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Since its beginning, the art market has always monetised scholarship. It is the scholars who appraise a work of art, and it is customary – quite rightly so – to pay them for their opinions. Museum boards have always been stuffed with wealthy patrons who privately collect works by the same artists that the museum supports. Dealers have always hobnobbed with curators of public collections – the former relish the prestige of selling to a public institution, the latter revel in the excitement of a new discovery. The danger that scholarship can be compromised by showmanship and salesmanship has always been clear and present in the arena of art history. In the case of the Salvator Mundi, such familiar interrelationships were built into the project in a particularly intimate and perilous manner.

PART II

CHAPTER 8
The King’s Painting

The windows were so small, and the light in the palace so poor, that when pictures arrived they were examined by candlelight. On 30 January 1636 the papal emissary, Gregorio Panzani, and a few footmen carried the paintings down the corridors of Whitehall Palace, a higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of banqueting and reception halls, chambers, chapels, breakfast rooms and bedrooms – two thousand rooms in all – plus tennis courts, gardens and cockpits. They climbed the stairs to the private rooms, or ‘closets’, of Queen Henrietta Maria. Her Majesty was already in bed, perhaps because of the winter temperature in the palace rather than the lateness of the hour, and she had the pictures ‘carried to her bed one by one’, as Panzani wrote in his detailed account of the encounter. The art was a gift from Cardinal Antonio Barberini at the Vatican in Rome. The cunning cleric was hoping that the queen’s husband, the Protestant Charles I, could be induced back to the Catholic faith, and was wooing him with Italian Renaissance paintings, which he knew the king loved. Or perhaps he could at least convince the king to moderate the oppression of Catholics in England. Of that fateful evening Panzani wrote, ‘Especially pleasing to the Queen was that by Vinci, and that by Andrea del Sarto.’ However, the queen said ruefully that she would not be able to keep them for herself, because they were so good that ‘the King would steal them from her’.

Meanwhile, Charles had been informed of the newly arrived masterpieces. He came hurrying down the corridors with a few of his courtiers, including the brilliant architect Inigo Jones, who shared the sovereign’s enthusiasm for Italian painting. Charles and Jones then played a game. Charles removed the labels bearing the names of the artists which Panzani had attached to each picture, and Jones attempted to identify the works’ creators, based on the style and technique. Thus began the discipline of connoisseurship in Britain, a parlour game for the wealthiest strata of society, but also, let us not forget, the sine qua non of the discipline of art history.

Inigo Jones, wrote Panzani, ‘threw down his riding cloak, put on his spectacles, took hold of a candle and turned to inspect all of them minutely together with the King’. The candle flickered over the outlines of portraits of noblemen and women, lighting up the spidery lace of their collars and cuffs, the sheen of their buckles, buttons and scabbards, and flourishes in their moustaches. Jones ‘accorded them extraordinary approval’, then pointed to one, and – Panzani writes with a trace of the suppressed smirk that one would expect from a citizen of the birthplace of the Renaissance watching the efforts of an English novice – ‘The King’s architect Jones believes that the picture by Leonardo is the portrait of a certain Venetian Ginevra Benci and he concludes it from the G. and B. inscribed on her breast. As he is very conceited and boastful he often repeats this idea of his to demonstrate his great knowledge of painting.’

Jones got the artist more or less right. This was a painting attributed by everyone at the time to Leonardo, although today it is ascribed to his most sensitive pupil, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio. But Jones got the identity and gender of the sitter wrong – perhaps understandably, given the gloom. He was in fact looking at a beautiful and ethereal image of a young man, his hand inside his cloak covering his heart, gazing slightly askance as if lost in a daydream. The sitter was probably the Italian poet Girolamo Casio. Today the picture hangs at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.

From Charles I’s passion for art and for Leonardo da Vinci sprang the birth of the international art market, which has evolved to the business we know today. It began thirteen years earlier, in 1623, when Charles was heir to the throne. He had travelled to Madrid with the intention of returning with a bride, the Spanish Infanta Maria. He failed to win the hand of the Spanish princess, but he did return with a new love – art.

