Chapter 8
#universalgenius
Today, when a Google search for ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ finds 225,000,000 results in 0.52 seconds and his name is synonymous with #universalgenius on Twitter, it is hard to imagine that he was once a relatively obscure Florentine artist. After all, according to Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo was an international celebrity in his own lifetime. Citizens of Florence queued for two days to catch a glimpse of his cartoon of the Virgin and Child with St Anne and the infant St John the Baptist. One French king tried in vain to wrest his Last Supper from its Milanese mortar; another supposedly cradled the dying artist in an imperial embrace.1 Today, Leonardo is a—perhaps the—canonical artist; his painting, the Mona Lisa, is the world’s most famous work of art. It is startling, therefore, to discover that Leonardo was little known in England throughout the seventeenth century, even within connoisseurial circles.2 It is apparent that the ‘idea’ of Leonardo, first formulated by Vasari, evolved in different locations, and in different ways, during the first centuries following the artist’s death in 1519.3 It will be important to establish how the understanding and appreciation of Leonardo’s paintings, drawings, and notebooks evolved in Britain during the lifetime of Charles I, and how the king and his courtiers were directly implicated in shaping the reception of the artist.
The fortuna of Leonardo da Vinci in seventeenth-century England has received surprisingly limited attention, despite the prodigious volume of reading matter devoted to this colossal figure over the past 450 years.4 The Windsor drawings, the Codex Arundel, the Codex Huygens, the St John the Baptist, and the Salvator Mundi were brought into England during the seventeenth century; the Codex Leicester arrived at the beginning of the eighteenth century.5 English collecting is central to the early history of the dispersal of the collection of Leonardo’s drawings and notebooks assembled by Leone and Pompeo Leoni.6 A number of paintings and drawings attributed to Leonardo or his followers were recorded in English collections during the seventeenth century. By the time of the execution of Charles I in 1649, twelve such works were recorded in the Royal Collection, testifying to a deep interest in the artist. England is, clearly, a significant location for the earliest responses to Leonardo as an artist and theorist. The lack of wider awareness of the artist in seventeenth-century England is, therefore, all the more intriguing. From the sparse evidence of contemporary literary sources, manuscript inventories, correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, we will consider how works attributed to Leonardo were first encountered and understood at the Caroline court, how the early reception relates to the wider ‘invention’ of Leonardo as a cultural entity, and whether a distinctly ‘English version’ of Leonardo can be detected.
Passing the Baton
The accession of James VI and I in 1603 to the unified thrones of Scotland, England, and Ireland heralded a new era. Elderly and unmarried, Elizabeth I refrained from naming her successor until the last; now, in her stead was a ready-made royal family: the king and his consort, Anne of Denmark; Prince Henry, b.1594; Princess Elizabeth, b.1596; and Prince Charles, b.1600. In the nine-year-old heir apparent rested the hopes of the nation. James exercised particular care to raise Henry as an ideal Renaissance prince—vigorously martial, yet skilled in the liberal arts. In a work addressed to his son, Basilikon Doron (1599; 1603), the monarch propounded aspects of northern humanism drawn from pedagogical literature such as Thomas Elyot’s Boke Named the Gouernour (1531).7 Anne of Denmark stimulated in Henry an appreciation for the visual arts, and after his investiture in 1610 as Prince of Wales, he was the recipient of diplomatic gifts of paintings, books and manuscripts, antique coins, medals and gems, and statuary, notably the fifteen bronze statuettes and figurines by Pietro Tacca, pupil of Giambologna, sent by Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.8 One of these, the Prancing Horse, poignantly symbolizes the point of transition between Henry’s embryonic collection and his younger brother Charles’s. Abraham van der Doort, cataloguing the item in the 1630s, recalled how Charles had given it to his brother as he lay dying of typhoid in November 1612: ‘a little horse being one of the no: of 18en Wch your Maty did send for to Richmond in the last sicknes time and there yor Maty gave it wth your owne hands to the Prince.’9
According to Henry Peacham, at the time of Prince Henry’s death a small group of noblemen—Salisbury, Arundel, Worcester, Southampton, Pembroke, Suffolk, and Northampton—was at the centre of art collecting at the Jacobean court.10 Of these, Arundel is most prominent as a collector of Leonardo’s works, but the rapid ascent at court of George Villiers between 1614 and 1623, when he was invested Duke of Buckingham, enabled the formation of a vast collection of Renaissance art, undertaken at great expense and at breakneck speed. Arundel and Buckingham vied for the favour of Charles, Prince of Wales, and their rivalry was auxiliary to the earliest British experiences of the works of Leonardo, as we shall see.
