Chapter 9
On balance, it would seem that the ‘Lomazzian’ version of Leonardo was more dominant in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This emphasized Leonardo as pictor doctus and highlighted his theoretical writings, engineering and design, as well as the experimental methodologies he employed, particularly in the study of human and animal anatomy. In England, this reading of the artist chimed with the incipient climate of empirical enquiry that would result in the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660. However, it also pervaded the earliest interpretations of Vasari, since his now-neglected technical treatise answered Francis Bacon’s call for a history of trades and because he had been heralded by the English mathematician John Dee in 1570 in the context of Euclidian geometry. The model of history promoted by Vasari’s Lives, a history advanced via the biographies of its protagonists, would prove widely influential, and, in Britain, was annexed to the predilection for portraiture. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the Vasarian Leonardo took root, but in England, perhaps more than any other location, the Lomazzian Leonardo prevailed. He is embedded in the English Enlightenment, to an extent that has not yet been fully understood.
So far we have considered the penetration of literary concepts of Leonardo as an artist and thinker in early seventeenth-century Britain; now we will turn to incidences of direct contact with works by the artist by Britons abroad and at the Caroline court; that is to say: the first-hand experience of Leonardo. While the opportunity to view or handle drawings, manuscripts, or paintings by Leonardo was extremely rare, by examining the wider matrix of these experiences we can gain some sense of a less tangible aspect of the early English reception.
The Prince of Wales and Juan de Espina
The earliest documented encounter between a Briton and a work by Leonardo da Vinci occurred in Spain in truly extraordinary circumstances.1 In January 1623, Charles, Prince of Wales, and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, set off on an expedition to Spain under the pseudonyms ‘Mr John Smith’ and ‘Mr Jack Smith’, thinly, and ridiculously, disguised in false beards. Ostensibly in Madrid to advance the stalled negotiations for the marriage between Charles and the Spanish Infanta María Anna (1606–46), their unannounced arrival at the court of Philip IV prompted astonishment.2 The six months that Charles spent in Spain in the company of a coterie of aristocratic collectors and diplomat-art advisors including Sir Balthazar Gerbier, Sir Francis Cottington (c. 1579–1652), Endymion Porter (1587–1649), and the seventeen-year-old Earl of Arran, later 1st Duke of Hamilton (1606–49), was transformative for his experience of Renaissance art, exposing him to the treasures of the Spanish royal collection. The twenty-three-year-old prince savoured the opportunity to purchase directly from the open market at almonedas (estate sales), through picture dealers, and from noble collectors, spending extravagantly.
The court painter and writer Vicente Carducho (c. 1576–1638), recounted in 1633 the prince’s unbridled lust for the Titians belonging to the Spanish king and his frustrated attempt to purchase ‘two books of drawings, and manuscripts, written by the great Leonardo da Vinci, of exceptional interest and learning, which the Prince of Wales, when he was in Madrid, wished to purchase and would not leave behind for any price. But [Juan de Espina] deemed them to be worthy of remaining in his possession alone’.3
This event should be underscored for its pivotal importance in the earliest English responses to Leonardo. Prince Charles, accompanied by Buckingham, and possibly Gerbier, visited Juan de Espina y Velasco (c. 1563–1642) at the Villa Angélica in Madrid, where the aristocratic Spanish cleric and antiquarian had amassed a collection of rare books, manuscripts, and Renaissance paintings, and two notebooks of Leonardo, now presumed to be the Madrid Codices I & II (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional). The first codex is dedicated to mechanics and statics; the second to geometry and fortification. Whether Charles and his entourage knew of the Leonardo material before their visit to the villa is not known, but their encounter with the notebooks in 1623, occurring shortly after the dispersal of Pompeo Leoni’s collection, is of singular significance and locates the first British contact with Leonardo’s writings in the milieu of experimental science and astronomy in early modern Spain.