According to an account by the English author and diplomat Henry Wotton, Charles had set off for Spain with his friend the courtier George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was then in his early thirties and, according to many who set eyes on him, ‘the handsomest-bodied man of England; his limbs so well compacted and his conversation so pleasing and of so sweet disposition’.1 Charles and Buckingham travelled incognito, ‘with disguised beards and borrowed names of Thomas and John Smith’2 and with only three servants. The journey was not as secret as they pretended, however. Charles’s father, King James I, had sanctioned this romantic quest after having spent years trying to negotiate the marriage of his son to a Spanish princess, all in vain. Christian Europe had been split in two by the Reformation, with the Roman Catholic empires and the pope on one side, and the Protestants and an assortment of nationalist kingships and independent-minded mini-states on the other. The Catholic Spanish king was loth to marry his daughter to a Protestant prince. Charles’s youthful ardour was the last card his father could play.

Charles and Buckingham’s planning was slipshod. They didn’t have the right small change to pay the ferry across the Thames at Gravesend – ‘for lack of silver, they were fain to give the ferryman a piece of two and twenty shillings’3 – and this immense overpayment aroused suspicions. At Canterbury they were stopped by local officials, but made their escape after Buckingham, who was Lord Admiral of the Fleet, pulled off his beard, revealed his true identity and said he was on his way to perform a surprise inspection of the navy. In Paris the pair bought wigs and charmed their way into the French royal palace, surely with French officials winking at each other over the Englishmen’s poor disguises. There they set eyes on Henrietta Maria, the daughter of the French King Henry IV, who would one day be Charles’s actual bride. But she was Plan B.

Charles and his minimal retinue made their way on horseback through Spain. To the young tourists it seemed a harsh place. An English diplomat of the time, Sir Richard Wynn, observed how poor rural Spain looked compared to England: windows had no glass, meat was scarce, people used planks for tables, and there were no napkins. Spanish men dressed for all eventualities, wearing capes and carrying swords.4 But everything changed when the royal party arrived in Madrid. Charles was put up in the towering fortress-cum-palace of Alcazar. The English king hastily upgraded his son’s trip into an official mission and dispatched diplomats. Spain’s King Philip IV laid out the red carpet and organised festivities. ‘All the streets were adorned, in some places with rich hangings, in others with curious pictures,’ wrote one contemporary.5

Charles rode alongside the Spanish king, under an ornate canopy, through the streets of Madrid, the capital of a freshly baked empire that stretched from North Africa to Latin America. The air reverberated with fanfares of trumpets and drums, while tapestries and carpets hung in decorative celebration from crowded balconies, wafting slowly in the spring breeze. The King of Spain temporarily relaxed the rules that limited the cost of clothing a subject might wear, and offered his nobility loans of up to 20,000 ducats so his court could impress the visiting English prince. There was jousting and bullfighting in the city’s enormous central square, the Plaza Mayor. Charles sat in a balcony neighbouring that of the Spanish princess, as close as decorum allowed, and seemed smitten. The spectacle was so expensive that locals joked that Charles had managed to sack the city without an army.

But after the festivities had subsided, Charles found himself locked in a diplomatic pas de deux, with the princess kept out of sight. The problem was still the prospective bride and groom’s religious incompatibility. If this was to be overcome a special dispensation would be required from the pope, and concessions from the English towards their Roman Catholic subjects, neither of which were forthcoming. Spanish ministers worked to keep Charles in Madrid for as long as possible, in the hope that he would succumb to the artistic and moral superiority of the Roman Catholic faith and consider converting. They contrived for him to be present when King Philip was kissing the feet of the poor, and tipped him off about an English Jesuit who was distributing the enormous sum of £2,000 in charitable donations to hospitals and religious institutions. The Spanish king gave him paintings with unmistakable messages which laid it on with a gold-plated Catholic trowel, such as Titian’s glittering Portrait of Charles V with Hound, painted to celebrate the pope’s coronation of the then Spanish monarch as Holy Roman Emperor in 1530.

