
It was already a world of smoke and mirrors. Smooth-talking dealers were continually trying to pass off copies or studio works, executed by artists’ assistants, as originals. In a series of letters dating from 1625 between an agent for Charles I in Rome and the art-dealing resident of a monastery in Perugia, the agent writes that both Charles and Arundel were unhappy about having been sold copies as originals. ‘Many scandalous tricks have been played here,’ he says. On another occasion, the British collector the Duke of Hamilton told his agent to watch out ‘that the originals be not retained and copies given in their place’. The art market today is still bedevilled by fakes. Meanwhile, collectors had their own underhand playbook. They bought anonymously through agents who were instructed not to divulge whom they were working for, in case knowledge of their wealthy patrons encouraged the sellers to charge higher prices. ‘Had it been known that I was acting for his majesty, they would have demanded so much more,’ the Venice-based art dealer Daniel Nijs wrote about securing the largest bulk purchase of Renaissance and Classical art for Charles I from the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua.
On occasion collectors formed secret anti-competitive syndicates to avoid a bidding war when they bought a collection. The richest buyers often paid late, as they do today, after their dealers had riskily financed acquisitions by borrowing in their own names – Charles took three years to finish paying Nijs for the Gonzaga purchase. But Nijs was no saint either: when he bought large collections for English clients he was known to pick off certain works for himself and try to sell them privately before forwarding the pruned consignment to London.
One marked difference between the art market of old and that of today is that in earlier times no one collected art for investment. But at least one canny adviser foresaw the rise of the art market. Balthazar Gerbier boasted prophetically to Buckingham that:
