Chapter 11

‘A Pitiable Sight’

Invisible Things

Leonardo’s canonical Christ as Salvator Mundi is a painting that has escaped notice for much of its existence. The copies and variants after the painting attest to an intermittent visibility, but since the origins and generation of these reiterations is not yet ascertained, their relationship to a ‘prime’ version, and to each other, has not been established. Robert Simon’s dogged research has now identified around twenty-six versions; Heydenreich identified only seven. In the absence of a systematic analysis of all the known versions, we cannot determine how many were made during the sixteenth century, besides the Naples, Ganay, Detroit, and Warsaw paintings. The circulation of Hollar’s 1650 etching undoubtedly contributed to the early modern identification of this composition with Leonardo.

An object of modest size, designed for private devotion, its inconspicuousness is logical, however, at several points in its history the painting was hidden in plain sight. It seems that the first public ‘exhibition’ of the painting was at Somerset House in 1649, where confiscated Crown property was exposed to sale by the trustees of the Commonwealth Sale; the Salvator Mundi may have been there from late 1649 until its sale at the close of 1651. There is a certain symmetry between the apparent indifference of well-informed and well-placed buyers in 1650s London, such as Sir Balthasar Gerbier, and the disregard of eminent twentieth-century Leonardo scholars such as Wilhelm Suida and Kenneth Clark, who himself passed up the opportunity to purchase the painting in 1958.¹ The little painting has manifested a condition of near-obscurity across its five-hundred-year lifespan.

Preserved from Puritans, 1641–9

The invisibility of the painting during the reign of Charles I can be explained in part by its preservation in the king or queen’s private apartments. We deduce the presence of a Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo at the Caroline court solely from its inclusion in the 1649 inventory. By whatever route the Salvator Mundi arrived into the Royal Collection, it was not documented. The devotional nature of the painting suggests it may have been placed in a place of worship. Paintings installed in the private and public chapels of the royal palaces were not usually included in the royal inventories; for instance, an altarpiece by Rubens, given to Charles I by the Duke of Buckingham, was not recorded by Van der Doort, despite its prominence at the Caroline court.

Inigo Jones built a Catholic chapel for the queen at Somerset House in Whitehall, which featured a high altar designed by François Dieussart and the aforementioned great altarpiece of the Crucifixion by Rubens.² Begun in May 1630, just before the birth of the future Charles II, the chapel was officially opened at the end of 1636. Catholic court artists, including Orazio Gentileschi, who was interred there in 1639, and Sir Anthony van Dyck, whose brother Theodoor was the queen’s chaplain, were among the worshippers. The new chapel at Somerset House was therefore a site of public devotion, albeit within the precinct of a royal palace. In contrast, access to the queen’s closets at Greenwich was highly restricted. The assignment of the ‘peece of Christ’ to this remote location ultimately ensured its survival, since it escaped the violent campaigns of Puritanical iconoclasm that occurred during the 1640s. On 30 March 1643, Rubens’s altarpiece was defaced, torn down, and thrown into the River Thames by a commission of Members of Parliament aided by a troupe of soldiers, who were appointed to destroy the contents of the queen’s chapel.³ The destruction extended to religious sculptures and liturgical books, and the chapel’s large ceiling painting of the Assumption of the Virgin by the English artists Matthew Goodricke and Thomas de Critz (1607–53) was also pulled down and cut into pieces. The danger of theft and pillage must have been anticipated, because, before the queen’s exile in 1642 ‘all the vessels of [the Somerset House] chapel’ were removed and sent abroad; unfortunately, the ship on which they were transported sank in a storm.⁴ During the destruction of March 1643, the queen’s closet at Somerset House was broken into and ransacked.⁵

In August of that year, a parliamentary bill legislated for the ‘utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition or Idolatry’ in public locations, stipulating that:

all crucifixes, crosses, and all images of any one or more persons of the Trinity, or of the Virgin Mary, and all other images and pictures of saints or superstitious inscriptions in or upon all and every one of the said churches or chapels, or other places of public prayer … shall before the said first day of November [1643] be taken away and defaced.⁶