Charles, for his part, was trying to engineer a private encounter with Princess Maria. At one point he climbed over a palace wall and ‘sprang down from a great height’ in order to come face to face with her. But when the princess saw him she ‘gave a shriek and ran back’. Her chaperone told Charles to leave at once, and he withdrew.6

Charles spent eight months hanging around in Madrid, waiting for a breakthrough in the marriage negotiations. He had time on his hands, and he spent it in the company of Buckingham and assorted courtiers and art advisers, visiting the magnificent palaces of the Spanish sovereign and the mansions of his nobles, and shopping for art. In the seventeenth century Spain held much the same power over the English psyche as Paris did in the twentieth: it was the epitome of sophistication. As Ben Jonson wrote in The Alchemist, ‘your Spanish Stoop is the best garb; your Spanish beard is the best cut; your Spanish ruffs are the best Wear; your Spanish pavin the best dance; Your Spanish titillation in a glove the best perfume …’, to which he might have added, ‘and your Spanish art collection is the best curated’.

By this time a small number of English aristocrats and royals, notably the Earl of Arundel and Charles’s older brother Prince Henry, had built up collections, sometimes travelling to Europe to see and buy art. Charles had already ordered the purchase on his behalf of cartoons by Raphael in Italy; famous tapestries based on these would be made in London. He also had accepted gifts of pictures from Peter Paul Rubens, Europe’s most famous living artist. Now the prince’s experiences in Spain would supercharge his appreciation of both the beauty of art and the thrall in which it could hold men.

At the time, King Philip IV had the largest art collection in the world, consisting of about two thousand works; by the time of his death forty-two years later that figure would have doubled. A thousand of them were in his enormous palace, the Escorial, on the hills just outside Madrid. Spanish noblemen collected art too, some owning up to six hundred paintings. Their taste was overwhelmingly for Italian Renaissance artists. Titian’s glamorous portraits, voluptuous mythological scenes and dramatic renditions of biblical stories, with brushwork that gave the impression of spontaneity, dexterity and speed, were the most fashionable; and he was also Charles’s favourite painter. Raphael, Michelangelo, Andrea de Sarto and Leonardo da Vinci were almost as highly regarded, but slightly less flashy. The northern Europeans, comparatively dour realists like Memling, van Eyck, Dürer and others, formed a third group. Art was the educated entertainment that held this elite together.

We know much about this Spanish art world thanks to the vivid Dialogues about Art and Painting, written contemporaneously by the Italian-born, Spanish-resident artist, critic and courtier Vicente Carducho. Carducho’s treatise takes us on an eye-opening tour of the best collections in Madrid, where he crossed paths with Prince Charles and his entourage.

His most serene highness King Charles Stuart was determined to acquire paintings of excellent originality. His emissaries are sparing neither effort nor expense searching for the best paintings and sculpture in all of Europe and bringing them back to the English Court … They confirm that the King is going to expand his Palace with new galleries, decorating them with these ancient and modern Paintings and with Statues of foreigners and citizens of that Kingdom, and where he cannot obtain the originals, he has sent artists to copy the Titians in the Escorial.7

Charles and Buckingham were assisted by a number of art advisers. The most prominent was Balthazar Gerbier, a scheming Franco-Dutch courtier, painter and miniaturist whose Leonardesque list of side jobs included mathematician, military architect, linguist, pamphleteer, cryptographer and double agent. Charles’s aide Sir Francis Cottington, a less colourful but more reliable individual, kept accounts of the money the prince was spending on art. Charles frequented estate sales, called almonedas, or bought from collectors, or was gifted artworks by noblemen, all to be packed and shipped back to England.

Vicente Carducho’s treatise was intended primarily not to paint a picture of the Madrid art world for posterity, but to promote a new theory of art. He was determined to elevate the status of painters and sculptors from that of craftsmen to the same level as poets. He argued for the superiority of painting over sculpture owing to its more scientific and speculative nature, and its ability to create optical illusions. These were arguments Leonardo had made in his notebooks. From Italy to Spain, Leonardo’s ideas about art underpinned not just the way people made art, but the way they looked at it.

