The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece

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Our pictures, if they were to be sold a century after our death, would sell for good cash, and for three times more than they cost … I wish I could only live a century, if they were sold, to be able to laugh at these facetious folk who say it is money cast away for baubles and shadows. I know they will be pictures still, when those ignorants will be lesser than shadows.13 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Salvator Mundi is said to have spent part of the seventeenth century somewhere in the court of King Charles I. But where? In 1639 Charles instructed Dutch-born Abraham van der Doort, his Keeper of the Pictures – a role we would call curator – to draw up an inventory of the royal art collection. Once completed, this was the most detailed art catalogue yet produced in Europe. However, back in those days pictures rarely had proper titles. Thus van der Doort had to come up with his own short descriptions, such as ‘the picture of an indifferent ancient gentleman’. He often mentioned where the king had acquired a work: ‘Another Mantuan peece’, he repeatedly wrote, referring to the scores of Renaissance paintings and classical sculptures Charles bought from the dukes of Mantua. He was careful to distinguish, where he could, between a work by an artist’s own hand and one by a studio. Thus, of an ‘Item above the door, a picture painted upon a board being a smiling woman with a few flowers in her left hand in a wood-coloured and gilded frame, half so big as the life’, he adds: ‘Said to be of Leonard de Vincia or out of his school.’ Through his entries percolates the character of a methodical civil servant, struggling in a foreign language to establish a uniform system of classification for the first time, and desperate to please his royal employer. A portrait of van der Doort by the English painter William Dobson, executed in a dashing impasto halfway between Titian and Rubens, shows a face with muscles tensed and an anxious expression in his eyes, as if caught for a brief moment before hurrying off.

The most detailed entry in van der Doort’s inventory is for a Leonardo da Vinci, but not the Salvator Mundi. It is a painting of John the Baptist, a marvellous but relatively simple painting, much the same size as the Salvator. Demonstrating his disdain for Christian propriety, and his penchant for fusing Christian and classical motifs, Leonardo had radically reimagined the iconography of his subject, depicting the saint as a puckish, quasi-Apollonian young man, smiling knowingly at the onlooker, raising one finger in a gesture that seems to beckon us to follow him as it points up to God. Van der Doort writes:

Item, A St John Baptist, with his right finger pointing upwards, and his left hand at his breast, holding in his left arm a cane-cross; done by Leonard da Vinci, sent from France to the King for a present, by Monsieur de Lioncourt, being one of the King of France’s Bedchamber; the picture being so big as the life, half a figure, painted upon board: in a black ebony frame; for which the King sent him back two of his Majesty’s pictures, the one being the picture of Erasmus Rotterdamus, done by Holbein, being side-faced, looking downwards, which was placed in his Majesty’s cabinet room; and one other of his Majesty’s pictures, which was done by Titian; being our Lady, and Christ, and St John, half figures, as big as the life; which was placed in his Majesty’s middle privy lodging-room …14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Van der Doort tells us that Charles got this Leonardo in an exchange with the French courtier and ambassador to London Roger du Plessis de Liancourt. So important was a Leonardo considered that the painting was swapped not just for a Titian, the most fashionable artist in Europe at the time, but also for a Holbein, the German painter who had produced sharply observant portraits of Henry VIII’s court.

The alluring golden sfumato effect, which makes St John look as if he has stepped out of Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical film Pan’s Labyrinth, is partly the result of Leonardo’s style, but also partly of the mishandling of the picture by its owners. In the left-hand margin van der Doort states that it has been damaged, but not, emphatically not, by him:

The arm and the hand hath been wronged by some washing – before I came to your Majesty.

That is the longest entry by far in van der Doort’s entire catalogue. It may seem strange, then, that he makes no mention of the other supposed Leonardo, the Salvator Mundi, which continues to evade the pens of inventorists. One explanation, which Simon and Dalivalle have suggested in the past, could be that van der Doort’s catalogue was not exhaustive. He concentrated on the king’s collection at Whitehall Palace in central London, but overlooked parts of other palaces, including Hampton Court, the Queen’s House, Greenwich, and Nonsuch Palace. It is possible that the Salvator Mundi may have hung in one of these locations; or maybe van der Doort just missed it. Such possible shortcomings in his work came to light after he committed suicide in the summer of 1640. Some of his biographers think he took his life out of shame, after having mislaid some of the king’s miniatures. A broadsheet of the time suggested alternatively that it was because he was about to be fired for incompetence: ‘It is believed he was jealous the King had designed some other man to keepe his pictures, which he had not done.’ A German poet, George Rudolf Weckherlin, wrote an epigram commemorating van der Doort’s death:

Anxious to do his duty well,

Van Dort there, conscientious elf,

from hanging up his pictures, fell

One day to hanging up himself.15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Ten years later a second inventory was made of Charles I’s collection, and this one, the Commonwealth Inventory of 1649–51, does mention, for the first time, a picture that could be the Salvator Mundi.

At the close of the English Civil War, the defeated king was beheaded in January 1649. Two months later, Parliament, now representing a ‘Commonwealth’, not a ‘kingdom’, decided that all the late king’s possessions, including his art collection, should be valued and then sold. The funds raised were to pay off the royal debts – the king owed money to hundreds of servants, tradesmen and craftsmen. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘That gallery to whose formation politics had been sacrificed … was now, in turn, sacrificed to political and ideological revolution.’16 (#litres_trial_promo)

An inventory was produced for this sale of ‘the late king’s goods’. Item number 49 was a ‘Peece of Christ done by Leonard’. There was only one well-known artist at the time called Leonard, or Leonardo. It is not a very precise description, but just one single-figure type of portrait painting of Christ in Leonardo’s style has ever been known, and that is as the saviour of the world, or Salvator Mundi. The ‘Peece of Christ’ was valued at a mere £30.

The Commonwealth Inventory’s entry for the ‘Peece of Christ’ introduces a new mystery to the painting, namely its price. Thirty pounds for a Leonardo – around £3,000 in today’s money – is rock bottom for one of the ten most desirable Renaissance masters on the mid-seventeenth-century European art market. But it might add another piece of evidence to the provenance narrative. One of the distinguishing features of Simon’s Salvator