The proclamation included an important qualification—monuments to ‘any king, prince or nobleman’ in any place of public worship were excluded from the order. The wording of the proclamation signals that images of noteworthy persons in religious settings were to be preserved from destruction; it also stipulated that the excision of religious imagery was restricted to places of public worship. As Jerry Brotton has observed, this ‘effectively placed the royal estate, as well as the collections of royalists like Arundel, Buckingham and Hamilton, beyond the committee’s reach’.⁷ The frenzy of destruction in spring 1643, and the violation of the closet at Somerset House, may have been a critical factor in Hamilton’s decision to remove his paintings from the walls of his properties and have them packed in crates against shipping to Scotland. It is important to remember that Hamilton occupied a set of rooms at Whitehall, and rooms at Hampton Court, which were decorated with paintings and tapestries. The list of crates does not specify their locations. The pertinence of this point will become clear.

Puritanical iconoclasm occurred sporadically throughout the decade of the Civil War.⁸ Within a month of the king’s execution on 30 January 1649, Oliver Cromwell warned that civic unrest (rather than organized iconoclasm) meant that books, statues, and pictures formerly belonging to the Crown estate, and now in the possession of the Commonwealth, were in danger of being stolen or damaged;⁹ they should be catalogued and protected against the exigencies of the pending sale of the late king’s goods. The Salvator Mundi in the queen’s closet at Greenwich was hidden from public view during the Civil Wars of the 1640s; this factor, and the bureaucratic efficacy of the trustees of the Commonwealth Sale, combined to preserve it for posterity.

A World of Rare Paintings

John Evelyn’s diary entries of February 1649 confirm the looting of the estates of the king and his courtiers. Perusing the goods of London merchants, he frequently came across the spoils:

Web, at the Exchange has some rare things in miniature of Breugls, also Puti in 12 Squares, that were plunderd from Sir James Palmer … Bellcan shewd us an excellent Copy of his Majesties Venus Sleeping, & the Satyre, with other figures; for now they had plunderd sold and dissipated a world of rare Paintings of the Kings and his Loyall Subjects: After all Sir William Ducy shewd me some excellent things in miniature, & in Oyle of Holbeins Sir Tho: Mores head, & an whole figure of Ed: the Sixt: which were certainly his Majesties.¹⁰

By late March, Parliament was resolved to legislate for the liquidation of Crown property; the bill passed quickly through three readings, and on 4 July 1649 ‘An Act for the sale of the goods and personal estate of the late King, Queen and Prince’ was passed.¹¹ A period of intense activity followed during the summer and autumn, as eleven trustees appointed by Parliament hurriedly expedited the task of locating, appraising, recording, and securing thousands of items at the many royal residences in London and its environs.¹²

Among their number was Jan van Belcamp, former keeper of the King’s Pictures; on 16 January 1651, the Council of State ordered the appointment of Sir Balthazar Gerbier as a trustee. The appraisal of pictures and statuary required specialist expertise, and the two former royal servants evinced no qualms about reneging on old loyalties, nor did they waste an opportunity to monetize the new state of affairs. Belcamp earmarked one of the most expensive paintings of the sale: Leonardo da Vinci’s St John the Baptist. Dying shortly afterwards, four paintings belonging to Belcamp would be given into the hands of his executors: Derick Hooste, elder of the Dutch Reformed Church of London; Timotheus Cruso, a Walloon cloth merchant and deacon of the Dutch Reformed Church at Austin Friars; and Anthonie Tierens, a wealthy Dutch textile merchant and member of the same congregation.¹³ Besides the St John,¹⁴ there was a painting of a male nude by Titian,¹⁵ a Funeral of the Emperor Otto, attributed to Giulio Romano,¹⁶ and a Venus and Adonis by Peter Oliver after Titian.¹⁷ The value of the four paintings amounted to £275. The antiquarian Richard Symonds saw Belcamp’s paintings shortly afterwards with a merchant in St Swithin’s Lane, presumably either Tierens or Cruso, although he did not mention the Leonardo, focusing instead on the Giulio Romano and the miniature copy after Titian.¹⁸