Persons of Interest
The earliest British campaigns of collecting paintings, drawings, and manuscripts by Leonardo were centred on the courts of the Stuart kings James VI and I (reigned 1603–25) and Charles I (reigned 1625–49). And, while Jacobean travellers to Italy, Spain, and France almost certainly saw works of Leonardo in public locations and private hands, there exists no record of any such event until 1623.11 This is the date of the first documented encounter between a Briton and a work by Leonardo da Vinci. The significance of this event cannot be overstated, particularly since the Briton in question was the twenty-three-year-old Charles, Prince of Wales, and the location of the encounter was the private house in Madrid of an eccentric Spanish antiquarian, Juan de Espina y Velasco. So, the primary episode in the earliest English experience of Leonardo occurred on foreign soil, and the future king was its chief protagonist.
Arundel spearheaded early pursuits of Leonardo’s drawings and manuscripts, as is well known; Buckingham’s appetite for the iconic Mona Lisa is less familiar, but highly significant as an indication of the early reception of Leonardo, and his most famous painting. Art collecting was not only a consuming personal passion and expression of high rank, it was also an instrument of political preferment and international relations, the donation and exchange of art objects being an expeditious currency of diplomacy and favour at court. Royal and aristocratic collectors were aided by an international network of diplomats, agents, artist-dealers, and cognoscenti. The multiple roles of Stuart diplomats serve to obscure their engagement in the international trade in art, but the significance of these individuals in the transmission of intelligence about the locations of works of art, and the shifting receptions of artists, should not be underestimated.12 Cultural authority is often ascribed to the most conspicuous individuals, the princes and the peers, yet it is often those who elude the limelight who are instrumental in the diffusion of emerging ideas. This chapter will highlight the roles of Richard Haydocke (1569/70–c. 1642), influential in the earliest English literary response to Leonardo, and Sir Balthazar Gerbier (1592–1663), as an overlooked conduit of the wider international reputation of Leonardo into England. A close reading of key episodes during the 1620s and 1630s will establish how literary sources underpinned both Charles and his courtiers’ experience of the artist’s works and the emerging English reception of Leonardo.
Englishing Lomazzo
The earliest reception of Leonardo in England dates to the late sixteenth century when the courtier Sir John Harington (c. 1560–1612) encouraged Richard Haydocke, a physician, to undertake a translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (Milan, 1584).13 Harington was engaged in the translation of Italian literature; he published an English translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in 1591.14 Lomazzo’s trattato was extremely scarce in England. Until Thomas Brett, of All Souls College, Oxford, gave a clean copy to Haydocke, he relied on a tattered and incomplete volume.15 The connection with Oxford was underlined in the frontispiece of Haydocke’s book, which gives prominence to the armorial crests of the University of Oxford and of New College, where he was educated. The dedication signalled the anchoring of the enterprise in Thomas Bodley’s ambition to rebuild the university library, formalized in 1598, and the objective to extend access to scholarly texts beyond private libraries—‘So now, since it hath pleased God to moove your harte to the erecting and restoring of this worthie Pambiblion, or Temple to all the Muses; as I holde it the parte of every studious minde to offer up the picture of his private Muse in carefulliest written books, to this Shrine’, a characterization strongly reminiscent of Lomazzo’s ‘temple of painting’, itself based on Giulio Camillo’s theatre of memory.16 It was through Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo (Oxford, 1598), that awareness of Leonardo’s corpus of drawings and writings began to spread in England at the turn of the seventeenth century, albeit within a very restricted readership.
