Part III
Chapter 7
A World of Rare Paintings
On 15 February 1649, shortly after the execution of King Charles I, the antiquarian and diarist John Evelyn visited Whitehall Palace where he was shown around by the Flemish painter Jan van Belcamp, former Keeper of the King’s Pictures, and a master copyist. Having opportunistically switched sides, Belcamp was now one of the Trustees to the Commissioners of the Sale of the late king’s sequestrated goods. He steered Evelyn towards a copy of Titian’s Jupiter and Antiope (Pardo Venus). The king’s prized original, a gift from Philip IV of Spain on the occasion of Charles’ (ultimately broken) betrothal to the Spanish Infanta in 1623, would be sold at Somerset House on 8 November 1649.1 Evelyn lamented the devastation brought about by years of civil war and its culmination in the violent dismemberment of the king and his collection: ‘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 & his Loyall Subjects’.2
Just over ten years later, the Interregnum brought to a sudden close, Evelyn ecstatically narrated the triumphant entry of the restored Charles II into London on 29 May 1660.3 Following the order of a hastily-assembled House of Lords committee for the seizure of Crown property in private hands, some of Charles I’s sequestered paintings were reinstated at Whitehall, where Charles II sought to recreate his father’s legendary art collection and the seductive lustre of monarchy.4 Evelyn was again eyewitness to events; on 18 June 1660 he recorded that ‘Goods that had ben pillag’d from White-hall during the Rebellion, now daily brought in & restor’d upon proclamation: as plate, Hangings, Pictures etc.’5 During November and December 1660 he made many visits to the restored royal court to view ‘his Majesties Cabinet and Closset of rarities’, listing many of the items that caught his eye; small precious objects and natural curiosities captured his interest more than paintings.6
Between these two historical points, separated by a decade, a painting of Christ, as Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci exited and re-entered the Royal Collection, apparently unnoticed by the sharp-eyed Evelyn, and very nearly, but not quite, by posterity. Thanks to the bureaucracy of the Commonwealth Sale trustees and the creditors through whose hands it passed, it is possible to track the painting from one of Queen Henrietta Maria’s closets at Greenwich in 1649, identifying it without doubt as the same painting restored to the Royal Collection in 1660 and listed in the king’s closet at Whitehall around six years later. The hazardous journey related by the documentary evidence is presented here comprehensively for the first time.7
That much is ‘straightforward’. Complicating the view, however, is another contender, another Christ by the hand of Leonardo, ambiguously described in the documentation of the Commonwealth Sale of 1649 and whose whereabouts during the Interregnum and Restoration are opaque. As we shall see, one of these paintings is branded with the cipher of Charles I; the other bears no physical vestige of its royal provenance.
Plotting the Paper Trail
Plotting the movements of a small object made of wood and paint over the course of half a millennium is inescapably problematic. In fact, only one work by Leonardo—the Last Supper—has a continuous history, for reasons that are self-explanatory. Leonardo’s paintings migrated across national boundaries during his own lifetime; it is presumed that more than one painting accompanied him to the French royal court in 1516. The intestacy papers of his assistant and heir Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno (better known by his nickname ‘Salaì’), who suffered a violent death in Milan in 1524, contain a list of a dozen paintings, unattributed to an artist but assumed to be by Leonardo on account of the unusually high monetary value accorded to them.8 Janice Shell was first—in 1991—to observe that one item on the list—‘Uno Cristo in modo de uno Dio Padre’ (Christ in the mode of God the Father)—suggests a Salvator Mundi.9
Modern scholars have proposed that paintings corresponding to the descriptions of items in the intestacy papers were present in the French royal collection during the earlier part of the sixteenth century, suggesting that François I (reigned 1515–47) purchased them directly or indirectly from Salaì’s heirs.10 Others caution that it is possible a payment made by the royal treasurer Jean Grolier to Salaì in June 1518, for unidentified paintings sold to the king, indicates they could have entered the collection at an earlier date.11 Martin Kemp has pointed out that the Grolier payment need not have related to paintings by Leonardo at all; Salaì may have been exploiting his network in Italy to supplement his income with some dealing in pictures on the side, a common, if overlooked, practice of Renaissance and early modern artists.12 All three theories are plausible, but unless further documentation comes to light, they must remain speculative.