Among the houses Charles and Carducho both visited was the villa of Juan de Espina, a character later described as ‘the Spanish Leonardo’. Charles would have passed through an unprepossessing door in a building in the centre of Madrid and found himself inside a high-walled villa full, as Carducho described it, of beautiful and miraculous things: artworks, rare books, musical instruments, stuffed animals, wooden automata, a telescope designed by Galileo, and historical memorabilia that included a collection of knives that had been used to execute the great and the not-so-good. Espina, a man of ‘eminent and erudite wit’,8 was not himself an artist, but he was a mathematician and a virtuoso on the lyre and the vihuela (a kind of guitar). He threw parties that lasted until 3 a.m., at which magic tricks were performed, or mock bullfights or giant puppet shows took place. At one party in 1627, as chronicled by Don Juan himself, there was a three-hundred-course banquet at which ‘fruit, china, pastries, ceramics’ appeared to rise off the table and ‘all flew through the window’. There were hydraulic machines, influenced by the ideas in Leonardo’s notebooks, that could make music and storms. And there was a lot of art, as Espina described in his Memorial, written to the Spanish king:

When it comes to rare, curious and beautiful artwork made by the most famous masters from these and other kingdoms and nations, my house in this court can compete with all the extraordinary things worldwide, and even leave them behind, as the experts of all major disciplines have already certified in writing.9

Charles must have thought Espina eccentric, for he called him ‘a foolish gentleman’, but as a collector he had something the future king wanted. Espina owned two notebooks, now known as the Madrid Codices, full of Leonardo’s notes and drawings of machines, engineering and geometry. They had been brought to Spain by an Italian sculptor, Pompeo Leoni, who had acquired them from the son of Leonardo’s pupil Francesco Melzi. Charles tried to buy them while he was in Spain, but Espina refused. As Carducho wrote of his visit to the collector’s home:

There I saw two books drawn hand-written by the great Leonardo de Vinci of particular curiosity and doctrine, which Prince of Wales so loved that he wanted them more than anything when he was in this Court: but [Espina] always considered them worthy only to be inherited by the [Spanish] King, like everything else curious and exquisite that he had been able to acquire in his life.10

Years later, Charles spotted another opportunity. One of his art advisers, Henry Porter, heard that Espina had been arrested by the Spanish Inquisition on the grounds that his automata were ‘white magic’. Porter wrote swiftly to London: ‘The owner of the book drawn by Leonardo has been taken by the Inquisition and exiled to Seville … I will try my utmost to find out about his death or when his possessions are sold.’ Espina was, however, released, and later bequeathed his Leonardo notebooks to the Spanish crown. Charles and his courtiers were eventually able to buy some Leonardo drawings from Pompeo Leoni, who had inherited them before he moved to Madrid.

After nearly a year in Spain, Charles and his entourage returned to London infused with Madrid’s enthusiasm for art. A year later he was king. He and his friends formed a circle of aesthetes and collectors, known as aficionados – revealingly, a Spanish word – which translates as connoisseurs. Dubbed the Whitehall Group, they were determined to import the Leonardesque sophistication of Madrid’s art world to London. They sent their agents to Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands to find and buy Italian paintings and classical sculptures. They gifted each other paintings, or swapped them, and especially with the king. Art was, as the art historian Francis Haskell noted, ‘the continuation of politics by other means’.

Among the artworks collected by the aficionados were several Leonardos. Charles’s constant companion the Duke of Buckingham owned three by the time he died in 1628, including the Virgin of the Rocks now in the Louvre. However, the duke’s efforts to persuade the King of France to part with the Mona Lisa while he was negotiating Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria in 1625 failed. Charles himself owned three paintings he thought were Leonardos, though only one, the St John the Baptist, is now thought to be the genuine article.

Important visitors to Whitehall Palace, whatever their rank, were marched around on a ceremonial tour of Charles’s art collection. At the palace’s heart was the two-hundred-foot Long Gallery, in which the king hung around a hundred of his best Renaissance and northern European paintings, including van Dyck’s Cupid and Psyche and Dosso Dossi’s Virgin, Child and Joseph. The king’s apartments contained another array of masterpieces by Titian, Correggio, Giorgione and others. Seventy-three smaller pictures were displayed in the intimate cabinet room, along with thirty-six statues and statuettes, as well as books, miniatures, medals and curios. By the time of his death in 1649, Charles I had collected almost three thousand paintings, drawings and sculptures. When Rubens arrived in London in 1629 he wrote:

I must admit that when it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-class masters, I have never seen such a large number in one place as in the royal palace and in the gallery of the late Duke of Buckingham.11

And so it was that, thanks to the collecting of Charles and his comrades, England could now be counted among Europe’s most magnificent monarchies.