Close reading of Haydocke’s translation reveals two other literary sources besides Lomazzo: Ludovico Ariosto and Giorgio Vasari; from these he gleaned additional intelligence about Leonardo’s standing. He made reference to Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso, which followed the 1532 edition where Ariosto added a verse praising contemporary artists, including Leonardo.17 Harington’s text conveyed to the reader a sense of the rarity and intellectualism of Leonardo’s works, and the esteem in which he was held abroad: ‘Leonard Vinci was a Florentine, a goodly man of person, and so excellent in the Idea or the conceived forme of his worke, that though he could finish but few workes, yet those he did had great admiration’.18 Haydocke stressed the version of Leonardo as pictor doctus, the learned painter: ‘so great a Philosopher, Architect, Painter, and Carver (being as well able to teach as to worke)’.19
‘The Skillful pen of George Vasarie’
Biographical details gleaned from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives pepper Haydocke’s prose; he owned one of the very few copies then in England, which he donated to the Bodleian Library in 1601, together with a copy of Sebastiano Serlio’s Architettura, and a copy of his own translation of Lomazzo’s Trattato.20 This raises the issue of the balance of influence between Lomazzo and Vasari in the earliest English conceptions of Leonardo. Lomazzo’s version of Leonardo conveys the Milanese and Spanish receptions, emphasizing the scholarly nature of the drawings and writings, and relates the artist’s experimental and empirical methodologies; Vasari’s focuses on the Florentine and the French royal reception, privileging the artist’s social status, and his paintings. Both Italian texts were vanishingly rare in sixteenth-century England, but Haydocke’s translation dramatically increased the reach of Lomazzo to an English readership. The DNA of the conception of Leonardo espoused by the earliest English sources descends from Lomazzo; over the course of the seventeenth century, anecdotes drawn from Vasari began to supplant and colour that version, as will become apparent.
Translations and Transmission
Although Haydocke translated only the first five books of the Trattato, this provided a relatively comprehensive representation of Lomazzo’s text in English at the turn of the seventeenth century. Despite the influence and popularity of Vasari’s Vite on the Continent, the text was virtually unavailable in Britain. It was not entirely unknown, however; the Vite was introduced to a British readership by the Elizabethan mathematician John Dee in 1570, in his most influential text, the Preface to Henry Billingsley’s English translation of Euclid’s Elements: ‘How, that Picture and Sculpture, are Sisters germaine: and both, right profitable, in a Commonwealth, and of Sculpture, as well as of Picture, excellent Artificers have written great books in Commendation. Witness I take, of Georgio Vasari, Pittore Aretino; of Pomponius Gauricus and other.’21 During the first decades of the seventeenth century, Vasari’s text was absorbed piecemeal via Haydocke, who also made reference to the often-overlooked technical treatise affixed to the Lives.
The French Huguenot Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, a friend of Rubens and physician to the courts of James I and Charles I, owned a French translation of Vasari’s technical treatise that had been undertaken c. 1580s by his father Louis de Mayerne, probably with a view to publication in Geneva.22 De Mayerne was deeply embedded in the artistic culture of early seventeenth-century London, compiling scraps of information about the technology of art in a manuscript titled ‘Pictoria scultoria et quae subalternarum artium’, perhaps in emulation of Vasari.23 He was the intended reader of the first version of Edward Norgate’s manuscript treatise Miniatura, or the Art of Limning, c. 1627–8; the second version, c. 1648–9, was dedicated to Henry Howard, Earl of Arundel.24 He made several references to Vasari’s ‘Prolixe History, delle Vite de piu excellenti Pittori’, recommending the ‘Imitation of those Italian Masters in this Art soe much and soe often celebrated by the Virtuosi’; Leonardo was one of the artists he mentioned.25 Norgate acted as an agent in the purchase of drawing and paintings for Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and Charles I, often corresponding with Gerbier and Rubens. He probably acquired books abroad, since in his will of 1649 he bequeathed works in Latin, French, and Italian to his son Thomas.26
Henry Peacham (c. 1576–c. 1643), tutor to Lord Arundel’s three eldest sons, stated in 1622 that he knew of only two copies of Vasari’s Vite in London: one belonged to Inigo Jones (one volume of which is preserved in the library of Worcester College, Oxford), and the other to Dr John Mountford, Prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral.27 Peacham said that he had seen neither of those copies and relied instead on Karel van Mander’s Het Schilder-Boeck (1604) as a proxy for Vasari’s text.28 Peacham recounted eighteen lives of famous Italian painters, including Masaccio, Alberti, and Ghirlandaio, but considered that Raphael eclipsed all preceding artists: ‘I overpasse for brevity sake, many other excellent and famous Artists of Italy, equalling the former, as Bellino, Pollaiuoli, Botticello, Verrocchio, Andreas Mantegna of Mantua … and will comprise them in the excellency of one onely, Raphael D’Urbine ’.29 Van Mander provided a seven-page biography of Leonardo, but Peacham made no mention of the artist in any of his books, although Cesare da Sesto and Francesco Melzi are numbered among excellent masters in his Gentleman’s Exercise (1634).30