Identifying paintings by Leonardo in the French royal collection during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a complex procedure, frustrated by lack of documentation, ambiguous descriptions, and the copies performed by Leonardo’s immediate retinue and by successive generations of French court artists. As such, precisely how paintings later attributed to Leonardo entered the French royal collection has not yet been fully established. Whether the Salvator Mundi in the collection of Queen Henrietta Maria, c.1630s–1649, is identifiable with a painting previously recorded in the French royal collection, will be considered in detail in Chapter 10. Henrietta Maria of France was the youngest sister of Louis XIII and brought an extensive trousseau to England on her marriage in 1625.
If we accept the premise that the paintings recorded in the 1525 extensa of Salaì’s estate were indeed by the hand of Leonardo and that some of them returned to France shortly after his death, the case of the St John the Baptist (Louvre INV. 775)—sent to England in 1630, returning again to France at an unknown date, and later sold by Cardinal Mazarin to Louis XIV—precisely illustrates the peregrinations of Leonardo’s works, which, because of the fame and prestige of their maker, continue to exchange ownership over the duration of their lifetime.13 For this reason, traces and records of his paintings are not restricted to one geographical location and must be sought far and wide. The deficiencies of description and attribution in the surviving documentation, and the many copies and variants produced by generations of copyists in different locations, compound the complexity. Add to this the existence of three distinct typologies of a Leonardesque Salvator—as a child, as an adolescent, and as an adult—all of which could conform to the generic description of a ‘Christ who holds in his hand a globe’, and the possibilities multiply exponentially.
That signals a further problem in tracking the movements of this most elusive painting: it belonged to the small coterie of ‘hypothetical Leonardos’ related to lost works, copies, cartoons, or extant drawings. To borrow an infamous phrase, it was a ‘known unknown’. Frank Zöllner, in the 2011 edition of his catalogue raisonné of Leonardo’s drawings and paintings, lists the (adult type) Salvator Mundi alongside the Medusa and the Madonna with a Cat as compositions mentioned in early sources, now presumed to be either lost prototypes or variants produced by near-contemporary followers, or paintings after drawings or cartoons by Leonardo.14 Until the worldwide publication of the ‘Cook’ painting in July of the same year, the modern assumption that Leonardo had generated a prototype of the composition was sustained by three sets of evidence. There is the intriguing item described in Salaì’s inventory, discussed above; and there are the two drapery drawings by Leonardo, iterations of which are found in a group of French and Italian copies and variants of a Salvator Mundi type attributed, during the early modern period, to Leonardo (see Plate 8, and Figs. 1.12 & 5.5). A comprehensive analysis of the earliest copies would provide useful data, but the fact that copies were themselves copied and adapted at an early date complicates any assumption about the location of Leonardo’s painting during the sixteenth century.
It is important to understand that it was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that Leonardo’s name was formally attached to a specific Salvator Mundi typography. Despite the presence in the Salaì document of a painting of Christ, in the Manner of God the Father, we hear nothing of any such painting from Vasari (1550/1568) or Lomazzo (1584), nor is there any reference to it in the earliest manuscripts sources, such as Antonio de’ Beatis (1517),15 Antonio Billi (c. 1518),16 Paolo Giovio (c. 1527),17 the ‘Anonimo Gaddiano (c. 1540),18 and Sabba da Castliglione (c. 1546).19 The first explicit assertion of Leonardo’s generation of a Salvator Mundi was published in 1650 by the Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar (1607–77). On the legend of his etching of a blessing Christ, he stated: ‘Leonardo painted it. Wenceslaus Hollar made it in etching, from the original, in the year 1650’ [‘Leonardus da Vinci pinxit, Wenceslaus Hollar fecit Aqua forti, secundum Originale, Ao 1650’]20 (Fig. 1.3).
