Chapter 10
How the eleven paintings relating to Leonardo identified in the Caroline collection were described in the inventories and lists of 1639, c. 1640, 1649, 1653, 1660, and c. 1666 affords us a glimpse of contemporary appraisals—both cultural and monetary. These are disparate documents. Van der Doort’s Register was much more than an inventory; addressed to the king himself, it is a testimony of reconnaissance and inquisitiveness, an imprint of the expertise at the Caroline court. His annotations and marginalia evince penetrating scrutiny, conversations, comparisons, cogitations, afterthoughts, appended over the long period of compilation. In contrast, in 1649 the Contractors probably relied on earlier royal inventories, most likely Van der Doort’s Register or the anonymous c. 1640 list; the necessity of haste, and the sheer number of items to be accounted for, means that the descriptions of the items are prosaic. However, the attachment of monetary value to each item makes the Commonwealth era lists a remarkable historical resource and provides a snapshot of the appreciation of particular artists at the time, however unscientific.
The Contractors’ Inventory records four items attributed to Leonardo, two copies after Leonardo, and three works attributed to Luini. Only one painting attributed to Leonardo features in the 1639, c. 1640, and 1649 royal inventories: the St John the Baptist, which in 1639 was in the Privy Gallery at Whitehall; in 1649 it was at St James’s Palace, where it was described laconically as ‘St John at 140 - by Leonardo da Vinci’; it would be disbursed to the executors of Jan van Belcamp on 8 October 1651.1 A ‘Naked boy playing on 2 boards. done by Leonardo’ was sold to ‘Thomson’ for £40 on 18 October 1649, shortly after the commencement of the sale.2 The painting hung in one of the two closets at Greenwich. This entry is here identified as Bernardino Luini’s Boy with a Puzzle, formerly attributed to Leonardo (Plate 16).
The painting ambiguously described as ‘A lords figure. in halfe’, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and sold for £80 to Edward Bass and the Ninth Dividend in December 1651, 3 discussed above, hung at St James’s Palace. As we have seen, this item was described as a ‘bust of Christ’ in the list drawn up by Cardinal Mazarin’s agent at the Commonwealth Sale in 1650. It was not returned to the Crown at the Restoration.
The fourth painting described as an autograph work by Leonardo in the Contractors’ Inventory is: ‘[49] A peece of Christ done by Leonardo at ---- 30-00-00. Sold to Stone a/o 23 Oct. 1651’.4 It had hung in one of the closets at Greenwich, adjacent in the Contractors’ Inventory to Luini’s Boy, and was among goods received by Capt. John Stone, the leader of the Sixth Dividend (syndicate) of Crown creditors, on 23 October 1651.5 It was recorded in an inventory of the goods owned by the syndicate (the Taylour Inventory) of c. 1653,6 and again in a list of items restituted by Stone to the Crown in 1660.7 The exact conformity of the attribution, subject, stated value, and inventory number in all three lists confirm that the same item left and re-entered the Royal Collection. The inventory of the collection of Charles II, taken in the mid 1660s, records only one item corresponding to the description in the lists of 1649, the 1650s, and 1660. It reads: ‘In the King’s Closet … No. 311. Leonard de Vince. Or Savior wth a gloabe in one hand & holding up ye other’; that is, a Salvator Mundi type.8 It is intriguing to note the change from the Italian to the French version of Leonardo’s name in the Restoration inventory.
The three paintings attributed to Luini are: Herodias with the Head of St John the Baptist (from Hampton Court Palace),9 a Salutation of the Virgin (from St James’s Palace),10 and a seated St John the Baptist (from the gallery at Somerset House).11 The Flora and Holy Family recorded by Van der Doort in 1639 were not catalogued in 1649. The Herodias is identified today as the Salome after Cesare da Sesto, in the Royal Collection since the Restoration in 1660; it bears the brand of Charles I on the reverse of the panel (Fig. 10.1).12 The full-length sitting St John the Baptist may be a variant or copy of the Louvre St John the Baptist in the Wilderness, with the Attributes of Bacchus (Fig. 10.2), a version of which is at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, where it is attributed to Cesare da Sesto.13 The Salutation of Mary attributed to Luini is obscure, but the subject may in fact have been an Annunciation (see Chapter 14).
Fig. 10.1After Cesare da Sesto, Salome, oil on panel, Royal Collection [Hampton Court].
Fig. 10.2Leonardo da Vinci and workshop, Bacchus [formerly St John in the Wilderness], c. 1510–15, oil on panel, transferred to canvas, 177 × 115cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Two works were described as copies after Leonardo: a Virgin and Child (from Somerset House),14 and a work described as Joanna, Queen of Naples (from Hampton Court)15. Could the Virgin and Child described as a copy after Leonardo in the Arundel inventory of 1641 be the same work absorbed into the Royal Collection? The painting described as a copy of Leonardo’s Joanna of Naples was probably after the Raphael/Giulio Romano Portrait of Doña Isabel de Requesens in the Louvre, or the more Leonardesque version in the Doria Pamphili, Rome (Fig. 10.3).16 Neither of these items were reabsorbed into the Royal Collection at the Restoration, having found their way to the hands of Perruchot at Paris, as we will see in Chapter 11.
Fig. 10.3After Giulio Romano and Raphael, Portrait of Doña Isabel de Requesens y Enríquez de Cardona-Anglesola, Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome.
Eleven Paintings: A Roll Call
A roll call of the paintings attributed to Leonardo or his immediate followers documented in the British Royal Collection between 1625 and 1649 according to their modern coinage—if known—is as follows. As Leonardo: St John the Baptist; Boy with a Puzzle; Salvator Mundi; Bust of Christ. As Luini or school of Leonardo: Flora; Holy Family with Saints; Salome with the head of St John the Baptist; St John the Baptist in the Wilderness; Annunciation to the Virgin. Anonymous copy after Leonardo: Virgin and Child; Joanna, Queen of Naples/ Portrait of Doña Isabel de Requesens y Enríquez de Cardona-Anglesola. Of these, four paintings—the Boy with a Puzzle, the Salvator Mundi, the St John the Baptist in the Wilderness, and the Virgin and Child—were hung at locations associated with the queen’s household: Somerset House, the Queen’s House and/or Greenwich Palace.
The Queen’s Closet
On 8 September 1649, Henry Browne, former under-housekeeper to Queen Henrietta Maria at Somerset House, received into his custody a large quantity of paintings, whose value amounted to the sum of £4,154 9 s.17 These were sequestered from several former royal households: Wimbledon; Greenwich; the Bear Gallery, Privy Lodgings; and Privy Gallery at Whitehall Palace. Among their number were some of the most cherished belongings of the late king and his family: the Raphael Cartoons; Van Dyck’s monumental portrait of the king and queen and their two eldest children, known as the Great Piece; a clutch of Titians; and Rubens’s Minerva protects Pax from Mars. The paintings were listed under their original locations, and, because of the division of royal households, it is possible to ascertain which paintings had belonged to the queen. That is, those removed from Wimbledon Palace, and the complex of buildings at Greenwich, which included the old Tudor palace, Placentia, built by Margaret of Anjou, and the ‘new building’, originally designed by Inigo Jones for Anne of Denmark and completed in the 1630s for Henrietta Maria (now known as the Queen’s House) (Fig. 10.4). The manor of Greenwich became part of the queen’s jointure in 1628, and Wimbledon followed in 1640; therefore, nominally, the contents of these households belonged to the queen.18 If Abraham Van der Doort made a formal inventory of the paintings at Greenwich or Wimbledon, no trace of any such documentation survives.