Because of his close connection to the Stuart courts, Inigo Jones was a significant early English owner of a copy of Vasari’s Vite, which he may have bought while travelling in Italy with Lord Arundel between 1613 and 1615. Besides the annotations in his copy preserved at Worcester College,31 there is evidence of Jones’s consumption of Vasari’s text in an important eyewitness account concerning a painting attributed to Leonardo, to be discussed below. The most extensive literary treatment devoted to Leonardo published in seventeenth-century England features in William Aglionby’s Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues of 1685, which presented selected highlights of Vasari’s Vite in English translation.32 The ‘Life of Leonardo da Vinci, a Florentine Painter, and Sculptor’ extends to some thirty pages; Aglionby maintained Vasari’s conversational tone, making the translation highly accessible to a wide English readership. It was not until the mid nineteenth century that a more comprehensive translation of the Vite into English was published.33
In view of the inaccessibility of Vasari’s text, and thereby his ‘formulation’ of Leonardo, during the first part of the seventeenth century, the version of Leonardo provided by Lomazzo, and transmitted by Haydocke, was more widely influential in England during the early modern period. As such, the significance of Lomazzo/Haydocke as the earliest conduit of the Italian fortuna of Leonardo into England is clear. The text is fundamental to the response of the foremost English collector of Leonardo’s manuscripts: the Earl of Arundel. Although he possessed a copy of Vasari’s Lives, it is likely that his principal interest in Leonardo’s treatises and graphic works stemmed from Lomazzo; he owned copies of the Trattato and the Idea in the original Italian and, most likely, a copy of Haydocke’s translation.34
From Lomazzo, Arundel would have learnt of the artist’s patronage by the Sforza, Francesco Melzi’s inheritance and conservation of Leonardo’s writings, and their first major dispersal in the decade after Melzi’s death c. 1570.35 He would have been aware of Pompeo Leoni’s extensive compilation of Leonardo’s manuscripts and drawings because the disposal by Leoni’s heirs of the collection, then divided between Madrid and Milan, was concurrent with Arundel’s extensive Italian sojourn between 1613 and 1615, when he visited Milan, Florence, Rome, Padua, and the Veneto, patronizing artists and visiting important aristocratic collections.36 Arundel’s father-in-law, Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, died in 1616, leaving a great fortune. This event, combined with the new availability of Leoni’s collection, was propitious for Arundel’s ambition to assemble a corpus of Leonardo’s manuscripts, and he sought them out in Spain and Italy until the last months before his death in 1646.
‘Ex collectione Arundelliana’
Thomas Howard has been hailed since the seventeenth century as the ‘chief favourer of the arts in England’, but it is important to understand that the surviving documentation of the Arundel collection is fragmentary and does not adequately convey its vast scale.37 The looming outbreak of civil war in Britain precipitated the exile of the Roman Catholic Arundels in 1641; the couple separated shortly afterwards, and family disputes concerning probate occurred after the death of Lady Arundel in Amsterdam in 1654. These factors stimulated the dispersal and partial sequestration of their collections and the loss of most of the records of the collection during its assembly. Consequently, it is not possible to identify the precise number of works attributed to Leonardo in the Arundel collection.
The collection of Leonardo writings spanning the years 1478 to 1518, now known as the Codex Arundel and preserved in the British Library, is the most celebrated of Thomas Howard’s acquisitions.38 The provenance of the codex is ascertained from its possession by Arundel’s grandson, Henry Howard, 6th Duke of Norfolk (1628–84), who, at the instigation of John Evelyn, donated it to the Royal Society in 1667.39 It is believed that Arundel acquired the Windsor Volume before 1630 because two of the drawings it formerly contained were copied by Lucas Vorsterman the Elder, an artist employed by Arundel until that year.40 Similarly, Wenceslaus Hollar, in the service of Thomas Howard between 1636 and c. 1641, reproduced in etching some of Leonardo’s drawings, stating in the legend their Arundelian ownership.41 A great book of original drawings by Leonardo was seen by the papal legate Gregorio Panzani at Arundel House in the Strand in January 1636;42 this may have been the Windsor Volume, later sighted in the Cabinet of King Charles II at Whitehall Palace in the 1670s and discussed in Chapter 14. How the Windsor Volume entered the Royal Collection is not established, but donation by Henry Howard seems possible, although it is surprising that Evelyn does not mention such an important event.
During the 1630s Arundel continued to seek out paintings, drawings, and manuscripts by Leonardo, mandating a network of agents, dealers, connoisseurs, and artists throughout Europe to locate, appraise, and purchase items. One episode provides a glimpse of the painter Daniel Mytens and the collector Everard Jabach in the service of Arundel in the Netherlands in 1637. Mytens wrote to Sir Edward Walker, Arundel’s secretary, from The Hague on 18 February 1637: ‘Mr Everard hath bene at Dort [Dordrecht] to see the peece that was said to be of Lionardo, but found it to be onelye a Coppie after Mabuse [Jan Gossaert], as Mr Everard wil wryte at large to my Lord.’43 Throughout the 1630s Arundel pursued a book of drawings by Leonardo belonging to Juan de Espina at Madrid, discussed in Chapter 9.