This episode is ubiquitous in the literature concerning the early history of Leonardo’s manuscripts, but little attention has been paid to Espina, the nature of his collection, or how and why he contrived to broadcast the royal visit. Enrique García Santo-Tomas points out that ‘Juan de Espina remains largely unknown to this day, as do the existing literary testimonies about him’.4 Yet Espina, and his ‘house of tricks’, the Villa Angélica, was famous, indeed notorious, during the seventeenth century. Within its walls, Espina created not just a cabinet of curiosities, but an astonishing theatre of Baroque wonders, with fountains, revolving walls, and hydraulic machines that created music and storms. Espina lived alone, attended by wooden automata and flocks of stuffed exotic birds and animals. Harnessing the allure of the rare and unique, he issued invitations to the elite of Madrid, orchestrating elaborate parties which would last from 7 p.m. until 3 a.m., where magic spectacles were performed by human and animal automata and fantastical machines. According to an anonymous—and hyperbolic—poem of 1627, the spectacles included a ‘mock bullfight, a puppet show with giants, and a 300-course banquet in which food levitated and left the house through the window’.5 Espina owned a chair specially adapted for star-gazing which rotated and was apparently equipped with telescopic instruments, and which Luis Vélez de Guevara praised in his 1641 satire El diablo Cojuelo (The limping devil), in the same breath mentioning Galileo’s telescope: ‘I say this with all due respect for Galileo’s telescope and the one used by Don Juan de Espina, whose famous house and extraordinary chair are the results of his own imagination’.6
Carducho spent eight hours at the villa on 10 April 1628, where he was impressed by Espina’s art collection; it was ‘expensive, singular and authentic’.7 He praised Espina’s exceptional qualities as a collector, and signalled the shrewd self-promotion behind the exploitation of his collection to attract visitors of high status, even princes: ‘He [Juan de Espina] has the rarest objects, worthy of being examined by a learned and curious visitor (in addition to all the paintings), because he always considered himself exceptional and unique, which drove him to find and acquire, no matter the price tag, the most beautiful and strange things.’8
Espina was deeply embedded in the Spanish royal court; his father, Diego, had been Philip II’s accountant, and the young Juan enjoyed a genteel upbringing, excelling at the lute and at painting. In addition to his clerical role, he was Philip IV’s Vice–Groom of the Bedchamber. When, after 1609, the heirs of the royal sculptor Pompeo Leoni began to sell his famed collection in Madrid, Espina was in prime position to scoop up some of the gems. Carducho was intimate with Leoni’s collection; indeed he was originally contracted to draw up an inventory of it after Pompeo’s death in 1608. It is interesting, therefore, to observe the parallels between Carducho’s descriptions of Espina and Pompeo Leoni as exemplary collectors; the sculptor had, he said, ‘with particular care, acquired the most important things possible’.9
Espina carefully curated the public reception of his collection via texts which celebrated its riches, via his own direct address to Philip IV, via the conscious emulation of the model of collecting promoted by Leoni, and via the acquisition of objects that stressed these references. For instance, Pompeo Leoni owned ‘models of water devices’, which may have been models after Leonardo’s studies of water and designs for hydro engineering or perhaps hydraulic devices invented by the Cremonese engineer Juanelo Turriano for King Philip II.10 Is it possible that Espina’s storm-generating machines were in fact Turriano’s models, bought from Leoni’s estate?
Leoni’s inventory of 1613 details an automaton of a man and a woman who dance and play the lute.11 Espina’s ‘butlering automata’ dramatize the iterations of illustrious scientific collections, such as those of Leoni and Philip II. In García Santos-Tomás’s elegant phrase, these are ‘ventriloquizing objects’.12 The anonymous poem of 1627 (was it penned by Espina himself?) exhibits strong similarities to Famiano Strada’s De Bello Belgico, published in Rome in 1632, which relates how—during Charles V’s seclusion at the monastery of San Yuste—Turriano revived the Emperor’s flagging spirits with after-dinner entertainments of performing automata.13 The text also refers to Turriano’s feats of hydroengineering, notably his artificio—a machine that lifted water from the River Tagus to a height of three hundred feet in the air to supply the city of Toledo. Both texts seem to have a common ancestor in Ambrosio de Morales’s Las antiguedades de las ciudades de España (1575).
Espina carefully crafted testimonies—literary, material, and theatrical—to present his collection, and his persona, as analogous to the cabinets of wondrous things that flourished under the enlightened protection of Charles V and Philip II. For the eccentric Spanish antiquarian, the account of Prince Charles’s visit to the Villa Angelica was an eloquent avatar. In his memorial of 1632, addressed to Philip IV, he reiterated Carducho’s narrative, evoking the lingering animus between the Habsburg and Stuart Courts.14 Despite Charles’s covetousness for Leonardo’s treatises, Carducho declares that Espina will never relinquish the precious volumes; they are to be inherited by Philip IV ‘together with all the other curious things that he had acquired during his lifetime.’15 Espina emerges as the ventriloquist standing behind Carducho’s words.
It is possible that—through Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo—Prince Charles knew of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts, and of Pompeo Leoni’s collection, before he visited Madrid; if not, then the Spanish adventure represents an important moment of transmission of the wider reception of the artist to an instrumental collector. Carducho tells us that Charles, Prince of Wales, when in Spain in 1623, bought items left over from Leoni’s almoneda. Since the remainder had since been sent to Milan, these items were bought from a third party, who had presumably purchased them at the 1609–10 sale. Carducho mentions a Correggio painting on copper purchased from Don Andres Velásquez for 2,000 escudos,16 and Abraham Van der Doort catalogued a Faustina ‘brought by the King out of Spaine, and bought of the superior spye there.’17 Repercussions of the visit to Espina’s house would occur in the immediate aftermath, and for long afterwards. Encountering, for the first time, Leonardo’s manuscripts in the bizarre setting of the Villa Angélica, it must have seemed to the Britons that they had stepped into an alternative universe where Leonardo’s inventions had escaped from the pages of his notebooks, coming to life in front of their eyes. This occasion cannot fail to have left an indelible impression, which would forever be directly associated with the experience of Leonardo.