Perhaps the St John already been purchased; it may have been later in the hands of the Cologne banker and art dealer Everard Jabach, who sold the painting to Louis XIV in 1662.¹⁹ According to a letter of 27 October 1653 from Antoine de Bordeaux-Neufville (afterwards French ambassador to the Protectorate) to Cardinal Mazarin, a French merchant called Oudancourt or Adamcourt was in London to buy works of art.²⁰ Bordeaux said that Oudancourt was a friend or associate of the collector Gilles Renard (c. 1591–1670), for whom he purchased two suites of tapestry and also paintings, including Correggio’s Allegory of the Virtues.²¹ Renard sold the Correggio to Jacques de Souvré, prior of France of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, who then sold it to Jabach; these transactions illustrate the wider commerce in the former Stuart art collection in seventeenth-century France.²² Although the St John was apparently in the possession of Jabach by 1662, this does not mean that he purchased it directly from Oudancourt. Further research into the documentation of the collections of Renard and de Souvré, and indeed its previous owner Liancourt, may shed more light on the seventeenth-century French history of this painting.

Gerbier, having been instrumental in bringing some of the most prestigious Renaissance paintings to the Caroline court, was now in a prime position to capitalize on his inside knowledge and international contacts. During 1650 he dealt in many of the royal paintings exposed to auction, acting as intermediary for Philip IV’s agent, the Spanish ambassador Don Alonso de Cárdenas. In 1651, presumably to convince the council of the fidelity of his abrupt political conversion, Gerbier published a vitriolic attack on the late king: The None Such Charles his Character. In a breathtakingly double-dealing passage, he accused the late king of putting collection above country: ‘Yet nevertheless in those exigent times, when moneys, the soul and sinews of War were so scarce, yet great sums were squandered away on braveries and vanities; On old rotten pictures, on broken nosed Marble.’²³ Gerbier’s words are especially mendacious in view of his picturesque boast to the Duke of Buckingham many years before: ‘Our pictures, if they were to be sold a century after our death, would sell for good cash, and for three times more than they cost. I wish I could only live a century, if they were sold, to be able to laugh at these facetious folk who say it is money cast away for baubles and shadows.’²⁴

During September and October 1649, the Contractors of the Sale stripped the royal palaces of their luxurious furnishings. Carts laden pell-mell with Flemish tapestries, classical statuary, finely wrought silks, precious table ornaments, and Renaissance paintings trundled into Somerset House in Whitehall, where they disgorged their cargo. The former hub of the queen’s court, despoiled by troops during the Civil Wars of the 1640s, the palace was now repurposed as a vast saleroom. On 7 September carts containing the contents of the manor of Greenwich arrived at Somerset House, where they were given into the hands of Henry Browne.²⁵ The following day Browne made an inventory of the Greenwich pictures.²⁶ Eighty-one paintings came from the two closets and the galleries, among them pictures attributed to Correggio, Raphael, Veronese, Romano, Holbein, Mantegna, and Carracci, as well as two attributed to Leonardo. Another thirty-five were from the queen’s gallery; these were portraits of the royal family and some of their courtiers. Over the following days Browne viewed and appraised paintings from the Bear Gallery and Privy Lodgings at Whitehall; on 13 September, his inventory was countersigned by six trustees.²⁷ Jan van Belcamp’s signature appears; as the only trustee with expertise in the valuation of works of art, and privileged access to Van der Doort’s written records of the Royal Collection, he must have been indispensable to the task. This may explain Browne’s careful attributions, mentioned above. Two paintings from Greenwich—the Titian and the Romano—were assigned to Belcamp. On 16 February 1650 the Contractors appraised ‘Severall Pictures’ at St James’s Palace. The 281 lots amounted to £1,136 and were signed off on March 8 by John Foche, Anthony Mildmay, and David Powell; it is not known whether Belcamp or Browne appraised these paintings, among which two paintings attributed to Leonardo were recorded.²⁸

The sequestered paintings were amassed in a first-floor gallery of Somerset palace; by late October 1649 a few pieces had been sold. The Dutch diplomat Lodewijk Huygens visited the sale much later, in January 1652; his journal entry provides important insights into the dismal and crowded display of the paintings, their poor condition, and devaluation:

We went to Somerset House again and saw a number of beautiful things, among them the most costly tapestries I ever saw. One room was valued at £300. In that same room were many antique and modern statues, although nearly all damaged. There was also a unicorn cane as thick as an arm, with a large crystal knob. In the gallery above, we saw a very large number of beautiful paintings, but all so badly cared for and so dusty that it was a pitiable sight. There was an admirable portrait by Van Dyck of King Charles sitting on a white horse, which could be obtained for £150. Five or six Titians, however, surpassed everything there, and yet these also could be purchased at a very reasonable price.²⁹