Before the outbreak of the Civil War, Hollar worked in the train of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (1585–1646)—a prolific collector of Leonardo’s manuscripts and graphic works—arriving in London in December 1636. He may have been employed in a minor capacity by the royal household some time between the end of the 1630s and 1644, when he left England for Antwerp. At the Restoration, impoverished, he petitioned Charles II for patronage, with limited success. In 1669, the king appointed him to accompany Arundel’s grandson, Henry Howard, to Tangier, where he made scenographic surveys of the coastline.21 Very few of Hollar’s prints bear a royal privilege; despite vigorous attempts to court royal favour, he remained an outsider, and we should not assume he enjoyed unfettered access to the Royal Collection before the war.22 His etching claims a Salvator Mundi from the hand of Leonardo. As we will see, it may provide vital corroboration of the painting’s presence in the British Royal Collection during the seventeenth century.
After the emergence of a putative prototype of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi in 2005, the initial search for documentation was focused on seventeenth-century England. The painting’s existence at some point in history was conjectured partly from the number of sixteenth-century French and Italian copies it had apparently prompted, pointing, unremarkably, to its location in France or Italy during that period.23 However, the vague confluence of British connections—the two related Leonardo drawings in the British Royal Collection since at least the end of the seventeenth century, Hollar’s interactions with Arundel and the Restoration court of Charles II, and the Cook painting’s location in a British collection at the end of the nineteenth century—suggested a reasonable prospect.
What follows in this chapter is an outline of the key evidence documenting the presence of these two paintings in the Royal Collection c. 1630s–1660s. The subsequent chapters address questions arising from the paper trail left by Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi in England, France, and Italy, such as the availability of manuscripts, drawings, and paintings by Leonardo in seventeenth-century England, the Interregnum art market, Wenceslaus Hollar’s contact with Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, and what is known of the fate of the two paintings after the reign of Charles II.
This section of the book investigates the broader context of collecting and connoisseurship in the vicinity of the Stuart courts, highlighting the esotericism of a taste for Leonardo in seventeenth-century England. That phenomenon links the two, seemingly unrelated, aspects of this study: (1) the search for a small, and elusive, Renaissance painting, and (2) the trajectory and mechanisms of the seventeenth-century reception of Leonardo da Vinci in Britain, a subject that has received barely any scholarly notice, despite the prodigious volume of reading matter devoted to this colossal figure over the past 450 years.24 What happened in seventeenth-century England forms a component of the ‘invention’ of Leonardo as a cultural entity.25 The historical identification of works by Leonardo from early documentation powerfully affects our modern conception of his holograph, yet this aspect of scholarship is often relegated to a subordinate rank. In the course of this research it has become clear that the current understanding of the ownership of some of the most important objects of Leonardo’s corpus is fragmentary, and, in some cases, insecure.
Backdrop
For the benefit of the reader unfamiliar with the intricacies of seventeenth-century British history, it will be useful to sketch the bare bones of the political background. This was an era characterized by civil insurrection, profound social change, and the political fortunes of the Stuart monarchy. And while, in a general sense, the appreciation of art did not impact ordinary lives, the royal art collection—and its works by Leonardo—became embroiled in political conflict affecting the entire society.