Fig. 10.4The Queen’s House, Greenwich.
It is important to recognize that the Queen’s House was not referred to as such in the 1630s and 1640s; Inigo Jones’s surviving drawings for the fitting-out of the house during the late 1630s call it ‘grenewich’, and warrants for payments dated 1632–8 refer to ‘new buildings at Greenwich’.19 Indeed, although we now see the Queen’s House as isolated, it was in fact integral to the complex of buildings at the palace, being linked to the wall around the garden, which in turn connected with the tiltyard.20 Accordingly, Henry Browne’s inventories of September 1649 do not draw any distinction between the new building and the old palace, they are amalgamated under the heading ‘Greenwich’. He divided the pictures from this household into four subsets: ‘The Pictures wch were in both ye Clossetts at Grenewch’, ‘Pictures out of the Gallaries at Grenewch’, ‘Pictures of ye Queenes Gallarie at Greenewch’, and ‘Pictures at Grenwch’. The first three sections (written on six consecutive folios) list the moveable pictures; the fourth (on a separate folio appearing much later in the manuscript) records paintings that were evidently fixtures of the decorative interiors. The Salvator Mundi that would later belong to Charles II features in the list of the amalgamated contents of two closets at Greenwich: ‘[49] A peece of Christ done by Leonardo at—30-00-00.’21 Since Browne’s list was not compiled in situ, but after the arrival of the paintings from the two Greenwich closets at Somerset House, we cannot determine whether its internal order reflects the original hang, or how the forty-five paintings were divided between the two rooms. However, it is possible that he consulted a now-lost inventory as he appraised the paintings, checking items off according to the sequence of the original document. Certainly, Browne’s lists contain markedly precise information about attributions. For instance, he describes a landscape by Hendrick van Steenwyck the Younger where the figures were painted by Orazio Gentileschi.22 Unless the paintings were labelled in some way, it is unlikely he possessed sufficient know-how to draw such distinctions, and he worked under extreme time pressure against the impending Commonwealth Sale.
Frustratingly, early modern plans of the (destroyed) Tudor palace and the piano nobile of the new building do not survive. This presents a fundamental problem: where were the two closets situated within the complex of buildings at Greenwich? From a close reading of the primary documents—the inventories of 1639 and 1649—and the aid of a partial reconstruction of the layout of Greenwich palace, recently published by Simon Thurley, we can construct a tentative hypothesis about the location and manner in which the Salvator Mundi was displayed, and thereby its meaning and function for the queen.23
In fact, one of Browne’s lists—the short inventory of ‘Pictures at Grenwch’—concerns paintings in the ‘new building’ at Greenwich. It records a group of twenty-four paintings fitted within chimneypieces, walls, and ceilings.24 These were pieces by Orazio Gentileschi, Jacob Jordaens, and Giulio Romano that formed part of the original decorative arrangement at the Queen’s House.25 Gentileschi’s large paintings—the Finding of Moses, and Lot and His Daughters—hung in the Great Hall, probably above the first-floor balcony, or gallery.26 Apparently, in the autumn of 1649 the large paintings had not yet been removed and were inventoried in situ. The ceiling paintings, and two pictures set into chimneypieces, were reserved for the use of the Commonwealth. A list of thirty-six statues ‘at Grenwch’, including Bernini’s (lost) bust of Charles I, valued at £800, is written on consecutive folios.27 Some of the paintings and sculptures remained there by 28 February 1651, according to an eyewitness account of the Dutch envoy Lodewijk Huygens. He described the house stripped of most of its contents and in a state of preparation for the residence of Bulstrode Whitelock, president of the Council of State: ‘When one enters, there is a large hall on one side with a balustrade around it; and the ceiling is decorated with fairly good paintings. The rest of the house consists of rooms of normal size only and not furnished yet; two or three mantelpieces were worth looking at, however, being finely sculptured with all sorts of ornamental foliage. … We were also brought into a room with a great number of marble statues, most of which I took for antique ones. Some more good paintings were to be found in other rooms.’28 Ten months after Huygens’s visit, the ‘peece of Christ’ attributed to Leonardo would be assigned to Capt. John Stone and the Sixth Dividend, together with four more paintings and a statue of Cleopatra, also from Greenwich.29 The four paintings were large and were appraised in situ among a group of statues.
There is no extant account of the hang at Greenwich before 1649. After Van der Doort’s suicide in 1640, his deputy, the Flemish painter and copyist Jan van Belcamp, was appointed keeper of the King’s Pictures, and the obscure Dutch Huguenot painter and picture-restorer Daniel Soreau (fl. 1626, d. London, 1643) was put in charge of ‘her Majesty’s pictures in whatsoever of their Majesty’s houses’,30 although no documentation of her paintings under Soreau’s stewardship survives. If he made an inventory after his appointment, it has not been traced. We know very little about Soreau’s activities, except that he restored paintings by Giulio Romano in 1636/7, and supplied information concerning the preparation of painting materials and the methods of cleaning paintings to the royal physician, Sir Theodore de Mayerne.31 Several paintings attributed to Giulio Romano were recorded in 1649 in the two closets and the galleries at Greenwich, perhaps the pieces restored by Soreau.32
Yet, Van der Doort must have been given some access to Greenwich before he died. An annotation in the working copy of his Register lists seven paintings ‘in grinwij haus’ [in Greenwich house]; these were hung in restricted locations associated with the queen: one in her bedchamber, and six in her withdrawing chamber.33 He also compiled an inventory, dated 1639, of thirty-seven paintings in the Queen’s Gallery at Greenwich (palace) that had formerly belonged to Anne of Denmark.34 He recorded paintings in the King’s First Privy Gallery at Greenwich (palace);35 several of the items had been bought or given to the king, according to Van der Doort’s annotations, and the hang was relatively recent: four paintings had been removed from Whitehall. An obscure note on the Register’s flyleaf—headed ‘grinwij gallri’—records a conversation about paintings in the King’s Bedchamber and gallery at Greenwich.36 The picture hang at the Queen’s House most likely occurred in 1640, the year of Van der Doort’s death and after he had completed his Register, further explaining the absence of an inventory of its contents.