It is clear from this description that the canonical Salvator Mundi, a small painting, would have been inconspicuous in this setting; the paintings mentioned by Huygens are large. Among the earliest purchasers at the sale were artists and dealers, some of whom had intimate knowledge of the Royal Collection, and evinced an interest in Leonardo. Nicholas and Jerome Lanier purchased paintings in Italy for Charles I; Nicholas assembled one of the earliest collections of drawings in England.³⁰ Two grotesque heads after Leonardo, bearing the collection mark of Lanier, are pasted into the Mariette Album;³¹ Lely reputedly purchased the originals of the drawings in the album from the Arundel Collection.³² Remigius van Leemput was probably an early owner of the Codex Huygens, which his widow sold in London in 1690 to Lodewijk’s elder brother Constantijn.³³ The Laniers, Lely, and van Leemput purchased paintings from the closets and galleries of Greenwich in April and May 1650.³⁴ Given their demonstrable interest in Leonardo, it is puzzling that apparently they took no notice of the ‘peece of Christ’.

Someone who did notice the painting, however, was M. de Croullé, secretary and chargé d’affaires to the French ambassador, M. Pierre de Bellièvre, Président de Grignon. Instructed by Cardinal Mazarin to send lists of paintings and tapestries of interest, Croullé visited Somerset House, where in May 1650 he observed the Spanish ambassador, Don Alonso de Cardenás, who ‘asked to be shown all the tapestries and then spent a long time in viewing the paintings about which he had some notes taken down, and which he has already purchased many.’³⁵ Croullé listed 209 paintings and fifteen suites of tapestry; it is evident that he adhered to a catalogue supplied by the stewards of the sale; his list of paintings is divided into sublists, which correspond exactly to sections of the sale inventory.³⁶ For instance, the Greenwich pictures appear in the Contractors’ Duplicate H, Letter A; Croullé’s list of twenty items from this location is headed ‘Lettre A’. The fourth painting listed is: ‘[49] Une pierre par Léonard de Chiest 0- 30’.³⁷ An inkblot explains the misreading of the final word, and the French transcriber consistently misunderstood the seventeenth-century English lower case ‘c’, hence ‘peece’ becomes ‘pierre’ throughout the document. Nonetheless, the Letter, inventory number, attribution, and price confirm that this item is identical to the painting of Christ by Leonardo that would be disbursed to Capt. John Stone on 23 October 1651.

On the execution of Charles I, and the instatement of the Commonwealth administration, the French ambassador no longer occupied an official position, since the Kingdom of England, and the royal court, was now defunct. He was recalled to France, leaving Croullé in diplomatic limbo; this meant access to lines of credit, and to export licenses, was increasingly problematic; ultimately, on 25 December 1650, the Council of State ordered him to leave England. From January 1651 until December 1652, diplomatic relations between England and France were officially suspended. Antoine de Bordeaux-Neufville arrived in England at the end of 1652 as an agent, but because of the escalating naval conflict between England and France, the French protection of the surviving British royal family, the civil wars of the Fronde, and political factionalism in France, he was not received as the French ambassador to the Commonwealth until March 1654.³⁸

After this date Mazarin relied on Bordeaux for the purchase of paintings and tapestry, although by now the majority of the goods were in the hands of private owners, and inexperience in these matters placed him at a disadvantage to his rival, the Spanish ambassador Cárdenas, who had spent the past few years plucking the peaches of the former royal collection.³⁹ Croullé’s inventory, where three paintings attributed to Leonardo appear, was now merely a wish list. Bordeaux negotiated with merchants and dividend leaders in the autumn of 1653, most frequently Edward Bass (head of three dividends of creditors), David Murray (head of the Second Dividend), Robert Houghton (head of the Fifth Dividend), Edmund Harrison (head of the Eleventh Dividend), and the painter Emmanuel de Critz (head of three dividends). From them, he purchased paintings by Giulio Romano, Correggio, Raphael, and Van Dyck.