On the accession of the first Stuart king, James VI and I, in 1603 the crowns of England, Scotland, and Ireland were united for the first time; the period is bookended by the Act of Union of 1707 during the reign of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch. James I had instilled in his son an unfailing belief in the divine right of kings; Charles I’s absolutist ambitions would shape his ill-fated reign. Dismissal of Parliament, imposition of Personal Rule, and harsh taxation prompted civil war during the 1640s, culminating in the public execution of the king in 1649 by the Commonwealth regime led by Oliver Cromwell, who assumed the role of Lord Protector.26 In the febrile climate, the king’s compulsive spending on art and luxury was seen as profligacy, symptomatic of his autocracy and disregard for political process, and evidence of Roman Catholic sympathies. Much of the royal art collection was French or Italian in origin; with subject matter ranging from the overtly Catholic to the mildly erotic, it fuelled Puritanical suspicion and hostility. Iconoclasm broke out during the wars of the 1640s; funerary monuments were destroyed or melted down, sculptures of the royal family were removed and smashed, and Rubens’ altarpiece for the chapel of Somerset House was reportedly thrown into the river Thames.27
After the execution of Charles I, one of the first acts of the Commonwealth administration was to gather together, from all the royal residences throughout the country, the art collection, belongings, and furnishings of the late king and his family. These were catalogued at Somerset House and sold between 1649 and 1654 to recompense creditors of the Crown.28 The Interregnum lasted until 1660 when General George Monck stage-managed the restoration of Charles II. Pausing only to purchase seventy-two paintings from the dealer William Frizell at Breda, Charles II crossed from Holland to England.29 Restoration England saw a period of relative economic and political stability until James II’s perceived Catholic sympathies led to his enforced exile and the English Revolution of 1688. A short political vacuum preceded the accession of King William and Queen Mary, whose reign saw the expansion of the lottery and the auction as vehicles for the sale of art to the burgeoning middle class.
Behind these wider events stand narratives of interactions with works of art, generating correspondence, sales catalogues, bills of sale, eyewitness accounts, and inventories of collections, all providing insights into contemporary processes of appraisal. Since such documentation occasionally records pieces attributed to Leonardo and his followers, they also provide insights into the reception and understanding of his works in seventeenth-century England.
Prime Mover
The ‘prime mover’ of seventeenth-century English collecting was King Charles I (1600–1649), described by Sir Peter Paul Rubens as the greatest art lover among princes.30 In his formative years, he was alert to the art collections of his mother, Queen Anne of Denmark (1574–1619), and late brother Henry, Prince of Wales (1594–1612), and those of prominent courtiers, notably Thomas Howard (1585–1646) and Aletheia Talbot (c. 1590–1654), the Earl and Countess of Arundel, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628).31 Charles’s consort, Queen Henrietta Maria (1609–69), as the daughter of the French queen, Marie de Médicis (1573–1642), was well versed in the collecting, commissioning, and display of art by the time of her marriage in 1625.32
This rarefied circle formed the early nucleus of a cluster of courtiers that would come to be known as the Whitehall Group; deeply acquisitive, their collecting practices were characterized by intense competition, the purchase of foreign collections en bloc, and a discursive connoisseurship.33 Of these, Charles I, Henrietta Maria, and the Arundels were the greatest enthusiasts of Leonardo, to judge by accounts of their protracted attempts to acquire his drawings, paintings, and manuscripts.34 The Duke of Buckingham, whose usual modus operandi was the block purchase of prestigious collections, singled out the Mona Lisa while he was resident at Versailles in 1625, a measure of the painting’s fame.35 While a number of works attributed to, or after, Leonardo da Vinci feature in inventories of Caroline aristocrats, as we shall see, only one conforms to the appearance of a Salvator Mundi. This painting belonged to James, 3rd Marquis and later 1st Duke of Hamilton (1606–49), whose spectacular collection was aggrandized at a similar pitch and contemporaneously to the Royal Collection.
The earliest inventories of the Royal Collection reveal a panel painting of a Salvator Mundi; these records date from the Tudor kings Henry VIII and Edward VI. The 1542 inventory of Westminster Palace itemizes ‘oone table with the picture of our saviour blessing with his oone hand and holding thother upon the worlde’.36 This item reappears in the posthumous inventory of the royal households of Henry VIII (1547, completed 1549).37 As is customary in English inventories written before the late sixteenth century, the name of the artist is omitted, but it is possible to discern from the remarkably comprehensive description of the subject matter that this Blessing Christ is the type that rests a hand on a globe, and therefore does not correspond to the typographies of the Leonardesque Salvators, who hold a globe in the proper left hand. The fate of this unidentified painting is not ascertained.