By comparing Van der Doort’s list with the Contractors’ Inventory, it is apparent that, ten years later, some of these paintings had moved again. The Pordenone in the Queen’s Bedchamber at Greenwich in 1639 was now at St James’s Palace;37 Orazio Gentileschi’s Lot and his Daughters,38 previously at Whitehall, was by 1639 in Henrietta Maria’s Withdrawing Chamber at Greenwich, and, by 1649, among the large pictures appraised in situ at the Queen’s House.39 (This indicates that the fitting out of the Great Hall at the Queen’s House occurred as late as 1640–1.) Artemisia Gentileschi’s Tarquin and Lucretia, previously in the Queen’s Withdrawing Chamber, was in the ‘Gallaries’ at Greenwich in 1649.40 Van Dyck’s ?Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria, sent to London by Gerbier in 1635,41 and at Greenwich by 1639, was at Hampton Court in 1649.42 A large picture of ‘Flora and three cupids, who strew flowers’, in the Queen’s Withdrawing Chamber in 1639, was appraised together with a group of statues at Greenwich in 1649 and would be disbursed to John Stone in 1651.43 Giulio Romano’s Funeral Pyre of the Emperor Otto, brought from the Gonzaga collection at Mantua in 1627/8, which hung in the Queen’s Bedchamber at Greenwich in 1639, was by 1649 in the Greenwich galleries.44 Tintoretto’s Nine Muses followed suit.45
This serves to illustrate how difficult it is to pinpoint the exact locations of paintings at Greenwich between 1639 and 1649. Erin Griffey’s important study of the material culture of the court of Henrietta Maria highlights the frequent movement of rich furnishings of textiles and paintings between households of the queen’s jointure, according to the season, liturgical calendar, and for special functions, such as the decoration of the Queen’s Bedchamber during periods of lying-in at childbirth.46 This extended to the queen’s devotional practices during seclusion, when her ‘closet was also furnished with “necessaries” for her worship’.47 Gifts of paintings were sent at lying-in, the most famous occasion being the Barberini gift at the birth of Princess Anne in 1636, although the cardinal had worried that the skull painted on the verso of the ‘Leonardo’ portrait could have an adverse effect on the pregnant queen.48 Browne’s inventories of paintings and sculptures from Greenwich provide a snapshot of its contents frozen in time, before the outbreak of war in 1642 and the forced exile of the queen in 1644, but in the heyday of the Caroline court, paintings were often in flux, marshalled and reshuffled to signify particular functions and meanings.49
There is one clue to the location and display of the Salvator Mundi at Greenwich during the late 1630s/early 1640s. Close comparison of Van der Doort’s Register and the Contractors’ Inventory provides a sense of the decorative scheme of one of the rooms at Greenwich. In 1639, Van der Doort itemized a copper plate engraved by Lucas Vorsterman I, associate of Rubens and from 1624 engraver to Charles I; it was made after a small cabinet painting by Annibale Caracci, The Agony in the Garden, which hung at Greenwich in a little room where the walls were lined with green damask, towards the River Thames (‘Engraven by Vosterman. Inpris Christ in the garden [kneeling at the Mount of Olliffs] engraven after one of yor Mats little painted pictures being don by Haniball Coratch in a black frame wch said principall picture is at this instant placed at Grenwich in the little roome hanged with hreene damask towards the water side.’).50 Vorsterman stated in the lower margin of the print that it was made to the king’s express command. Anthony Griffiths notes, ‘the painting is very small—exactly the same size as the print—and this, as well as its Catholic piety which doubtless appealed to the queen may have been the reason why it was chosen to be engraved.’51 The Carracci painting had been acquired as part of the Gonzaga collection c. 1627/28; Van der Doort also recorded its presence in the King’s Chair Room in the Privy Gallery at Whitehall Palace, presumably before it was removed to Greenwich.52 This item is identified with a painting in the modern Royal Collection, although it must have been transferred to canvas from its marble support at some point in its history, which may explain its compromised condition (Figs. 10.5 and 10.6).53
Fig. 10.5Lucas Vorsterman I, after Annibale Carracci, The Agony in the Garden, 1627, engraving, British Museum, U,1.120.
Fig. 10.6Annibale Carracci, The Agony in the Garden, 1596–7, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, RCIN 402990.
Comparison with the Contractors’ inventory confirms that the Carracci painting remained at Greenwich in 1649; it was almost immediately proximate in the inventory of the closets to two paintings attributed to Leonardo: Christ [Salvator Mundi] and the Naked Boy playing on 2 Boards (here identified as Luini’s Boy with a Puzzle).54 If Browne’s inventory retains some sense of the original sequence, it may be that all three paintings were placed within the little room decorated with green silk damask facing the river at Greenwich and described by Van der Doort—surely a closet or cabinet. In the absence of an inventory of the closets before the outbreak of civil war, it is not possible to say for certain whether this room was in the riverfront elevation of the ancient palace or the north range of the new building (the Queen’s House), which faced towards the Thames. We will consider both possibilities.
There are no surviving plans of the Tudor palace, but the architectural historian Simon Thurley has recently published a reconstruction of the layout of the first floor.55 This was devised from records of excavation of the site in 1970–1 and information contained in volumes of repair books surviving from the reign of Henry VIII.56 Thurley discerned two closets in the range behind the main riverside block. Both fulfilled a devotional function.
A door from here led to a gallery or anteroom on the riverfront. Here you could turn right and be in the holyday closet looking down onto the chapel below, or turn left to enter the presence chamber … Beyond was the privy chamber and between the two lay a short gallery off which was, on one side, a staircase and, on the other, the privy closet—the king’s private chapel. … The privy closet had two parts: the chapel itself, which was entered off the gallery, and the king’s kneeling place—as it was known—which was entered from the privy chamber. The kneeling place had a lattice window that allowed the king, on his knees, to see the altar and the Elevation of the Host. This cunning arrangement … meant that the king could enter his closet directly from the privy chamber, and his chaplain, who had no right of access to the privy chamber, could enter the closet from the gallery.57
The chapel was lavishly refurbished by Inigo Jones between 1622–5; that is, after the manor of Greenwich had reverted to James I on the death of Anne of Denmark and before the accession of Charles I, who gifted it to his wife in 1629. A great window frame between the chapel and the adjoining holyday closet was carved by Maximilian Colt; painted white, it featured ‘boys with gilt hair, drapery partly gilt, and palms and garlands ‘being silver and glassed with faire greens’.58 The Sergeant Painter John de Critz painted and gilded forty-eight ‘antiques’, probably caryatids, in the chapel itself and painted murals on the chapel walls.59 The holyday closet overlooked the riverfront and was exquisitely decorated in green, white, silver, and gold, to judge by the craftsmen’s accounts.60 However, it was a relatively large space. On the other hand, the privy closet, and its private chapel, was on an intimate scale. Small windows pierced the palace walls abutting the water’s edge. This, then, is a strong contender for the ‘little room hung with green silk damask towards the waterside’, a fitting setting for an altarpiece comprising the diminutive Salvator Mundi, and also for Carracci’s Agony in the Garden. But, if so, it is puzzling that Van der Doort did not identify the room by its official name in 1639: the Queen’s Privy Closet.