The Prince of Wales returned home without Espina’s manuscripts, but they were not forgotten in England. Lord Arundel pursued them doggedly throughout the 1630s, ostensibly on behalf of the monarch, but perhaps, in reality, on his own account. On 27 April 1630 Endymion Porter penned a memorandum to the British agent at Spain: ‘A note of such things as my Lord Embassator Sr Francis Cottington is to send owt of Spaine for my Lord of Arondell: and not to forget the booke of drawings of Leonardo de Vinze wch is in Don Juan de Espinas hands, whoe everie man at Madrid knows’.18 Soon afterwards, Espina’s supernatural spectacles brought him to the attention of the Spanish Inquisition. Tried on a charge of necromancy in 1630, he was incarcerated at Toledo. This event did not escape the notice of Cottington’s successor, Sir Arthur Hopton, who was optimistic that Espina’s misfortune would serve to liberate his art collection. On 29 July 1631 he wrote from Madrid to the Earl of Arundel: ‘The gentleman that is the owner of the booke drawne by Leonardo di Vinci hath bin of late taken from his house by order from the inquisition; whoe after some time of restraint at Toledo, was permitted to goe to live at Sevill where hee now is. All the dilligence that I can use therein is to procure to have advice when either by his death or otherwaise his goods are to bee sould, and therein I wil be very watchfull.’19 After his release, and a period spent at Seville, Espina returned to Madrid, where he became increasingly reclusive, repeatedly stating that after his death the collection (except the wooden automata, which were to be burned) would be left to Philip IV of Spain.20 Arundel did not give up however, writing to Lord Aston, ambassador to Spain, on 19 January 1637: ‘I beseech ye be mindfull of D: Jhon: de Spinas booke, if his foolish humour change’.21
Arundel’s correspondence with English agents at Madrid demonstrates the close contact he maintained with his ‘quarry’ over extended periods, the role of Italian painters in the Madrid art market, and the transmission of intelligence about works of art attributed to Leonardo in Spain.22 The attempts made by Charles I and Arundel to purchase Espina’s notebooks are well known, but the intensity and impact of this first experience of Leonardo is overlooked.
‘Labella Jucunda’: The Duke of Buckingham’s Mona Lisa
Arundel’s tenacious pursuit of Espina’s books of drawings in Madrid has obscured the fact that they were first encountered by Charles in the company of Buckingham, and his curator-advisor Gerbier, and it is perhaps to these individuals that the stimulus of the prince’s embryonic interest in Leonardo should be attributed. Buckingham, basking in the near-conjugal favour of King James I, eclipsed Arundel, who would not be an intimate of Charles until some years after Buckingham’s murder in 1628; indeed, Arundel’s attempts to acquire Juan de Espina’s manuscripts after that date may relate to his efforts to gain royal favour. Therefore, the Spanish buying spree of 1623 and the first yen for Leonardo falls within the compass of Buckingham and Gerbier. At Paris in 1624, Gerbier met Rubens, forming a close friendship that would last until the Flemish painter’s death. The following May, Rubens painted a portrait of the Duke of Buckingham on horseback, while they were both at Paris to attend the proxy marriage of Prince Charles and Henrietta Maria of France.23 Gerbier attended the duke, and from this episode emerges another glimpse of the English appetite for works by Leonardo da Vinci, this time concerning the most prized painting in the world, then and now: the Mona Lisa.24
Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657) was also in Paris in 1625 for the proxy royal wedding, as secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the nephew of Pope Urban VIII, who was godfather to Henrietta Maria of France. Cassiano is prominent in the early response to Leonardo’s writings, not least by virtue of his fundamental role in the generation of the 1651 editio princeps of Leonardo’s Trattato della Pittura.25 The diary he kept while travelling from Rome to Paris in the Cardinal’s entourage contains an important eyewitness account of paintings by Leonardo and his followers in the French royal collection, including a famous description of the Mona Lisa.26 Cassiano was also the source of the information that the Duke of Buckingham had tried to buy the Mona Lisa while at Fontainebleau in 1625, recounting the duke’s displeasure at being frustrated in his attempt to acquire the celebrated painting:
The Duke of Buckingham, sent from England to accompany the bride to the new king, had some thought of obtaining this portrait but was put off by the king, dissuading him at the urging of many who thought that His Majesty was sending out of the kingdom the most beautiful painting he had. The duke felt disgusted by this resistance, and among those to whom he complained was Rubens of Antwerp, painter to the archduchess [Isabella of Austria].27
It appears that the duke subsequently acquired a copy of the painting, to judge by an item recorded in a schedule of the Buckingham collection taken in 1635: ‘Labella Jucunda—A Little Picture a Copy’.28 There is no record of how or exactly when this item entered the collection, but it is possible that it was one of the copies made by court artists at Fontainebleau at the beginning of the seventeenth century.29