The incipient Stuart art collection can be credited partly to the proclivities of Henry, Prince of Wales, whose premature death in 1612 at the age of eighteen incited in his younger brother Charles the desire to take up the mantle of princely collecting with renewed, almost neurotic, zeal.38 While the author Henry Peacham (1578–c.1644), secretary and tutor to the Arundel household, celebrated seven prominent English noblemen as mentors to Prince Henry, his mother, Queen Anne, is today becoming recognized as an important and influential collector in her own right.39 However, as far as is known, despite its importance, no inventory was made of Prince Henry’s picture gallery at St James’ Palace during the prince’s lifetime or after his death. When the auditor Richard Connock drew up the first draft of the inventory of the late prince’s possessions, he summarily recorded ‘pictures, sylven vessel and furniture of his house with other things of great worth not here valewed.’40 The prince’s reputed preference for ‘very fine pictures, ancient and modern, the large part brought out of Venice’, and the quality of the very few pictures of Henrician provenance identifiable today, suggest an active collector possessing a honed eye.41
In contrast, there are several extant inventories of the belongings of Queen Anne, taken during her lifetime and after her death.42 Those known as the ‘Glynde Place MSS’ were made at the instance of the queen’s removal from Oatlands Palace to another of her residences on several occasions between 1611 and 1618; a number of these manuscripts are partly in the hand of Sir John Trevor, appointed keeper of Oatlands on 31 August 1603.43 Three manuscript copies exist of an inventory of the queen’s household goods at Denmark House; it was commissioned by James I on the occasion of her death in April 1619.44 This inventory lists a quantity of paintings; their subject matter is given, but the names of artists are not.
Inventories and written records of Jacobean art collections, even royal ones, are extremely rare and frustratingly devoid of detail. Generally drawn up by clerks more accustomed to accounting for fine furnishings and silken drapery than fine art, they tend to be perfunctory and do not dwell on intricate matters of authenticity or attribution. In any case, none of the documentation associated with the Jacobean Royal Collection indicates the presence of a Salvator Mundi.
In sharp contrast, documentation of the collections of Charles I and Henrietta Maria is astonishingly precise and erudite, and stands comparison to even the most sophisticated early seventeenth-century Italian inventories and sale catalogues. Abraham van der Doort, the Dutch Keeper of the Cabinet Room of St James’ Palace, and latterly Surveyor of the Royal Pictures ‘at Whitehall and our other houses of resort’, was the compiler of the most scholarly English catalogue of the early modern period.45 Four manuscript volumes of inventories of parts of the Royal Collection attest to his strenuous efforts to create a systematized and orderly record of the works of art belonging to Charles I and his family between 1625 and 1639.46 The late Sir Oliver Millar, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, accomplished their transformation into a coherent ‘virtual’ catalogue of the collection of Charles I, which was published by the Walpole Society.47 To this ‘catalogue’ (hereafter Van der Doort’s ‘Register’) Millar appended a transcript of a shorter inventory of the Royal Collection written in an anonymous English hand, possibly that of the courtier, connoisseur, and miniature painter Sir James Palmer.48 This list was compiled c. 1640, perhaps after Van der Doort’s suicide in May of that year.49
Van der Doort meticulously documented the presence of Leonardo’s St John the Baptist (Paris, Louvre) in the collection of Charles I, together with two other works, A Holy Family with Saints John, Anne and Catherine, and a Flora or Columbine that he attributed to Bernardino Luini or to the school of Leonardo, but no painting corresponding to the description of a Salvator Mundi appears in the catalogues he made of the king’s collection during the fifteen years of its assembly.