The ‘closet ajoyning’
This brings us to an alternative scenario: the closet in question was located in the new building, the Queen’s House. Inigo Jones completed the shell of the entire building around 1635, following his original design of 1616; he seems to have left the south range unfinished, with all efforts marshalled towards the decoration of the north range, which commanded views across the palace garden and towards the River Thames.61 The rooms of the north range—the Great Hall and its painted ceiling, the Queen’s Bedchamber, her Cabinet Room, and a closet—were fitted out between 1635 and 1640,62 but the decorative scheme remained incomplete at the outbreak of war in 1642. Inigo Jones annotated a drawing for a chimneypiece: ‘Grenwich 1637 for ye room next ye bakstaiers above’ (Fig. 10.7).63 The location of this room corresponds with the small antechamber, or closet, behind the queen’s bedchamber on the first floor of the north range. While not facing the water directly, it overlooks the River Thames from a window on the northwest elevation. The decoration and furnishing of this room almost certainly occurred in late 1639.
Fig. 10.7Inigo Jones, Elevation for a chimney-piece in the room next to the back stairs (present North-West Cabinet Room), the Queen’s House, Greenwich, 1637, Royal Institute of British Architects, RIBA Jones and Webb 22.
The carving of Jones’s chimneypiece was probably carried out under the supervision of the King’s master mason, Nicholas Stone (the father of Capt. John Stone). A list compiled by Nicholas Stone Jnr details masonry works undertaken at the Queen’s House in July 1639, among which are records of the fitting of chimneypieces, hearths, jambs, and paviours ‘In the Bedchamber whar the Rouef is paynted’ (that is, the Queen’s Bedchamber, where the ceiling cove was possibly painted by John de Critz or Matthew Goodricke, and Giulio Romano’s Daedalus and Icarus was set into the central panel), in ‘the closet ajoyning’ (the adjoining Queen’s Antechamber), and the ‘Iner Rom at foot of the Bak stars’ (the room directly beneath the small room adjoining the Queen’s Antechamber, where a private staircase led from the ground floor to the roof platform).64
The recent renovation of the Queen’s House included refurbishment of the Queen’s Antechamber, and reconstruction of its lost chimneypiece, based on Jones’s 1637 drawing (Fig. 10.7). John Bold thought this room may have had a religious function: ‘As a devout Catholic, Henrietta Maria would certainly have desired a place of private devotion within the Queen’s House. No provision for a private chapel was made by Inigo Jones in the original plans and no evidence survives to show where her private oratory was, but it is likely to have been in the small room to the rear of the Queen’s Bedchamber. This room is placed next to a back staircase, replaced in the nineteenth century, rising from the ground to the first floor, which would have allowed the priest easy and discreet access.’65 In other words, the access arrangements reiterate those of the Queen’s Privy Closet at Greenwich Palace—her chaplain, who had no right of access to the royal bedchamber, could enter the closet from the small room adjoining the backstairs.
Fig. 10.8The queen’s antechamber, The Queen’s House, Greenwich.
During the late 1630s Henrietta Maria embarked on a programme of embellishment and renovation at Greenwich; paintings were relocated from Whitehall, and new pieces—secular and religious—were commissioned from Catholic artists. In 1637, the same year in which Jones designed the chimneypiece for the antechamber, the queen wrote to Léon Bouthillier, comte de Chavigny, foreign minister of Louis XIII, sending him ‘the measure of a picture, which her majesty wishes to have executed by Guido [Reni], for her chapel at Greenwich’.66 This refers to the main chapel at the old palace. Also in 1637, she entreated the papal envoy, George Conn, to negotiate the commission of a painting by Guido Reni for the ceiling of the bedchamber; the Bacchus and Ariadne disappeared after its dispatch from Rome.67 On 17 October 1639 William Murray wrote to Balthasar Gerbier at Brussels, instructing him to commission from Jacob Jordaens a suite of twenty-two paintings depicting the Story of Psyche for the Cabinet Room on the north (river) range of the Queen’s House, including plans of the room, where he outlined the paintings and their subjects.68 Of these, only eight canvases reached England; they appear in Browne’s 1649 list of the fixed paintings at the Queen’s House.69 At the end of 1639 Richard Dirgin provided three carved frames for paintings in the Queen’s Bedchamber in the Queen’s House, including Giulio Romano’s Daedalus and Icarus, relocated from St James’s Palace.70 It is likely that by this time the antechamber was fitted with its chimneypiece. If the little room had a devotional and contemplative function, it is entirely feasible that Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi and Carracci’s poignant Agony in the Garden should be hung in this location. Luini’s Boy with a Puzzle, with its sweet evocation of innocent and carefree childhood, would have made a suitable ornament to the queen’s adjacent bedchamber.
There exists, then, the possibility that the painting fulfilled a devotional purpose, while also serving the queen’s appreciation of Leonardo, in either the Queen’s Privy Closet at the old palace, or in the Queen’s Antechamber at the Queen’s House. It may not be necessary to choose between them. The new building was designed for occupation only during the spring and early summer hunting season (April to June); the entire central third of the building has no chimneypieces and would have been too cold for habitation in the winter.71 The Salvator Mundi may have migrated to the more comfortable quarters of the closet at the old palace during the autumn and winter months.72
Analogous Display? Greenwich Palace and Ham House
We must also allow the possibility that the Salvator was not hung in a devotional closet, but instead in a picture cabinet. Browne’s inventory of the two closets accounts for forty-five paintings, some of a decidedly salacious subject matter; clearly, there existed at least one other room in the palace complex, besides the long galleries, where paintings were hung for contemplation and appreciation. One such is the Cabinet Room in the Queen’s House, which overlooked the river. Since the suite of paintings by Jordaens commissioned for this room in 1639 remained ultimately incomplete, the gaps in the decorative scheme may have been filled by easel paintings. William Murray, who had a hand in the commission, was also involved in the redecorations at the old palace, while simultaneously refurbishing his family estate at Ham House in Surrey. The interior remains largely faithful to its seventeenth-century appearance, and there are discernible consonances between the decoration of the ‘Green Closet’ at Ham, approached from a gallery, and the little room hung with green damask at Greenwich.