In the autumn of 1624 Gerbier was at Paris, scouting for paintings, from where he sent Buckingham a list of paintings for sale.30 By February 1625, he had returned to New Hall, Essex. King Henry VIII’s country mansion was purchased by Buckingham for £20,000 in 1622 and Gerbier was supervising the remodelling of the landscape gardens. It may have been Gerbier who first alerted Buckingham to the unique status of the Mona Lisa, whetting his appetite to extract it from the French royal collection. Writing to Buckingham, he recalled observing the Mona Lisa at Fontainebleau under the watchful custody of Jacques or Claude Douet, warning that the custodian of the King’s Cabinet was like a cat guarding milk; ‘une Joconde’ and a panel by Raphael being treasure the king’s ancestors had always preserved like a holy relic.31
One of the aristocratic collections Gerbier visited at Paris in November 1624 was that of Jean de Warignies, Lord of Blainville (c. 1581–1628), whose posthumous inventory of 1628 records three items related to paintings by Leonardo then in the French royal collection.32 The first, priced at 30 livres, is a St John: ‘Item un saint Jehan de Leonnard delignite prisé XXX lt.’ Immediately following are two paintings recorded together, priced at twenty-four livres each: ‘Item une Joconde et une Vénus ou Flora prisez vingt quatre livres chacun revenant à XLVIII lt.’33 These items were appraised and priced by the Parisian painter Charles Masson.34
It is probable that the three items were copies after the St John in the Wilderness, the Mona Lisa, and the Flora/Columbine (the latter then in the possession of Marie de Médicis).35 Certainly, Blainville’s collection was very closely connected to the French royal collection; the inventory also records five paintings borrowed from it, to be returned to François Moymier, general Guard of the King’s Furniture, and one item, a Virgin, which was repossessed by Jacques Douet on behalf of the king.36 As Janet Cox-Rearick has noted, a copy of the Mona Lisa ‘made at Fontainebleau is mentioned in the contract of 21 October 1621 with the painter Charles Simon, who was commissioned to make four copies after works in the French Royal Collection, including “une Joconde d’après Leonard d’Alvin” ’.37 While this event cannot be identified with Blainville, it indicates a commission of direct copies after works in the royal collection at a proximate date. Perhaps Gerbier saw a copy after the Mona Lisa in Blainville’s collection in 1624/25, and subsequently acquired it for Buckingham in 1628. But while this theory is seductive, there existed only a short window of time during which a purchase could have occurred. Blainville’s inventory is dated 8 March 1628; Buckingham was assassinated six months later. That event brought to an end Gerbier’s appointment and the programme of acquisition for the Buckingham collection. Intriguingly, Jean de Waringies was ambassador extraordinary to the Caroline court in 1625.
Buckingham’s interest in Leonardo, unusual in England at that date, is evident from documentation of his collection. Besides ‘Labella Jucunda’, the 1635 Buckingham inventory itemized two other items related to Leonardo: a ‘Holy Family with two saints’ was said to be ‘like Leond de Venice’, and a ‘Herodias’s Daughter wth St. John’s Head’ was attributed to ‘Leonardo, Venice’.38 The copy of the Mona Lisa was not included in the list of items belonging to the 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628–87), which were sent to Antwerp for sale around 1650; it is not known whether it remained in England, nor when it left the Buckingham collection.39 Buckingham was probably the first English owner of a copy of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Although a substitute for the real thing, the copy of ‘Labella Jucunda’ must have represented something of a coup; its surrogacy in the Buckingham collection attests to the desirability, and rarity, of autograph works by Leonardo in seventeenth-century England.
Given that it records the first known copy of the Mona Lisa in England, the Buckingham inventory entry has received surprisingly little scholarly notice.40 If Buckingham’s ‘Labella Jucunda’ did indeed remain in England after 1650, it may be identifiable with the exquisite version in a private British collection, exhibited at the Dulwich College Picture Gallery in 2006 (Fig. 9.1). This painting is believed to have been owned by the artists Prosper Henry Lankrink (1628–92)—a pupil and assistant of Sir Peter Lely (1618–80), Jonathan Richardson the Elder (1665–1745), Jonathan Richardson the Younger (1694–1771), and Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92).41 It should be noted that there exists no documentation of a copy of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in England between 1635 and 1692, therefore it is not possible securely to identify the item in the Buckingham inventory with an item in Lankrink’s posthumous sale inventory of 1692/93: ‘A Modalisa Womans Head, the manner of Leon. Da Vinci’.42 Given the extreme fidelity of this copy to Leonardo’s original, the appraiser’s comment ‘manner of’ is striking, and suggests prior knowledge that the painting was a copy after Leonardo, perhaps due to some intelligence about its provenance.