It is easy to recognise the art world we know today in Stuart England; the art market emerged from the womb of the late Renaissance almost fully formed. New record prices were being set for art in seventeenth-century Europe, as established collectors from Italy and Spain sold works to new collectors like Charles’s circle. Old money was profiting from new money, just as European and American dealers in our era have been able to raise prices for Russian oligarchs and Asian and Gulf billionaires. The historian Edward Chaney writes, ‘The craze for the collecting of pictures grew more dramatically in the 1620s and 30s than in any other period in British history.’12

It was already a world of smoke and mirrors. Smooth-talking dealers were continually trying to pass off copies or studio works, executed by artists’ assistants, as originals. In a series of letters dating from 1625 between an agent for Charles I in Rome and the art-dealing resident of a monastery in Perugia, the agent writes that both Charles and Arundel were unhappy about having been sold copies as originals. ‘Many scandalous tricks have been played here,’ he says. On another occasion, the British collector the Duke of Hamilton told his agent to watch out ‘that the originals be not retained and copies given in their place’. The art market today is still bedevilled by fakes. Meanwhile, collectors had their own underhand playbook. They bought anonymously through agents who were instructed not to divulge whom they were working for, in case knowledge of their wealthy patrons encouraged the sellers to charge higher prices. ‘Had it been known that I was acting for his majesty, they would have demanded so much more,’ the Venice-based art dealer Daniel Nijs wrote about securing the largest bulk purchase of Renaissance and Classical art for Charles I from the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua.

On occasion collectors formed secret anti-competitive syndicates to avoid a bidding war when they bought a collection. The richest buyers often paid late, as they do today, after their dealers had riskily financed acquisitions by borrowing in their own names – Charles took three years to finish paying Nijs for the Gonzaga purchase. But Nijs was no saint either: when he bought large collections for English clients he was known to pick off certain works for himself and try to sell them privately before forwarding the pruned consignment to London.

One marked difference between the art market of old and that of today is that in earlier times no one collected art for investment. But at least one canny adviser foresaw the rise of the art market. Balthazar Gerbier boasted prophetically to Buckingham that:

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. I know they will be pictures still, when those ignorants will be lesser than shadows.13

The Salvator Mundi is said to have spent part of the seventeenth century somewhere in the court of King Charles I. But where? In 1639 Charles instructed Dutch-born Abraham van der Doort, his Keeper of the Pictures – a role we would call curator – to draw up an inventory of the royal art collection. Once completed, this was the most detailed art catalogue yet produced in Europe. However, back in those days pictures rarely had proper titles. Thus van der Doort had to come up with his own short descriptions, such as ‘the picture of an indifferent ancient gentleman’. He often mentioned where the king had acquired a work: ‘Another Mantuan peece’, he repeatedly wrote, referring to the scores of Renaissance paintings and classical sculptures Charles bought from the dukes of Mantua. He was careful to distinguish, where he could, between a work by an artist’s own hand and one by a studio. Thus, of an ‘Item above the door, a picture painted upon a board being a smiling woman with a few flowers in her left hand in a wood-coloured and gilded frame, half so big as the life’, he adds: ‘Said to be of Leonard de Vincia or out of his school.’ Through his entries percolates the character of a methodical civil servant, struggling in a foreign language to establish a uniform system of classification for the first time, and desperate to please his royal employer. A portrait of van der Doort by the English painter William Dobson, executed in a dashing impasto halfway between Titian and Rubens, shows a face with muscles tensed and an anxious expression in his eyes, as if caught for a brief moment before hurrying off.