We have already heard of Inigo Jones’s intended display of the (supposed) Portrait of Ginerva de’ Benci by Leonardo da Vinci, which had been sent to the queen by Cardinal Francesco Barberini in 1636; it was to be kept in a special room and provided with a gilded and jewelled frame. This manner of display, in which Renaissance paintings, set in luxuriously appointed frames, were installed in a sparse hang in small cabinet rooms is reminiscent of the arrangement of the galleries in Lady Arundel’s contemporaneous casino, Tart Hall.73 Elizabeth Chew has demonstrated the instance of special viewing rooms, or closets, adjacent to, but separate from, the intersecting long galleries, where paintings of high status were hung in isolation for contemplation and discussion, thereby serving the ostentatiously performative aspect of Stuart connoisseurship, which had so irritated the papal agent Gregorio Panzani.74
The sole-surviving illustration of the appearance of such a room in 1630s England is the exquisite Green Closet at Ham House, Surrey, referred to by the Countess of Dysart in her inventory of 1655 as ‘the closset within the gallerie’, although it is important to note that this room may have been densely hung from its inception.75 The closets at Ham House and at Greenwich may have been close cousins. Ham was transformed under the patronage of William Murray, 1st Earl of Dysart (c. 1600–55), Charles I’s childhood friend and Gentleman of the Bed Chamber.76 Murray employed many of the same royal craftsmen, such as Matthew Goodricke, then carrying out Jones’s designs at Greenwich, the king’s Great Cabinet Room at Whitehall Palace, and the queen’s New Cabinet Room at the east end of the Cross Gallery at Somerset House.77 Christopher Rowell notes that ‘the Italian concept of the studiolo clearly influenced William Murray, Charles I and their advisers. The Green Closet, adjacent to a Long Gallery for the display of larger portraits and artefacts, would have been a tangible reminder of Murray’s sophisticated love of the arts.’ The room’s ‘décor, and its grotesque painted ornament must have been similar to the decoration of Queen Henrietta Maria’s New Cabinet Room … at Somerset House, designed by Inigo Jones’, and constructed c. 1628–30.78 The choice of wallcovering may signal correlations between the closets at Ham and Greenwich. Three narrow panels of green silk damask in the textile collection at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, USA, are probably the sole surviving fragments of the ‘Hangings of greene stuffe’ that decorated the closet at Ham c. 1655.79 French or Italian in origin, and patterned with stylized flowers, lobed leaves, and pomegranates, it is possible that the same damask was used to decorate the queen’s closet at Greenwich.
It is fascinating, given the close relation between William Murray and Charles I, that the c. 1683 ‘Estimate of Pictures’ at Ham House records three works attributed to ‘Leonard Davinshaw’ (Leonardo da Vinci). Alastair Laing has attempted to reconstruct the hang according to inventories taken in 1677, 1679, and 1683; frustratingly, while many of the paintings probably derive from William Murray’s time, the earlier inventories do not identify the pictures.80 Two items, a St Anthony and a St Sebastian, both valued at £25 in 1683, hung in the Duchess of Lauderdale’s private closet. A remarkable survival, they remain at Ham House today, where they are now attributed to an unknown sixteenth-century Italian hand.81 This presents a vanishingly rare opportunity to understand what was thought in seventeenth-century England to represent a work by Leonardo (Figs. 10.9 and 10.10).
Fig. 10.9Early–mid-sixteenth-century Italian (?Venetian) School, St Sebastian, oil on panel, 38 × 19.5 cm, Ham House, 1140141.
Fig. 10.10Early–mid-sixteenth-century Italian (?Venetian) School, St Anthony Abbot, oil on panel, 38 × 19.5 cm, Ham House, 1140140.
A Resurrection of Christ, attributed to ‘Leond Davinshaw’, hung in the Green Closet in 1683; valued at £150, it was the costliest painting in the Ham House collection.82 Sadly, it was lost or sold at an undetermined date before 1844.83 It is significant that the most valuable painting was placed in the Green Closet, and also that the highest value was accorded to a painting attributed to Leonardo, at a time when he was a relatively unknown artist in Britain.
Accession
In all probability, the Salvator Mundi was placed in the Privy Closet at the old Greenwich palace in winter, and the Queen’s Antechamber in the new building during the warmer months, where it was the focus of private devotion. In absence of documentation, this must remain an imponderable. The one secure fact is that it belonged to Henrietta Maria; the means by which it entered the Royal Collection is mysterious. Van der Doort’s Register is littered with the names of donors of important pictures, together with the names of diplomats, agents, and artists who gave, exchanged, or sold paintings to the king. However, the Greenwich Salvator Mundi does not feature in any surviving records of the Royal Collection taken during the lifetime of Charles I. The queen’s stated appreciation of Leonardo, and her preference for devotional subjects, suggest a gift from an important Catholic donor such as Cardinal Barberini, or that she brought it from France. The lengthy inventory of the vast trousseau Henrietta Maria brought to England on her marriage in 1625 documents thirty-four pictures; none are identified by subject matter or artist, but their total value is given as 800 livres.84 Is there any evidence of a painting of Christ as Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo, in the French royal collection at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and if so, can we discern its typology?
‘Christ à demy corps’: A Salvator Mundi by Leonardo in the French Royal Collection?
The earliest intimation of a Salvator Mundi from the hand, or studio, of Leonardo is given in the posthumous inventory of the estate of his assistant Salaì, taken in 1525, which records a ‘Christ in the mode of God the Father’.85 Since some of the items on this list seem to correspond with items later recorded in the French royal collection, it is feasible that the Salvator Mundi may also have found its way to France. A tradition dating from the seventeenth century claims the Salvator Mundi was a component of the core of the royal collection formed by Francis I before 1530.86
Indeed, a Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo or one of his followers was recorded in the French royal collection during the seventeenth century. To determine the iconography of the painting recorded in the French royal collection, and to ascertain whether the item may have migrated to the British Royal Collection before 1649, we will review the documentary evidence and the literature concerning a Salvator Mundi by or after Leonardo in the French royal collection. Comparison between the descriptions is highly pertinent to the identification of the painting, therefore citations are given in full as a point of reference.
Although sixteenth-century inventories do not provide the names of artists, there exist significant eyewitness accounts, such as that of Antonio de’ Beatis, who, as part of the entourage of Cardinal (Luigi) of Aragon, was shown—by the elderly Leonardo himself—three paintings at the Chateau de Cloux (Clos Lucé) in 1517: a portrait of a Florentine woman, a Young St John the Baptist, and a St Anne.87 The writer and collector Paolo Giovio saw a St Anne at the Oratory of the Chateau de Blois or Amboise in 1527.88 These offer vital glimpses of paintings attributed to Leonardo during his period of residence in France (1516–19) and shortly after his death.89 Neither de’ Beatis nor Giovio mention a painting of Christ, nor do any of the other sixteenth-century sources of information about Leonardo’s paintings, such as Giorgio Vasari or Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo.
The earliest seventeenth-century account comes from Cassiano dal Pozzo, who visited Fontainebleau between June and October 1625; his Diarium provides a list of paintings attributed to Leonardo he saw in the cabinet of paintings: the Virgin of the Rocks, the St John in the Wilderness, the Leda, the Gioconda, the Rape of Prosperine (a lost painting by Gaudenzio Ferrari, described by Lomazzo). He did not mention a painting of Christ.90 At an unknown date between 1625 and 1630, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc wrote a partial inventory of ‘the most rare paintings at Fontainebleau’, among which were: ‘La Jocunda, Un St Jean, Un petit Jesus, Une Nrē Dame—de Leonard del Vins’.91 This is the first testimony of a small painting of Christ, attributed to Leonardo, in the French royal collection. In his 1642 book, Le trésor des merveilles de la maison royale de Fontainebleau, Pierre Dan, father superior of the Convent of the Trinitarians, described the cabinet of paintings, where he recorded five paintings attributed to Leonardo, among which was a half-length Christ (‘un CHRIST à demy corps’).92 Although the book was published in 1642, its compendiousness suggests an enterprise that must have been many years in preparation.