Provenance research is an imprecise science, and, while it is customary to construct a systematic search, proceeding from document to document in strictly chronological order, the process is sometimes short-circuited by a fortuitous discovery, as indeed it was in this case. An initial survey of inventories taken of the Royal Collection in late 1649, after the execution of Charles I and the sequestration of his property, (hereafter the ‘Contractors’ Inventory’) disclosed a number of works attributed to Leonardo. One item seemed promising, but the description was frustratingly laconic: ‘a peece of Christ done by Leonardo’.50 The unpublished and little-examined inventory of the collection of King Charles II, compiled by Thomas or William Chiffinch during the mid-1660s and preserved in the office of the Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, York House, St James Palace—’An Inventory of all his Maties Pictures in White-Hall’ and ‘An Inventory of all his Maties Pictures in Hampton Court’, c. 1666–7—produced a revelation. Examination of this manuscript established the presence of an item instantly recognizable as a Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: listed ‘In the King’s Closet’ is ‘No. 311. Leonard de Vince. Or Savior wth a gloabe in one hand & holding up ye other’51 (Fig. 7.1).
Fig. 7.1MS Inventory of Charles II’s pictures etc., at Whitehall and Hampton Court: ‘An Inventory of all his Maties Pictures in White-Hall’ & ‘An Inventory of all his Maties Pictures in Hampton Court’, c. 1666–7, folio 19. RCIN 1112575, Office of the Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, St James’s Palace.
This discovery was transformative, unmistakably establishing the presence of a Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo in the Royal Collection during the seventeenth century. It was now possible to work backwards from the 1660s, tracing paintings broadly corresponding to that description in documents of the immediately preceding period, whose desultory nature had caused them to be disregarded without the corroboration of the graphic reportage of the Charles II inventory. Remarkably, considering the historical context of violent political upheaval and regime change, it was possible to track the imprint of this item as it exited and re-entered the Royal Collection over a period of a decade or so.
Revisiting the inventories compiled by the Contractors of the sale of the late king’s goods, and intermediary documents drawn up during the Interregnum and at the Restoration in 1660, it was possible to trace a direct line between the ‘peece of Christ by Leonardo’ and the ‘Or Savior wth a gloabe in one hand & holding up ye other’. The entry in the Contractors’ Inventory reads in full: ‘[49] A peece of Christ done by Leonardo at—30-00-00. Sold to Stone a/o 23 Oct. 1651.’52 In other words, the painting was sold to Capt. John Stone (the youngest son of the late Nicholas Stone, master mason to King Charles I) and other members of a dividend on 23 October 1651. During the course of the Commonwealth Sale, distressed creditors of the late king were divided into fourteen syndicates, or dividends, headed by individuals deemed reliable by the trustees of the sale. John Stone was elected leader of the Sixth Dividend, and on 23 October 1651 he received goods to the value of £4,998 9s. 6d. on behalf of his syndicate.53
Opportunely, two manuscript inventories describing the goods in the possession of the Sixth Dividend survive. The first, preserved in the British Library, is a copy of a (lost) original list of the items disbursed to Stone on 23 October 1651.54 It is associated with Daniel Taylour, one of the members of the Sixth Dividend, who may have lent the late king sums of money.55 It is written in a seventeenth-century hand, presumably Taylour’s, and confirms the total value of the dividend as £4,998 9s. 6d. The items are not numbered consecutively, but repeat their original numbers in the Contractors’ Inventory. Internal evidence dates the inventory to c. 1653 (see Appendix). It is evident that this list was copied from another, which was probably itself a copy; errors of transcription are apparent from comparison with the corresponding entries in the Contractors’ Inventory. With one exception, none of the paintings in this inventory are attributed to an artist, not even Titian’s (now lost) series of Roman Emperors, some of the most desirable and famous paintings in the Commonwealth Sale. The authorship of the works listed can be ascertained only by concordance with their corresponding entries in the Contractors’ Inventory, where the subject matter, and sometimes the artist, is stated; items are numbered and annotated with the name of the recipient (Stone) and the date of disbursement is given. It would therefore be possible in theory to reconstruct the attributions from the Contractors’ Inventory, but this is not necessary in the case of the Leonardo: the only picture exempt from anonymity in the entire inventory is: ‘It. 49 A pict of Christ by Lianare—030 00 00.’56 It is clear from the agreement of the number, price, and subject matter, that this item is identical to the painting of Christ attributed in the Contractors’ Inventory to Leonardo, despite the clerk’s misspelling of his name (Fig. 7.2).