The most detailed entry in van der Doort’s inventory is for a Leonardo da Vinci, but not the Salvator Mundi. It is a painting of John the Baptist, a marvellous but relatively simple painting, much the same size as the Salvator. Demonstrating his disdain for Christian propriety, and his penchant for fusing Christian and classical motifs, Leonardo had radically reimagined the iconography of his subject, depicting the saint as a puckish, quasi-Apollonian young man, smiling knowingly at the onlooker, raising one finger in a gesture that seems to beckon us to follow him as it points up to God. Van der Doort writes:

Item, A St John Baptist, with his right finger pointing upwards, and his left hand at his breast, holding in his left arm a cane-cross; done by Leonard da Vinci, sent from France to the King for a present, by Monsieur de Lioncourt, being one of the King of France’s Bedchamber; the picture being so big as the life, half a figure, painted upon board: in a black ebony frame; for which the King sent him back two of his Majesty’s pictures, the one being the picture of Erasmus Rotterdamus, done by Holbein, being side-faced, looking downwards, which was placed in his Majesty’s cabinet room; and one other of his Majesty’s pictures, which was done by Titian; being our Lady, and Christ, and St John, half figures, as big as the life; which was placed in his Majesty’s middle privy lodging-room …14

Van der Doort tells us that Charles got this Leonardo in an exchange with the French courtier and ambassador to London Roger du Plessis de Liancourt. So important was a Leonardo considered that the painting was swapped not just for a Titian, the most fashionable artist in Europe at the time, but also for a Holbein, the German painter who had produced sharply observant portraits of Henry VIII’s court.

The alluring golden sfumato effect, which makes St John look as if he has stepped out of Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical film Pan’s Labyrinth, is partly the result of Leonardo’s style, but also partly of the mishandling of the picture by its owners. In the left-hand margin van der Doort states that it has been damaged, but not, emphatically not, by him:

The arm and the hand hath been wronged by some washing – before I came to your Majesty.

That is the longest entry by far in van der Doort’s entire catalogue. It may seem strange, then, that he makes no mention of the other supposed Leonardo, the Salvator Mundi, which continues to evade the pens of inventorists. One explanation, which Simon and Dalivalle have suggested in the past, could be that van der Doort’s catalogue was not exhaustive. He concentrated on the king’s collection at Whitehall Palace in central London, but overlooked parts of other palaces, including Hampton Court, the Queen’s House, Greenwich, and Nonsuch Palace. It is possible that the Salvator Mundi may have hung in one of these locations; or maybe van der Doort just missed it. Such possible shortcomings in his work came to light after he committed suicide in the summer of 1640. Some of his biographers think he took his life out of shame, after having mislaid some of the king’s miniatures. A broadsheet of the time suggested alternatively that it was because he was about to be fired for incompetence: ‘It is believed he was jealous the King had designed some other man to keepe his pictures, which he had not done.’ A German poet, George Rudolf Weckherlin, wrote an epigram commemorating van der Doort’s death:

Anxious to do his duty well,

Van Dort there, conscientious elf,

from hanging up his pictures, fell

One day to hanging up himself.15

Ten years later a second inventory was made of Charles I’s collection, and this one, the Commonwealth Inventory of 1649–51, does mention, for the first time, a picture that could be the Salvator Mundi.

At the close of the English Civil War, the defeated king was beheaded in January 1649. Two months later, Parliament, now representing a ‘Commonwealth’, not a ‘kingdom’, decided that all the late king’s possessions, including his art collection, should be valued and then sold. The funds raised were to pay off the royal debts – the king owed money to hundreds of servants, tradesmen and craftsmen. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘That gallery to whose formation politics had been sacrificed … was now, in turn, sacrificed to political and ideological revolution.’16

An inventory was produced for this sale of ‘the late king’s goods’. Item number 49 was a ‘Peece of Christ done by Leonard’. There was only one well-known artist at the time called Leonard, or Leonardo. It is not a very precise description, but just one single-figure type of portrait painting of Christ in Leonardo’s style has ever been known, and that is as the saviour of the world, or Salvator Mundi. The ‘Peece of Christ’ was valued at a mere £30.

The Commonwealth Inventory’s entry for the ‘Peece of Christ’ introduces a new mystery to the painting, namely its price. Thirty pounds for a Leonardo – around £3,000 in today’s money – is rock bottom for one of the ten most desirable Renaissance masters on the mid-seventeenth-century European art market. But it might add another piece of evidence to the provenance narrative. One of the distinguishing features of Simon’s Salvator is the very poor condition the painting was in when he bought it, and the extensive repainting it has undergone in the last five hundred years. Those two facts can be linked.