Fig. 9.1After Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, private collection.
‘Piacquero straordinariamente alla Regina quello del Vinci’: Henrietta Maria and ‘Ginevra de’ Benci’
An important illustration of the deployment of Vasari’s ‘Life of Leonardo’ at the Caroline court, and the premium set on Leonardo’s paintings by the king and queen, occurs in an eyewitness account of 1636. In 1635 Cardinal Francesco Barberini sent Queen Henrietta Maria a gift of paintings from Rome, purchased via the sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, according to a letter of 25 July 1635.43 One of the paintings was said to portray a young page and bore a death’s head on the verso of the panel. The description corresponds to a painting in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth formerly attributed to Leonardo, but since 1898 assigned to Giovanni Boltraffio: an idealized androgynous portrait, believed to depict the poet Girolamo Casio (Plate 15 and Fig. 9.2).44
Fig. 9.2Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Portrait of a Young Man (?Girolamo Casio), c. 1500, verso, oil on panel, Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth.
Gregorio Panzani, papal envoy to Henrietta Maria, sent weekly dispatches from the Stuart court to Cardinal Francesco Barberini at Rome. The cardinal had been at pains to ascertain the preference of the king, whether for modern painters or old masters. The correspondence communicates a sense of Charles I as an informed, enthusiastic, and astute collector keeping a watchful eye on the international art market. It had come to the king’s attention that beautiful paintings by Raphael, Correggio, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci from Cardinal Ludovisi’s collection were to be sold, Panzani wrote to Barberini, and these would without a doubt please him greatly.45
The papal agent’s entertaining first-hand account of the arrival of the pictures in January 1636 conveyed the delight of the king and queen. The paintings had been sent from Rome to the queen. They arrived while she was lying in after the birth of a child, and the paintings were brought into her bedchamber, where she was attended by the principal ladies-in-waiting. Panzani related how the paintings were received with great approval and enthusiasm, and how the queen particularly liked those by Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Sarto (‘Piacquero straordinariamente alla Regina quello del Vinci, e quello d’Andrea del Sarto’), joking that she could not keep the pictures since the king was going to steal them.46 The queen sent for the king, and he rushed to her bedchamber, accompanied by Inigo Jones and the art-collecting earls of Holland, Pembroke, and Arundel. Panzani penned a vivid portrait of the pompous connoisseur Inigo Jones:
The very moment Jones saw the pictures, he greatly approved of them, and in order to be able to study them better he threw off his coat, put on his eyeglasses, took a candle and together with the King, began to examine them very closely. They found them entirely satisfactory, as the Abbé Duperron, who was present confirmed, and as was reported to Father Philip by the Queen, who was very happy about it. I informed the Earl of Arundel that I had sent the pictures to the Court; he hurried there immediately and went to the Queen to see them. She had them shown to him and he was full of admiration. The King liked particularly those by Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, and Giulio Romano.47
Writing again a few days later, somewhat contemptuously, he complained:
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. As the King had removed the names of the painters, which I had fixed to each picture, he also boasts of having attributed almost all the pictures correctly. He greatly exaggerates their beauty, and says that these pictures are to be kept in a special room with gilded and jewelled frames.48
Jones, while mistaking the androgynous figure for a female sitter, displayed his knowledge of Vasari’s Vite, where the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci is described.49 Jones’s own copy of Vasari’s Vite is annotated ‘la Genevra di Amerigo Benci’ in the margin of the relevant passage, making explicit his source of information about the painting in the Royal Collection.50 The identification of works of art from their inclusion in Vasari, or other early literature, has long been a staple practice of art historians and it is remarkable to see Jones deploy this method at such an early date. At Rome, the painting was ‘believed to be by’ Leonardo; at the Stuart court, it was attributed to Leonardo. Whether Panzani’s label attributed the painting to Leonardo or to his school is not known, so no conclusions can be drawn about the ‘upgrade’ of status.