Fig. 7.2‘Divident the 6th’, fol. 24v., Additional MS 37682, British Library.
The second inventory relating to the Sixth Dividend is a return, or ‘discovery’, submitted by Capt. John Stone on 14 May 1660 in accordance with an Act of Parliament of 23 March 1660 for the restitution to the Crown of royal property sequestrated and sold by the Commonwealth.57 On 9 May the House of Lords ordered the appointment of a committee to administer the return of the late king’s goods to the Crown,58 and on 12 May they ordered that ‘all persons that have any of the King’s Goods, Jewels, or Pictures, shall bring them in to the Committee for the King’s Goods, &c. within seven days after the date.’59 Stone lost no time in submitting an inventory of the remainder of the dividend under his administration, and was granted an order to seize the goods from the members of the syndicate or their heirs. (Fig. 7.3)
Fig. 7.3Return of Capt. John Stone, fol. 81, MS HL/PO/JO/10/1/285, Parliamentary Archives, London.
Although he belonged to a family of significant architects and artists, and would probably have professed a degree of expertise about Renaissance paintings, Stone’s ‘Discovery Inventory’ is similarly silent on the subject of authorship, with, again, the single exception of the Leonardo painting: ‘a peece of Christ by Leonard’. This inventory was made from an earlier (lost) list, common to the Taylour Inventory, but many items are omitted, probably to avoid drawing attention to articles that had been sold on during the Interregnum, most notably Titian’s Roman Emperors. Unlike the inflationary returns of other ‘discoverers’, the monetary values given by Stone are identical to the prices at the point of disbursement in 1651, recorded in the Contractors’ Inventory, and those in the c.1653 Taylour Inventory.60
It is therefore possible to say with certainty that the ‘piece of Christ by Leonardo’ described in the Contractors’ Inventory, the Taylour Inventory, and Stone’s ‘Discovery Inventory’, were one and the same painting. 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. This attenuated paper trail is unique among paintings returned to the Crown at the Restoration, and cannot be overstressed. While other paintings detailed in ‘discovery inventories’ of 1660 can be reconciled with their entries in the 1649 Contractors’ Inventory, no interim inventory of the property of any of the other thirteen dividends is known. The unbroken provenance of the Salvator Mundi during the Interregnum is very fortuitous and a vital factor in matching the item in the Contractors’ Inventory with the painting described in Charles II’s collection.
The Contractors’ Inventory lists Leonardo’s painting among ‘The Pictures wc. were. in both ye Clossetts at Grenewch..’ That is, it was in one of the private cabinets at Greenwich, either at the now-demolished Tudor palace or at the Queen’s House, the building originally designed by Inigo Jones for Queen Anne of Denmark and completed by him in the 1630s as a casino for Henrietta Maria. The properties at Greenwich were in the queen’s jointure, and during this period the new and old buildings were not distinguished from each other in documents, being referred to as ‘Grenewich’. This is important since, by inference, the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci recorded in King Charles II’s Whitehall cabinet in the 1660s had once belonged to his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria.