Leonardo’s St John the Baptist, which had featured on Croullé’s original list, had since been allocated to Jan van Belcamp, who died in 1651. The painting may have been acquired by Oudancourt on behalf of Jabach (or perhaps Perruchot, as we will see) between October 1651 and 1653, however new evidence suggests it may have been reserved by the state, passing into the collection of Charles II (see Chapter 14). The ‘peece of Christ’, as we know, was in the possession of John Stone’s Sixth Dividend from October 1651. The third Leonardo on Croullé’s list was extracted from ‘Letter E’, its number, attribution, and price correspond exactly to an item described in Duplicate H, Letter I or J, of the master inventory: ‘123. A lords figure. in halfe. At 80-’. The sale Contractors’ contemporary copies of Duplicate H add: ‘and Leonardo da Vinci’.⁴⁰ It was disbursed to Edward Bass and his dividend on 19 December 1651. While the English description of this painting implies a portrait of an aristocratic man, Croullé’s list suggests otherwise: ‘123. Christ en bust, par Léonard … 0-80.’ Clearly, the French agent saw the painting in person and identified the subject matter; the Contractors’ entry should have read ‘Our lord’s figure in half’ [modernized].

From this, it seems clear that there were two half-length paintings of Christ attributed to Leonardo in the Commonwealth Sale, one valued at £80, the other at £30. Stone’s painting, valued at £30, was returned to the Royal Collection; Bass’s painting, valued at £80, was not; nor does it appear in any of the ‘discovery’ inventories of 1660. The question arises: which painting—the ‘peece of Christ/Our Saviour with a globe in one hand and holding up the other’ or the ‘lords figure in half/Bust of Christ’—was the canonic Salvator Mundi and which the Young Christ as Salvator Mundi, the painting now in the Pushkin Museum, branded with the cipher of Charles I? This matter is opaque. Close examination of the panel, and the documentation of the cataloguing history of this painting, may provide some clarification.

The painters Nicholas Lanier and his brother Clement, Remigius van Leemput, and Jean Baptiste Gaspars made many purchases in March, April, and May 1650. Whether former royal retainers or newly arrived from abroad, artists capitalized on the opportunities afforded by the sale. They acted as agents or art advisors, independent dealers, copyists, and, in the case of Jan van Belcamp and Emmanuel de Critz, fulfilled administrative roles on behalf of the Commissioners of the Sale, or the creditors of the deposed royal family. This occasionally put them in the orbit of the untethered Caroline Leonardos; Belcamp, in life and death, was contingent to the fate of the St John the Baptist; Wenceslaus Hollar, as we will see, had a close encounter with the Salvator Mundi in 1650, and Emmanuel de Critz and Perruchot became owners of the Virgin and Child.

Perruchot and the King’s Leonardos

The Contractors’ inventory lists two works as copies after Leonardo: a Virgin and Child and a work described as Joanna, Queen of Naples.⁴¹ A Virgin and Child described as a copy after Leonardo was recorded in the Arundel inventory of 1641; could this be the same work, absorbed into the Royal Collection? The painting, which had previously hung at Somerset House, implying it was formerly the property of Henrietta Maria, was sold to Emmanuel de Critz for £15.⁴² Son of the late John de Critz the Elder, Serjeant Painter to the King, Emmanuel was the leader of the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth dividends of Crown creditors. By 1652 his house in Austin Friars, a district of London populated by Dutch immigrants, had become a cramped showroom of former royal goods. Richard Symonds, who had spent the years of civil war touring the cultural highlights of Italy, saw ‘three rooms full of the King’s pictures’, noting some descriptions and prices.⁴³ He did not mention the Virgin and Child after Leonardo.