An often-overlooked witness is the seemingly ubiquitous English antiquarian John Evelyn, who as a young man visited Fontainebleau on 8 March 1644, and, in the last decade of his life, wrote an account of the galleries, cabinet, and painting academy of the palace. Evelyn was shown around by the keeper of the royal collection, Jean Dubois the Elder (1604–76). Interestingly, two paintings by Leonardo were seen by Evelyn, not in the cabinet of pictures, but in the painting academy ‘where the Paynter himself wrought’; these were a St John the Baptist and ‘a Womans head’. The Gaudenzio Rape of Prosperine was also in this location; Evelyn did not attribute it to an artist, but thought it ‘very good’; after this date, it disappeared from the collection. Also in the academy were paintings by Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, and Perin del Vaga.93 Evelyn made no mention of a painting of Christ by Leonardo. The paintings may have been in the painter’s workshop for conservation and/or reproduction. Dan recorded a copy of the Rape of Prosperine in the Salle de la Conference at Fontainebleau in 1642, where it remained almost a century later, according to the witness of Pierre Guilbert in 1731.94 Guilbert also described a copy by Jean Dubois of a Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, placed in the queen’s cabinet at Fontainebleau, to which we shall return.95 In 1649, another important witness, the engraver Abraham Bosse, recorded two paintings by Leonardo in the French royal collection: the Mona Lisa at Fontainebleau, and a Flora, which hung in the cabinet of the queen mother, Marie de’ Médicis, at the Palais de Luxembourg; he did not record a Salvator Mundi.96
Before the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715) the royal collection was not inventoried,97 so the first official record of a painting of Christ, as Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo is found in the catalogue of Charles Le Brun, 1683: ‘15. Une teste tirée du cabinet de Fontainebleau manière de Leonnard d’avincy représentant Nostre Seigneur demie figure tenant un monde, haut d’un pied 4 pouces, peint sur bois avec sa bordure dorée. Veu a Paris le 8 aoust 1690.’98 The panel painting depicted Christ holding a world; it measured one foot, four inches high; a marginal note in Le Brun’s catalogue states that it was seen at Paris on 8 August 1690. Le Brun gives the panel’s provenance in the cabinet at Fontainebleau, and he is circumspect in his attribution of its authorship as ‘manner of’ Leonardo. Fagnart observed that Le Brun inventoried this Salvator Mundi among a group of paintings deriving from Fontainebleau, and considered that it almost certainly belonged the original core of Francis I’s collection assembled before 1530.99
In 1709–10 Nicolas Bailly undertook an inventory of the royal collection, where a Salvator Mundi on panel, and its corresponding copy on canvas, are listed under the name of ‘Lionardo da Vinci’: ‘4o Un tableau représentant un Christ tenant un globe; figure de petite nature; ayant de hauteur 16 pouces et demi sur 14 pouces de large; peint sur bois, dans sa bordure dorée. Versailles. Cabinet de la Surintendance’; ‘419o Une copie d’un Christ tenant un monde; ayant de hauteur 17 pouces sur 14 pouces de large.’100 The phrase ‘de petite nature’ is ambiguous; it can be interpreted as either ‘a child’ or ‘feeble’.101 In 1715 the original panel painting was among ninety-three loaned by the king to Louis Antoine de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Duc d’Antin; it remained at his Parisian hôtel until the duke’s death in 1736 and was inventoried when the collection was returned to the Crown in 1737.102 In 1731, Pierre Guilbert documented a copy of a Salvator Mundi by Leonardo in the cabinet of the queen; the original painting was then on loan to the Duc d’Antin. Guilbert’s description of this copy provides clarification of the iconography of the painting: a child Christ at half-length, who holds a globe.103 On canvas, the painting measured approximately one foot seven inches by fourteen inches in English imperial units;104 it was almost certainly the item recorded by Bailly in 1709–10. Guilbert named the copyist as Jean Dubois, keeper of the royal collection and Valet de Chambre of Louis XIII, who died in 1676. This suggests that the painting seen by Pierre Dan before 1642 conformed, in all likelihood, to a painting confiscated at the French Revolution in 1792 and transferred in 1803 to the Musée des Beaux Arts at Nancy, where it is today attributed unconvincingly to Marco d’Oggiono (Fig. 2.9).105 It is a painting of a young Christ as Salvator Mundi.
This evidence appears conclusive, until we take into account the reportage of François-Bernard Lépicié, engraver to Louis XV, and secretary of the Académie Royale, from whom Charles Coypel commissioned a new catalogue of the royal collection in June 1748.106 In a section devoted to the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, Lépicié provided a considered appraisal of the painting: ‘Le Sauveur tenant un globe. Tableau peint sur bois, ayant de hauteur 16 pouces & demi, sur 14 pouces de large. La figure est de petite nature. Ce Tableau, attribué à Léonard de Vinci, est extrêmement foible: il représente le Sauveur du monde en demi-figure, tenant d’une main un globe, & donnant de l’autre sa benediction. Son vêtement est unde draperie bleue pardessus une robe rouge. Il a été grave à l’eau forte par Winceslas Hollar, en 1650.’107 The measurements tally, more or less, with the painting recorded by Le Brun, Bailly, and Guilbert.
While the description of a bust of Christ, as Salvator Mundi, dressed in a red gown with a blue drape on top, holding a globe, matches the appearance of the Nancy painting, it is said to correspond exactly to the composition recorded by Hollar, which Lépicié cites in the inventory description. The colours of the drapery tally with the numerous copies after Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, which substitute a red gown for Leonardo’s blue-on-blue drapery. Lépicié’s pejorative judgment of the ‘extremely feeble’ execution of the painting signals misgivings about the attribution to Leonardo, suggesting he examined the painting in person. Hollar’s etching was hard to come by, and it seems unlikely that Lépicié, as engraver to the king, would cite it gratuitously, so the misidentification is puzzling.108 Was there a copy on panel of Leonardo’s canonical (adult) Salvator Mundi in the French royal collection in the mid eighteenth century? This is an imponderable, and does not get us any closer to confirming whether Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi was in the French royal collection at any point in its early history. It seems in all probability that it was not.
