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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      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

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:

      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

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

      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 СКАЧАТЬ