Panzani’s account provides important insights into the appeal of Leonardo for the king and queen, as well as the Stuart court’s sophisticated expertise and its ritual and playful enactment of connoisseurship. It establishes Queen Henrietta Maria’s role in the acquisition of paintings from abroad, the special access and intimacy afforded to courtier-connoisseurs, and the queen’s own appreciation of Leonardo. A further insight into the reception of the paintings sent from Rome is provided by Panzani’s successor as papal nuncio, the Scottish Franciscan George Conn, who wrote to Cardinal Barberini on 23 February 1637: ‘Her Majesty the Queen showed me in her favourite Cabinet, the pictures your Eminence sent her from Italy, placing them amongst the best things she has.’51 Whether the ‘Leonardo’ was in the queen’s cabinet in 1637 is not known; the painting was not recorded by Van der Doort in 1639, nor does it reappear in the Contractors’ Inventory of 1649. That such a prized painting should disappear off the radar so soon after its acquisition is surprising and illustrates the incomplete documentation of the Caroline collection during the period of its compilation and dispersal.
Documents preserved in the Barberini Archive at the Vatican Library record many items sent to England by Cardinal Francesco Barberini between 1634 and 1637; some are expressly identified as gifts to the queen.52 Among their number are paintings by Annibale Carracci, Pietro da Cortona, Dosso Dossi, Titian, Giovanni Antonio Pordenone, Federico Barocci, Sofonisba Anguissola, Parmigianino, Angelo Caroselli, Correggio, Francesco Albani, Giacomo Stella, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Giorgione, Benvenuto Tisi, and Giulio Romano. Besides paintings of a devotional or religious nature, there are portraits and mythologies. None of the items correspond to a Salvator Mundi by the hand of Leonardo. It is difficult to identify these paintings in the extant royal inventories, but one item—a St Catherine of Alexandria by Annibale Carracci, which had been bought by Cardinal Barberini from the heirs of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte and disbursed on 15 May 1636 to George Conn as a gift to the ‘Regina de Inchilterra’—was recorded at Somerset House in 1649: ‘205. St Katherine. being tortured on a wheele, by Carratts. 20-00-00.’53 Somerset House was the queen’s residence; this strongly suggests that Henrietta Maria retained for herself the works sent from Rome during the mid 1630s.
Eleven Paintings
Literature about the collection of Charles I tends to focus on his predilection for Titian, and certainly, reportage and documentation supports that view. For instance, the Contractors’ inventory records many paintings attributed to or after the Venetian painter; these include copies commissioned by the king from contemporary artists such as Michael Cross and Peter Oliver.54 In contrast, by 1649 eleven paintings attributed to Leonardo or his immediate followers can be identified in the Royal Collection. This statistic cannot be understood simply as an index of taste, since Titian was, after all, a highly prolific artist and master of a large workshop; Leonardo, on the other hand, famously produced only a small corpus of paintings. The number of Leonardesque paintings in the British and French royal collections during the first decades of the seventeenth century is comparable.55 At Fontainebleau, paintings attributed to Leonardo were copied by resident court artists, but this did not occur at the Caroline court, as far as can be ascertained. In this and the subsequent chapter we will consider the eleven paintings attributed to Leonardo and his followers that were documented in inventories of the British Royal Collection between 1625 and 1649, with a focus on those identified with Henrietta Maria, before examining the paintings by Leonardo, and their copies, in the French royal collection. We shall consider whether the Salvator Mundi in the closet at Greenwich in 1649 was formerly in the French royal collection and brought to England by Henrietta Maria.
Because of the political tumult of the seventeenth century, there are two chief accounts of the Caroline collection. The first was compiled between 1625 and 1640 by the Dutch curator Abraham van der Doort, whose Register stands comparison with the most sophisticated seventeenth-century Italian inventories. Even so, as the invisibility of the so-called ‘Ginevra de’ Benci’ demonstrates, Van der Doort did not record the entire collection, which was distributed throughout several royal households. The second account was drawn up, after the execution of the king in 1649, as an aggregated sale inventory of the possessions, including the works of art, of the royal family in various locations, which were brought to London and sold off between 1649–53. As a result, the Contractors’ inventory better reflects the totality of the Royal Collection, although theft from royal households had occurred during the Civil Wars of the 1640s. This may explain the absence from the 1649 inventory of certain pieces catalogued by Van der Doort a decade earlier. Some of these items reappear in lists drawn up at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when royal property was restituted to Charles II, who assembled a new collection from the recovered remnant and from purchases and diplomatic gifts.
Thereafter, inventories of the Royal Collection were taken for more conventional reasons: the movements of works of art between royal households or the death, accession, and deposition of subsequent monarchs. The royal inventories do not record any drawings or manuscripts attributed to Leonardo; recently uncovered documentation of the presence of the Windsor Volume in the King’s Cabinet at Whitehall Palace in the 1670s–1680s, that is, during the reign of Charles II, will be discussed in Chapter 14.