Mirrored Collections: London and Paris
Laure Fagnart has tentatively enumerated the paintings attributed to Leonardo in the French royal collection by the beginning of the seventeenth century; these are, according to their modern titles, where known: Portrait of a lady of the court of Milan, Virgin of the Rocks, St Anne, St John the Baptist in the Wilderness, with the attributes of Bacchus, Leda, The Rape of Prosperine, the ‘Nude Mona Lisa’, Salvator Mundi, La Belle Ferronière, and Mona Lisa.109 To this number could be added the Flora or Columbine then in the possession of Marie de Médicis. Scholars have flagged the symmetry between this group, perhaps the core of the collection of Francis I, and the small group of expensive paintings listed in the posthumous inventory of Leonardo’s assistant Salaì.110 There’s also a certain symmetry with the group of paintings attributed to Leonardo or his followers in the British Royal Collection in the first decades of the seventeenth century, not only quantitatively—ten/eleven items in Paris; eleven in London—but also in terms of subject matter. A St John the Baptist (in the Wilderness), a Flora, and a painting of Christ as Salvator Mundi were in both the Bourbon and Stuart collections. The Caroline collection possessed two paintings of Christ, both attributed to Leonardo, and perhaps each exhibiting Salvator Mundi typology.
How did these two paintings of Christ, attributed to Leonardo, come to be in London, if not via the French royal collection? The inventory of paintings in the Gonzaga collection at Mantua, sold to Charles I in 1627, lists two contenders, unfortunately without an attribution to an artist:
‘347. Un quadretto dipintovi N.S. giovine con fregiata d’oro, L. 36.’111
‘727. Un altro simile [sopra l’asse] dipintovi il Salvatore. 18.’112
Could these items be a Young Blessing Christ and a Christ, as Salvator Mundi?
Hamilton’s Salvator
Another, highly significant, possibility is to be found in a contemporary aristocratic collection in London: a painting belonging, not to Buckingham or Arundel as one might expect, but to James, 3rd Marquis of Hamilton (1606–49), a Scots nobleman created 1st Duke of Hamilton by Charles I at Oxford on 12 April 1643 and, like the king, executed by Parliament in 1649.
When we consider the enormous scale and importance of Hamilton’s collection, its sources, and its close ties to the Royal Collection, it is unsurprising that it may have contained a painting of such stature.113 The largest collection of Venetian art assembled outside Venice during the seventeenth century, today it forms the mainstay of the collection of old masters belonging to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Although Hamilton purchased a great part of it en bloc in 1638, he built on the foundation of an earlier collection inherited from his father. James, 2nd Marquis of Hamilton (1589–25), travelled to Italy in 1610; his collection featured works by Venetian artists, probably acquired via the agency of Sir Henry Wotton, British ambassador to the Venetian Republic. On 14 March 1625, twelve days after his father’s death, Hamilton warranted the delivery of a group of forty-three paintings to ‘my Lord Duke’, surely the Duke of Buckingham, whose niece, Lady Mary Feilding (1613–38), was Hamilton’s wife.114 Five of the paintings listed on this occasion were later recorded in the Buckingham collection, so it appears that the acquisitive Buckingham lost no time in choosing his pick.115 The 1625 list does not feature a Salvator Mundi by the hand of Leonardo, but it is not clear whether it represents the entirety of the collection assembled before that date.
Hamilton’s brother-in-law, Basil Feilding, 2nd Earl of Denbigh (c. 1608–75), was instrumental in the exponential enlargement of the collection in the late 1630s. As Charles I’s ambassador in Venice, Feilding was well placed to exploit the declining economy, which was bringing the great patrician collections to market. Via the Flemish artist-dealer Nicolas Régnier (c. 1588–1667) he purchased the plum pictures belonging to the Venetian procurator Michele Priuli (d. 1638), including Raphael’s St Margaret.116 Simultaneously, he was negotiating the purchase of the Venetian merchant Bartolomeo della Nave’s celebrated collection.117 It had been offered to Charles I in 1634, who instructed the agent William Petty (?1585–1639) to deal on behalf of a syndicate of the king and three aristocrats, who would throw dice for lots.118 This plan seems to have foundered, and in 1637 the king, his appetite rekindled by sight of an inventory of the collection, appointed Hamilton to negotiate the purchase. The arrangement between Hamilton and the king for the financing of the purchase is opaque. Hamilton wrote to Feilding in July 1637 that the king was so extremely taken with the collection, he had persuaded him to buy all of it, furnishing him with some money. Hamilton had undertaken to bring the entire collection to England, out of which the king was to make a choice and repay the marquis (presumably the difference between his ‘deposit’ and the final sum).119 Meanwhile Petty was still in pursuit of the collection on behalf of Lord Arundel, Hamilton’s rival not only in art collecting but also for the king’s favour.120 The surviving correspondence affords a glimpse of Hamilton’s single-mindedness in the aggrandizement of his collection, under the close purview of the king.121 The deal was done at a price of 15,500 ducats and the paintings were shipped aboard the Jonathan, arriving in London on 17 October 1638. The king then informed Hamilton, via the Earl of Morton, that he would waive customs duty on their arrival to London—provided the marquis gave him first choice of the pictures.122
Just as the sale was concluded in Italy, Hamilton’s wife died; this meant that her family must forfeit occupation of their Whitehall residence, Wallingford House; the Dowager Duchess of Buckingham had leased the house to her niece alone and now rescinded the tenancy. On 23 June 1638, the king granted Hamilton the lease of the manor of Chelsea and the manor house known as Chelsea Place, which was adjoined to the original manor house, Beaufort House, formerly the home of Sir Thomas More, and subsequently of Queen Catherine Parr. This seems to have been occupied when Hamilton took up the lease of the manor, so the marquis embarked on an ambitious renovation and building project to modernize and enlarge Chelsea Place, creating two new galleries for the display of his greatly enlarged art collection.123 A plan of the ground floor in 1706 gives some sense of its grandeur.124 Rosalind Marshall describes a two-storey building where ‘ten first-floor windows looked out over a terrace to the Thames, and at the back the gardens stretched down to an orchard. The main rooms were on the ground floor, round the Fountain Court, and leading from these gardens was a great gallery where the Marquis hung his notable collection of Italian paintings. Upstairs were three large drawing rooms extending the entire length of the south front, and no fewer than seventeen bedchambers overlooked the gardens at the back. Above that were garrets and “summer rooms”, and the accounts also mention a banqueting house, which may well have been a separate structure.’125 It is tempting to imagine that the three large drawing rooms running the length of the south elevation acted as an interconnected gallery.
Chelsea Place was to become, however briefly, a showcase for the Hamilton collection, advertising the purchase of one of the greatest Italian cabinets, comparable to the king’s acquisition of the Gonzaga collection in 1628. A bill of 1638 details the movements of furnishings and paintings between Hampton Court, Greenwich, Chelsea, and Wallingford House, and the installation of tapestries and pictures.126
Until recently, it was presumed that the della Nave paintings were never put on display after their arrival in England, due to the outbreak of the Civil War shortly afterwards.127 There has been an assumption that that the paintings remained in their crates before they were shipped to the Low Countries against the sequestration of the Hamilton estates in 1649; most of the collection was purchased shortly afterwards by the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm from William, 2nd Duke of Hamilton.128 This scenario would explain the apparent absence of della Nave paintings in the Contractors’ inventory, despite the king’s emphatic request to have the choice of the collection once it arrived in London.