The ‘Stone Painting’ and the ‘Bass Painting’
So far the paper trail has been obliging, but now we must turn to a second Christ, potentially a Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo and recorded in the 1649 inventory of the late king’s goods. This item introduces a new level of difficulty because of the ambiguity of the description, and because, unlike Capt. Stone’s Salvator, this painting was not returned to the Crown at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The Contractors appraised a group of paintings at St James’s Palace on 16 February 1650, among which they recorded ‘123. A lords figure. In halfe. at £ 80’; other contemporary copies of the inventory add the name of Leonardo da Vinci.61 Many of the items in this list are prefixed ‘R’; it is not fully established what this letter means; if it indicates works reserved for the state [the Reserved Goods], then why are the buyers and prices of many of these items recorded?62 This matter is untangled in Chapter 14. The syntax of ‘lords figure’—if it refers to Christ—sounds prosaic to the point of blasphemy according to the religious context of the time; could this be a portrait of a nobleman? The iconography of the item is elucidated in a list drawn up in 1650 on behalf of Cardinal Mazarin by M. de Croullé, secretary and chargé d’affaires to the French ambassador, M. Pierre de Bellièvre, Président de Grignon. The description of this painting in Croullé’s list suggests a half-length Christ, perhaps an Ecce Homo or Salvator Mundi type: ‘123. Christ en bust, par Léonard … 0-80.63 The numbering and price correspond exactly to the ‘lords figure’ itemized in Duplicate H, Letter I or J of the Contractors’ Inventory. Shortly afterwards the French ambassador was expelled from England and Mazarin’s acquisitiveness was frustrated. On 19 December 1651, the ‘lords figure’/‘Christ en bust’ was sold for £80 to Major Edward Bass in his capacity as leader of the Ninth Dividend of Crown creditors.64
We know for certain that one of these paintings was a Salvator Mundi and that it had once belonged to Charles I, because a panel painting of a Leonardesque Young Christ, as Salvator Mundi is branded on the verso with his CR cipher. This is the painting now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, which is attributed to Giampietrino65 (Plate 10).
The reconstruction of the paperwork, summarized above, generates a chorus of questions. If these paintings—let’s call them the ‘Stone painting’ and the ‘Bass painting’—were recorded among the late king’s goods in 1649 and 1651, then why are they both absent from Van der Doort’s Register, compiled c. 1625–39? How and when did they enter the British Royal Collection? How does Hamilton’s Salvator Mundi fit into the scene? Could there be three paintings of Christ as Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo in the vicinity of the Caroline court? Is it possible that two of these paintings are identical with each other: did the Hamilton painting find its way into the Royal Collection? Can any of these paintings be identified as copies made at the Stuart court? What is known of the collecting of works by Leonardo by the king, queen, and the extended ‘Whitehall Group’? What is the relationship of the paintings described in these inventories to Wenceslaus Hollar’s etching? Where and when did Hollar view and copy the Salvator Mundi? Why did he attribute the composition to Leonardo da Vinci? What was Hollar’s access to the paintings in the Royal Collection before the Interregnum? Exactly where were these three paintings during the Interregnum? Which of these three paintings was the Pushkin Giampietrino? What became of Hamilton’s painting? What became of Bass’s painting after 1651? What became of Stone’s painting after the reign of Charles II?
The following chapters tackle these questions in the context of historical documentation of collecting and dealing in works attributed to Leonardo and his school in seventeenth-century European networks. Joining the dots between England and the Continental mainland allows a renovated view of the history of significant objects, but some of the questions must remain unanswered until more evidence comes to light. This leads me to some remarks addressed to the reader expecting crystal clarity about the generation, movements, and locations of the Salvator Mundi over its five-hundred-year lifetime. Gaps and ambiguities in the provenance history are candidly disclosed here for reasons of academic rigour and to provide an audit of the processes involved in the appraisal of documentary evidence, but also to show how, in general, provenance histories are fallible, malleable, and subject to radical revision on the appearance of new material. The modern expectation of a clear-cut, complete, and unassailable provenance history is not only unrealistic, but it fails to admit the possibility of reconsideration of evidence. As I have said, provenance research is not merely an account of ownership, a secondary field of art history, it impacts our identification of what is deemed to be of cultural value and what is not; what is deemed to have been created by such-and-such an artist, and what was not. There is, in my opinion, insufficient emphasis on documentation in histories of art. Documents get us closer to facts—and further from speculation, but the interpretation of documentation requires attentiveness to historical context.