Van der Doort and Leonardo
Van der Doort’s Register, c. 1639, lists three items related to Leonardo; only one of these is described as an autograph work of Leonardo: a half figure of St John the Baptist.56 This is the painting now in the Musée du Louvre, which bears the ‘CR’ cipher of Charles I on the reverse of the panel (Plate 9).57 The detail in Van der Doort’s description of the work is important and extraordinary; he narrates the painting’s provenance with Roger du Plessis, Duke of Liancourt; its composition, size, support, and frame; its condition on entering the Royal Collection between 1625 and 1639; and its location in the Privy Gallery at Whitehall. Details of the works given in exchange, their previous locations in Whitehall, and their provenance is also recorded.
Sent to yor Matie for a present by Mounsr de Lyon Court, done by Leonardo De Vincia, whereof the Arme and the hand hath –
bin wronged by some washing before it came to your Matie.
Item a St John the Baptist with his right finger pointing upwards, and his left hand at his breast houlding in his left arme a Cane Cross, done by Leonardo Devincia sent from ffraunce to your Matie for a present by Mounsr de lyon Court being one of the king of ffraunces Bedchamber the Picture being soe big as the life half a figure painted upon Board in a black ebbone frame, for wch yor Matie sent him back againe .2. of yor Pictures the one being the Picture of Erasmus Rotterdamus being done by Holbin being side faced lookeing downwards wch was placed in yor Mats Cabbonett roome; And the other of yor Mats Pictures was done by Tichin, being our Lady and Christ and St. John half figures as bigg as the life, wch was placed in yor Mats midle privy lodging roome being in a Carv’d gilded frame, and was given heretofore to yor Matie by my lord of Carlile who had it of Doctor Dunn painted upon the right lighte. 2 f 4 – 1 f 10 ½.58
A Parisian Network
We can pinpoint the date Leonardo’s St John the Baptist entered the Royal Collection: the summer of 1630. On 12 July 1630, the painter Claude Vignon (1593–1670) wrote to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc that he had no news to convey other than the appointment of Liancourt as extraordinary ambassador to England to mark the occasion of the birth of Prince Charles (29 May 1630).59 Vignon was embedded in the Parisian art market, as son-in-law and business partner to the famous art dealer Nicolas Estienne (d. 1660), known colloquially as Perruchot.60 He was often called upon as an expert connoisseur; the queen mother, Marie de Médicis, sent him to Spain and Italy to purchase paintings and sculptures on her behalf.61 Vignon’s papers reveal his association with a dealer called Étienne Quarteron; at Rome in 1630 the pair collaborated in the purchase of a large number of paintings for Gaston de Orléans; later that year they were dealing at Lyon, where Quarteron sold the duc de Liancourt some paintings for the considerable sum of 3,200 livres.62 Whether Leonardo’s St John the Baptist was part of this transaction remains an open question; if so, the painting may have been acquired in Rome.
Vignon opens our view into the network of dealers supplying, simultaneously, the French and British royal courts and nobility in the 1630s and 1640s. Another of his close associates, the engraver François Langlois, called Ciartres (1588–1647), was said by Pierre-Jean Mariette (whose grandfather Pierre Mariette II married Langlois’s widow Madeleine in 1655, taking over his print dealership) to have sold drawings and prints to Lord Arundel.63 According to a seventeenth-century French tradition, Langlois also sold paintings, drawings, and rare prints to Charles I.64 This has a ring of truth since Langlois was a close acquaintance of the king’s painter and art advisor Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who, probably in London in 1637, painted a portrait of Langlois playing the musette, a type of bagpipe favoured by aristocrats. Claude Vignon had painted Langlois in a similar mode in 1621.65 In November 1641 Vignon wrote to Langlois, then in London, asking him to inform Van Dyck of the sale of paintings belonging to Alfonso Lopez, one of which, a portrait of Ariosto by Titian, was subsequently recorded in Van Dyck’s posthumous inventory of 1644.66 This episode is illustrative of the connections and routes by which Italian paintings made their way to the Caroline court, via Paris. In Chapter 11, we will see how two paintings described as copies after Leonardo in the Contractors’ inventory were recirculated (as originals) in Perruchot’s network in the 1650s.