Such information as can be gleaned from extant inventories and lists provides glimpses of works attributed to Leonardo acquired by the Earl and Countess of Arundel during the Jacobean and Caroline era. An inventory of part of the Arundel collection at Tart Hall taken in 1641 records a copy of a Leonardo Madonna and Child, ‘A picture of a Woeman with a Childe Copia Leo du = Vince’.44 The inventory was taken by an English clerk on the eve of the Arundels’ exile from England. As such, it is necessarily laconic, but it is interesting to observe the distinction of a copy. It is possible that this painting found its way into the Royal Collection before 1649, as we shall see.
John Evelyn was witness to Arundel’s sustained interest in Leonardo. As a young man, he was a protégé of Thomas Howard and an admirer of the earl’s resident artist, Wenceslaus Hollar, of whom he later wrote: ‘a Gentleman of Bohemia … whose indefatigable works in Aqua Fortis do infinitely recommend themselves by the excellent choyce which he hath made of the rare things furnish’d out of the Arundelian collection; and from most of the best hands, and designs for such were those of Leonardo da Vinci … and divers other Masters of prime note, whose Drawings and Paintings he hath faithfully copied’.45
Evelyn visited Arundel at Padua in 1645 and again in April 1646. One of Arundel’s final acts before his death in September 1646 was to give Evelyn a list of ‘things worth seeing in Italy’,46 recommending a visit to Cavaliere Galeazzo Arconati at Castellazzo and asking Evelyn to enquire after the price of some drawings by Leonardo.47 He wished to purchase the chalk drawings after the heads of the apostles in the Last Supper, as well as a (lost) cartoon related to the Raphael/Giulio Romano Portrait of Doña Isabel de Requesens in the Louvre, or the version in the Doria Pamphili, Rome.48 The cartoon was attributed by Arconati to Leonardo, and Arundel noted that, while the sitter was identified as Joanna, Queen of Naples at Fontainebleau and Rome, Arconati gave her a different name: the Duchess of Burgundy. Evelyn’s record of his subsequent visit to the Ambrosiana in May 1646 essentially reiterates Arundel’s ‘Remembrances’ and clarifies, as Jane Roberts has noted, Arundel’s remark that the Duke of Feria (the Governor of Milan) attempted to purchase Arconati’s manuscript by Leonardo (the Codex Atlanticus) in the name of King Charles I, when in fact, the prospective purchaser was Arundel himself.49
Writing of his visit to Leonardo’s Last Supper in May 1646, Evelyn demonstrates familiarity with Vasari’s biography of the artist, uncommon at that date, as noted above:
… so we concluded this days wandring at the Monasterie of Madonna della Gratia, & in the Refectorie admir’d that celebrated Cena domini of Leonard: da Vinci, which takes up the intire Wall at the end, & is the same the great Virtuoso Francis the first of France was so inamoured of, that he consulted to remove the whole Wall, by binding about with ribs of yron & timber, to convey it into France, being in deede one of the rarest paintings that Leonardo ever did, who was long in the service of that prince, & so deare to him, as the King coming to visite him in his old age & sicknesse he expired in his armes: But this incomparable piece is now exceedingly impaired.50
Similarly, this account reiterates Arundel’s handlist, which Evelyn must have consulted as an aide memoire in writing his recollections of the Italian journey of 1646 many years later. Arundel’s knowledge of and passion for the manuscripts and drawings, prompted by Lomazzo, and his acquaintance with Vasari’s anecdotal biography of Leonardo permeates his ‘Remembrances’. Evelyn’s further clarification provides telling insight into Arundel’s evaluation of the works he had seen in person: The Last Supper was ‘the rarest thing that Leonardo ever did … But now it’s wholly destroyed’; the Codex Atlanticus was ‘full of scratches’.51
In 1654 the Countess of Arundel died in exile at Amsterdam; the inventory of part of the collection taken after her death records six pictures attributed to ‘Lionardo da Vinci’: a Leda; a watercolour of St Catherine; a Portrait of a man holding a flower in his hand; a Head of St John the Baptist; and a Group of horses (either a drawing or a copy of the lost Battle of Anghiari).52 A drawing of 1627 by Lucas Vosterman reproduces a Head of Leda, which he attributes to Leonardo, stating that the original belonged to the Arundel collection (Fig. 8.1). The head is shown in a more upright position than in any of the extant copies or versions of the standing version of Leda; for instance, the version at the Uffizi or the one at Wilton House, which, because of its descent in the Pembroke collection, has traditionally been associated with the Arundel Leda, although this cannot be securely substantiated (Fig. 8.2). Leonardo’s Leda was last reported at Fontainebleau by Cassiano dal Pozzo in 1625, after which date it may have been replaced by a copy until the end of the seventeenth century.53
Fig. 8.1Lucas Vorsterman I, after Leonardo da Vinci, Head of Leda, 1627, 231 × 204 mm, inscribed ‘Leonardo d vinci pin/loeda ex/collection Arund/LVfeci/1627’, British Museum, SL, 5227.6.
