The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece. Ben Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      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 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

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

      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 СКАЧАТЬ