The Liancourt Collection
Roger du Plessis, Duke of Liancourt and Rocheguyon (1598–1674), was first gentleman of the bedchamber to Louis XIII of France; in 1620 he married Jeanne de Schomberg (1600–74), sister of Charles de Schomberg, Marshal of France (1601–56). According to Giovan Pietro Bellori, the duchess was a patron of artists, including Nicolas Poussin, and formed a large collection of paintings at the Château de Liancourt, which she restored and invested with the grandeur of a royal residence, as can be seen from Israel Silvestre’s engraving of the parterre elevation.67 She built up the collection during the first years of her marriage; it was distributed between the château and the couple’s Parisian hôtel on the Rue de Seine.68 Three works attributed to Leonardo passed through the Liancourt collection: the St John the Baptist given to Charles I in 1630, a Magdalen seen by John Evelyn in the hôtel in 1644,69 and a Christ, recorded in the posthumous inventory of 1674.70 Lack of documentation of the Liancourt collection between the couple’s marriage in 1620 and their deaths in 1674, and the fact that much of it was sold in the 1660s as an act of piety, frustrates identification of the latter two items. Whether Leonardo’s St John the Baptist had been part of the Liancourt collection before 1630 is not known; the common assumption that the painting was formerly in the French royal collection is unsupported by documentary evidence. Conversely, the St John the Baptist in the Wilderness, with the attributes of Bacchus, today attributed to Leonardo and workshop, was documented in the French royal collection during the seventeenth century.71
Evelyn’s account of his visit to the Hôtel de Liancourt on 1 March 1644 disrupts any notion that the St John came from the French royal collection; the exchange of paintings was clearly a transaction between collectors, since the paintings sent by Charles I remained in Liancourt’s possession. They had not been intended for Louis XIII. Evelyn did not see the Portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein, but recorded ‘a Madonna of Lucas van Leyden sent them by our King’, and ‘a very rare Madonna of Titian given him also by our King’.72 It is feasible that one party misremembered the items exchanged. Nonetheless, the rate of exchange of one painting by Leonardo in return for one of Titian and one or two others, pithily indexes the prime status of Leonardo for Liancourt, and Charles I. While in England in 1630, Liancourt took the opportunity to purchase from the king’s painter Orazio Gentileschi his poetic work Diana the Huntress (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes) for the sum of 460 livres,73 and he sold to the king a Virgin and Child by Annibale Carracci, a landscape by Paul Bril, and a book of fifty-four pastel portraits of the French nobility.74 Two items recorded as gifts from the French ambassador were decorative textiles.75 These factors, and Van der Doort’s statement that the painting was ‘Sent to yor Matie for a present by Mounsr de Lyon Court’, strongly suggest that the exchange of paintings between the king and Liancourt was not a diplomatic expression of the French and British royal courts, per se, rather it was interchange between two individuals in the throes of a powerful impulse to collect works of art.
‘Said to be of Leonard de Vincia: or out of his Scoule’
Van der Doort was circumspect about a portrait of a ‘smiling woman’, which he attributed to Leonardo or a close follower: ‘Said to be of Leonard de Vincia: or out of his Scoule … a Smileing woeman with a fewe flowerrs in her left hand …’.76 In February 1631, Richard Greenbury (c. 1660–70) painter to Queen Henrietta Maria, was paid for ‘painting and guilding one small frame for a womans picture thought to be of Leonardo’; presumably this painting.77 The painting was placed above the door of ‘the litle. roome Betwene the kings Withdrawing roome: als called the Breakfast chamber and the longe gallorie’ at Whitehall Palace. Interestingly, the anonymous author of the c. 1640 inventory attributed this painting to ‘Lowino’ [Luini], the importance of finessing the attribution apparently overriding a downgrade of status.78 The painting was not recorded in the 1649 Contractors’ inventory, but it was recovered by the Crown at the Restoration and features in the mid-1660s inventory of the collection of Charles II, where it was attributed to ‘Leonard de Vince’.79 This painting has been identified with Luini’s Flora at Hampton Court Palace, London, which was attributed to Leonardo until the late nineteenth century (Fig. 9.3).80
Fig. 9.3Bernardino Luini, Flora, c.1530, oil on panel, Royal Collection [Hampton Court].
‘A Mantua peece done by Lowino’
A second Leonardesque item recorded by Van der Doort was a Holy Family with the Infant St John the Baptist, St Catherine & St Anne, attributed to Luini, or a member of Leonardo’s school: ‘A Mantua peece done by Lowino: Item our Ladie and Christ. St John. St Ann. Joseph and St Katherin. 6. Intire figures less then the life Saide to be done by. Lowino. Or otherwise by one out of the School of Leonard De Venice. In a Carved and guilded frame. Hight—breadth … 4 f 0 -5 … 4 f 0 -0’. The painting was displayed in the Third Privy Lodging Room, also known as the Square Room, at Whitehall Palace. The Register records the painting’s provenance in the Gonzaga collection, Mantua (purchased en bloc through the Flemish dealer Daniel Nijs, 1627/28).81 The painting does not feature in the royal inventory taken 1640, and is probably the item attributed to ‘Godentio Melanesco’ [Gaudenzio Ferrari] in 1649; obscure, it may have been related in composition to Bernardino Luini’s Holy Family at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which, however, lacks a St Katherine (Fig. 9.4).
Fig. 9.4Bernardino Luini, Holy Family, tempera and oil on panel, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.
These three paintings, appraised by Van der Doort, entered the Royal Collection within the same window of time: if it shipped with the bulk of the Gonzaga Collection, the Holy Family arrived around 1629, the Flora was acquired presumably around 1630, and the St John was exchanged with Liancourt mid 1630.