A hint about the subsequent fate of this painting is contained in one of the first illustrated histories of art, Tabellae selectae ac explicatae, published in Padua in 1691—of conspicuous interest since it was written by a woman, although it is now overlooked.⁴⁴ The book’s author was Charlotte Catherine Patin, daughter of the exiled French physician and numismatist Charles Patin. It includes an essay about a painting of a Virgin and Child, attributed to Leonardo, which is illustrated by an etching of Joseph Justers (Fig. 11.1). According to Charlotte, her father purchased the painting in Paris from Perruchot’s heirs, who related that the painting had once belonged to King Charles I.⁴⁵ It is perfectly feasible that the painting could have found its way from Emmanuel de Critz to Perruchot by means of one of the French agents in London during the 1650s, maybe the fleet-footed Oudancourt, who perhaps acquired the St John the Baptist in nearby St Swithin’s Lane. Among the paintings listed in Perruchot’s posthumous inventory of c. 1660 was a Virgin attributed to Leonardo, considered ‘original’, and priced at 400 livres.⁴⁶ The painting was transparently advertised as a copy after Leonardo by the Contractors of the Commonwealth Sale; the upgrade in attribution was probably made by Perruchot or his heirs.

Fig. 11.1Joseph Juster after (then attr.) Leonardo da Vinci, Jesus ludens in gremio sanctissimae matris lilium tenes, engraving, c. 1691, British Museum, 1859,0709.2441.

Charlotte Patin certainly considered the painting an authentic work by Leonardo; the legend on Justers’s etching states: ‘Opus absolutissimum Leonardi Vincij pro Christianissimo Rege Francisco I’. In the accompanying essay, she narrated her version of the history of the painting: it was painted for Francis I while Leonardo was in his service and was thereafter at Fontainebleau until the French king gave it to Henry VIII of England at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, receiving in exchange a painting by Hans Holbein. Patin said that the painting remained in the English Royal Collection until it was sold after the execution of Charles I. There is an echo in this narrative of Van der Doort’s documented provenance of the St John the Baptist, which, he reported, was acquired from Liancourt in exchange for a Portrait of Erasmus by Holbein and a Madonna, Child and St John by Titian. If Oudancourt purchased the St John the Baptist in London, Perruchot, as the leading Parisian art dealer of the day, must have known about the transaction.

Undoubtedly, he knew the earlier history of the St John too. Liancourt was surely a client of Perruchot, whose son-in-law Vignon and his associate Quarterton had supplied the duke with paintings from Rome in 1630, as we have seen. In 1644, Liancourt himself advised John Evelyn that he should visit Perruchot’s substantial premises on the rue des Fontaines. The conflation of the two provenances, and the embroidered narrative of the exchange between two kings, conveys the shrewd intelligence gathering of Perruchot, and the wily salesmanship of his heirs. It also returns us to the question of the intermediate provenance of the St John before its acquisition by Jabach. Is it possible that Perruchot owned this painting immediately after the Commonwealth Sale? Could he have been involved in the original sale of the piece to Liancourt?

The composition of the Patin Virgin and Child as it appears in the etching by Joseph Juster corresponds to a painting in the Courtauld Gallery, London, attributed to Giampietrino, which formed part of the Gambier-Parry Bequest⁴⁷ (Fig. 11.2). Is it possible that the copy after Leonardo in the Arundel collection in 1641, the picture sold from the Royal Collection between 1649 and 1653, the ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ prized by Charlotte Patin in 1691, and the painting attributed to Giampietrino at the Courtauld, were one and the same?

Fig. 11.2Attributed to Giampietrino, Virgin and Child, Courtauld Institute.

The painting described in the Contractors’ inventory as Joanna, Queen of Naples, after Leonardo da Vinci, was, as we have seen, a version of the Raphael/Giulio Romano, Portrait of Doña Isabel de Requesens (Fig. 10.3). It had previously hung at Hampton Court and was disbursed to the former royal brewer Robert Houghton and his dividend in January 1652, who apparently sold it to Perruchot, via an agent, possibly Oudancourt. Correspondence dated 1 February 1658 between Perruchot and the Antwerp art dealer Matthijs Musson shows that he owned a painting of this description. In December 1654 Perruchot had placed a group of important paintings with a Brussels merchant by the name of Postel. By 1658 Postel had succeeded in selling only three items; Perruchot, in exasperation, sent a priced list of twenty-one paintings to Musson, urging him to view the paintings in Brussels and, if possible, to buy some pieces.⁴⁸ He assured Musson that all the paintings were true originals, except a Venus and Adonis attributed to Titian, and a Queen of Sicily by Leonardo, which were only ‘retouches’ of these masters. Despite that, the memorandum logs ‘Une reyne de Cicille de Leonnart d’Avincy’, priced at 500 livres.⁴⁹