Jeremy Wood’s publication of an inventory of Hamilton’s paintings in the upper and lower galleries and the closet at Chelsea Place, c. 1638–41, lays this theory to rest.129 Here were the principal purchases of 1638. The most prestigious paintings were placed in the lower gallery; the majority derived from the della Nave collection. It is in this location that we find—hanging alongside Raphael’s St Margaret, fragments of Antonello da Messina’s San Cassiano altarpiece, and Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds—‘Christ: with a globe in his hande done by Leonardus Vinsett’.130
What this document establishes is that Hamilton owned a Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which was displayed in the lower gallery at Chelsea Place after October 1638 and before May 1643 (when the collection was packed up for intended transport to Scotland, but leave to remove the ‘Pictures and Trunks of Marquis Hambleten’ from London was denied by Parliament).131
The Leonardo painting does not appear in any of the subsequent inventories of, or relating to, the Hamilton collection known to this author. There is a Salvator Mundi who holds a globe in his hand—attributed to Raphael—in a list of 384 paintings belonging to the 1st duke, dating from after February 1638: ‘31. A picture of Our Saviour, with a globe in his hand; of Raphael.’132 The attribution to Raphael is added in a different hand: Hamilton’s.133 Since this inventory apparently post-dates the Chelsea Place inventory it is possible that the attribution to Leonardo was revoked, or that the ‘Raphael’ Salvator was an entirely different item.
There are a number of entries that describe a head of Christ, however imprecisely, in the inventories of the Hamilton collection, c. 1638–c. 1649. The typology of some of these items is recognisable—a ‘Christ leaning on a globe’ (a Salvator Mundi), a ‘Christ’s head on a white cloth’ (a Veil of Veronica or Sudarium), a ‘head of Christ, holding up two fingers’ (a Blessing Christ), ‘Christ’s head with a crown of thorns’ (an Ecce Homo).134 Attributions for such items could be conjectured from a concordance of the entries. The dating of the inventories is not yet precisely determined, and the descriptions of the items vary in the level of detail provided by each compiler. Nor has it been possible to examine all of the documentation relating to the Hamilton collection since it is not fully accessible at the time of writing. The status and location of the crated goods between 1643 and 1649 is unclear because of Hamilton’s ill fortunes during the Civil War and the access to and oversight of his affairs by a number of interested parties.
The complexities of the ownership of the leasehold of the manor of Chelsea during the second half of the 1640s occasioned by the Duke of Hamilton’s insolvency, his loans to the Crown, imprisonment, the sequestration of his estates, and the vagaries of favour and ill-favour with the king mean that the ownership of the crates of paintings is opaque after 1646.
With the financial difficulties of the Civil War, the duke was having to borrow large sums of money, and at some point in the 1640’s he made the house over to his cousin and brother-in-law John, Earl of Belhaven. In 1646 the manor was sized by the commission for the compounding of delinquents, who put it up for sale, but Lord Belhaven explained that the property had been assigned to him in recognition of the substantial loans he had made to the duke, and the sale was stopped. The matter was now complicated by the fact that Lord Belhaven decided to disappear altogether, allowing everyone but his closest relations to believe that he was dead. Before he did so, he assigned his claim to Chelsea to the 1st duke’s gentleman Andrew Cole. Cole and the duke’s leading creditors, John Jeffs, Thomas Manley, James Gould and others, were permitted by the commission to buy the manor back so that they might sell it again and pay off all the creditors with the proceeds. They accordingly purchased the property and in 1657, having first of all paid off the mortgage, re-sold the manor to Charles Cheyne. This was done with the consent of the duke’s daughter Lady Susanna, who was in effect one of the creditors because her dowry had not been paid.135
As such, intelligence of the fate of this painting is bedevilled by loose ends and imponderables. Hopefully, in future, documentation will emerge to clarify the fortune of the Hamilton Salvator attributed to Leonardo. That said, the significance—and singularity—of this inventory entry cannot be underestimated. It appears to be the earliest documentation of a Salvator Mundi (whether child, adolescent, or adult) attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. As we have seen, there is no explicit identification of such an item in the sources associated with the French royal collection, nor has any early Italian documentation come to light beyond the ambiguous Salaì list.136
From the Hamilton inventory of c. 1638–41, we perceive a Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo in the immediate vicinity of Whitehall, at a time when the collecting proclivities of the king and queen were mature and when their campaigns of refurbishment and building across the royal estates were well advanced. In fact, at a date exactly corresponding to the furnishing of the Queen’s House at Greenwich, c. 1639, the heyday—and the swansong—of their art collecting. We know that Charles I made a habit of visiting many of the aristocratic collections in Whitehall, and further afield, for instance, the Arundel collection and Van Dyck’s cabinet of paintings by/after Titian at Blackfriars.137 We have heard the king’s emphatically stated wish to have the choice of the coveted della Nave paintings after their arrival in London, and observed the precedent of gift exchange between the king and Hamilton as late as 1646.138 We note Hamilton’s strenuous efforts to fit out the new galleries at Chelsea in a manner befitting their prestigious contents, but also perhaps as a location worthy to receive the king and queen. It may not be whimsical to surmise that the Salvator Mundi recorded at Greenwich in 1649 was chosen, perhaps by Henrietta-Maria herself, from the lower gallery at Chelsea Place between 1638 and 1641, passing into the Royal Collection.
A number of items that appear in the Hamilton lists of c. 1638–43 seem to have ‘twins’ in the contemporaneous Royal Collection, for instance, Titian’s Gypsy Madonna and Franciabigio’s Portrait of Jacopo Cennini.139 The status and movements of these paintings between the collections of Charles I, Hamilton, Charles II, and Archduke Leopold are obscure, but the records of the Royal Collection in 1639 and 1649 suggest the migration of objects from the Hamilton collection to the Royal Collection, some of which are not returned to the Crown at the Restoration, but are exported from Britain. It may be that paintings originally belonging to Hamilton found their way into the Habsburg collections via a more circuitous route than previously thought. This idea must remain speculative, however, against the emergence of further documentation.140
The della Nave collection, newly reconstructed by Jeremy Wood from the Hamilton-Feilding documentation, betrays no sign of a Salvator Mundi by the hand of Leonardo.141 The question remains: from where did Hamilton acquire this painting? He inherited the collections, not only of his father, but also of his father-in-law, William Feilding 1st Earl of Denbigh, and he acquired works of art from other Stuart courtiers.142 He also bought from dealers in Venice such as Régnier, who sourced paintings from across Italy. As a consequence, Hamilton acquired paintings of storied Venetian provenance: Bembo, della Nave, Priuli. That Leonardo’s painting may have found its way into one such collection is unremarkable, still, the possibility opens a new vista on the reception of the typology of Leonardo’s Salvator in sixteenth-century Venice.