Fig. 8.2Attributed to Cesare da Sesto, after Leonardo da Vinci, Leda and the Swan, Wilton House, Salisbury, Collection Earl of Pembroke.
The other items attributed to Leonardo in the 1655 Arundel inventory are obscure, but the Head of St John the Baptist is almost certainly a painting acquired at Madrid in 1631. Through the offices of Sir Arthur Hopton in Madrid, Arundel purchased from the Roman painter Giovanni Battista Crescenzi, Marquis de la Torre (Rome 1577–Madrid 1635), a Decollation of St John the Baptist attributed to ‘Leonardi del Vinci’.54 The painting had been brought to Madrid from Rome by the Conde of Lemos, formerly Viceroy of Naples.55 This was probably the item recorded in the 1655 Arundel inventory.
As a young adult, Arundel profited from the mentorship of Gilbert Shrewsbury, a well-travelled collector who would become his father-in-law. Within a few years Arundel would be the foremost connoisseur of his generation, described by Rubens as ‘one of the four evangelists of our art’.56 It is natural to assume that it was he who would shape the interest of the young Prince Charles in Renaissance art in general, and Leonardo in particular. But as David Howarth has pointed out, in the first years of his reign Charles I could not bear the sight of him, and he was largely ostracized from the Caroline court until the assassination of the king’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, in 1628.57 During his rapid ascent at the court of King James I, Buckingham had thrown himself into collecting. Appointing Balthasar Gerbier as art agent and curator in 1619 and deploying formidable purchasing power, he acquired ‘the pearls of Italian art’ from Roman and Venetian collections.58 The Buckingham-Gerbier combination presents a persuasive alternative theatre of influence on the prince. It was in their company that Charles would first experience a work by Leonardo.
‘Things elaborated’
A Dutch Huguenot émigré, Balthazar Gerbier’s career personifies the fleet-footed opportunism of the ambitious Stuart courtier. Variously artist, curator, agent, master-of-ceremonies, architect, spy, merchant-adventurer, designer of military hardware, and owner of an academy, the scope of his activity defies definition; in fact, it rivals, perhaps emulates, Leonardo’s. Gerbier had endorsed ‘Leonardo da Vinci … for things elaborated’, an elegant phrase, evoking the scholarly and graphic qualities of the manuscripts and drawings and surely indicating some direct contact. Numbered amongst the three ‘Knight-Painters’ invested by Charles I (the others being Rubens and Van Dyck), Gerbier was denounced as a ‘common Pen-man’ by Sir William Sanderson in 1658, a condescending opinion contradicted by the Windsor Herald Edward Norgate’s observation that, at Rome in 1621, the Farnese Hercules ‘was excellently drawne with a silver pen, upon a large peece of Table-Booke Leafe by Sir Balthazar Gerbier to the admiration of all the Italians that saw it’.59 In a letter of c. 1623, Gerbier’s creative penmanship can be discerned in the witty calligraphic flourish he unravels from the name of his esteemed correspondent ‘George’ [Villiers].60
To judge by his sensitive watercolour portrait of Charles around sixteen years old,61 Gerbier, newly arrived at the Jacobean court in the train of the Dutch ambassador, already enjoyed, or was contriving, close access to the young prince, recently invested as Prince of Wales. Within a few years he was in the pay of Buckingham, making, in many ways, an ideal match, the two men being supremely dexterous in achieving preferment at court. As Gerbier boasted to Buckingham in 1624, the prolific rate of acquisition outstripped all others: ‘out of all the amateurs and princes and kings there is not one who has collected in forty years as many pictures as your Excellency has collected in five’.62