The Picture Vanishes

Chapter 15 investigates the circumstances around the apparent absence of the Salvator Mundi in the collection of King James II, with a particular focus on events in the immediate aftermath of the ‘Revolution’ of 1688. A number of possibilities present themselves. Did the painting pass out of the Royal Collection before the accession of James II in 1685? Did the dowager queen, Henrietta Maria, take it to a property of her jointure, or to France? Was the painting taken to Portugal by Queen Catherine of Braganza after the death of Charles II? This chapter considers the evidence of a key witness to events, and whether a painting described as a ‘Head of Our Saviour’, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold out of the collection of the Duke of Buckingham in 1763, can be identified with the painting recorded in the collections of Charles I and Charles II. If so, by which route did it leave the Royal Collection and enter the Buckingham collection?

‘Nothing is hidden under the sun’

Chapter 14 surveys the return of royal goods to Charles II at the Restoration of the Crown in 1660 and identifies the Greenwich Salvator Mundi, disbursed and returned by Capt. John Stone in the royal inventory of c. 1666. The chapter reviews the individuals involved in the restitution and augmentation of the Royal Collection and identifies two inventories of the collection at the earliest state of assembly c. 1660–2. It identifies a previously unrecognized—and extensive—list of paintings reserved for the use of Oliver Cromwell. It considers the location and fate of the painting of Christ attributed to Leonardo that was disbursed to Edward Bass in December 1651. The chapter identifies, for the first time, documentation of the presence of the Windsor Volume in the collection of Charles II.

Patronage, Some Copies, and Other Versions

Chapter 6 discusses possible patronage of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, without arriving at any favoured conclusion. The presence of a ‘Christ in the manner of God the Father’ in the list of paintings owned in 1524 by Leonardo’s pupil, Salaì (Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno), indicates that the painting was never delivered to a patron. The evidence of some early copies is reviewed, including that formerly in the de Ganay collection, which, on the grounds of execution and the infrared reflectogram, cannot be credited to Leonardo himself, though it is of better quality that most of the copies. The Leonardesque version of the young Christ as Saviour in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and related pictures might be associated with Isabella d’Este’s attempts to secure a painting of the young Christ from Leonardo. The chapter concludes that the ex-Cook painting is the only one that manifests Leonardo’s painterly and intellectual brilliance.

The Calm Centre

Chapter 2 opens the second section of the book, where the painting and its place in Leonardo’s body of work is considered. This chapter, on Leonardo and the ineffable, considers the way that he evoked the spiritual in his paintings, above all in his images of Christ. This stands in opposition to the image of Leonardo as a heretic, first suggested in the 1550 version of his Life by Giorgio Vasari. The documentation of Leonardo’s career and his last testament indicate that his Christianity was of a traditional kind. His library featured bibles and other standard religious texts. His statements indicate that the nature of the divine was not directly knowable, but manifested itself through the works created by God. In Leonardo’s devotional images and religious narratives, Christ and the Virgin act as calm centres expressing the elevated essence of supreme divinity. The Salvator Mundi and the late St John the Baptist are the most developed expressions of the otherness of the divine being, who knows secrets inaccessible to us.

‘Capitanus Stone’

Chapter 13 examines the administration of the Commonwealth Sale and the identity and political activities of Capt. John Stone, leader of the Sixth Dividend, to whom a Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was disbursed on 23 October 1651. Stone, traditionally understood as a Royalist sympathizer, is unveiled as a member of Oliver Cromwell’s Council of State. The chapter reviews the fate of royal goods disbursed to Stone, their locations during the Interregnum, and the goods returned at the Restoration in 1660 from documentary evidence contained in a master inventory of goods disbursed to the Sixth Dividend between 1651–3 and Parliamentary papers. A ‘virtual inventory’ of goods belonging to the Sixth Dividend is provided in the Appendix.

Experiencing Leonardo

Chapter 9 considers incidences of direct contact with Leonardo’s works by Britons abroad and at the Caroline court in London; that is, first-hand experience of the artist. Although the opportunity to view or handle drawings, manuscripts, or paintings attributed to Leonardo was extremely rare, an examination of the wider matrix of these experiences provides a sense of a less tangible aspect of the early English reception. Key episodes include: Charles, Prince of Wales and Leonardo’s codices belonging to Juan de Espina (Madrid, 1623); George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Rubens, and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (Paris, 1625); Queen Henrietta Maria, Inigo Jones, and ‘Ginevra de’ Benci’ (London, 1636); Abraham van der Doort, Roger de Plessis, Duke of Liancourt, and Leonardo’s St John the Baptist (London, 1630); John Evelyn (Paris, 1644). The chapter concludes with a discussion of three works attributed to Leonardo or his immediate followers documented in the Caroline Royal Collection before 1639.

Inventing Leonardo

From the evidence of contemporary literary sources, manuscript inventories, correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, Chapter 8 considers the penetration of literary concepts of Leonardo as an artist and thinker (pictor doctus), how the early reception relates to the wider ‘invention’ of Leonardo as a cultural entity, and whether a distinctly ‘British version’ of Leonardo can be detected. It focuses on the introduction into England of sixteenth-century Italian receptions of Leonardo via Richard Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura, and from contact with Giorgio Vasari’s Lives. It proposes that, due to the scarcity of Vasari’s text in early modern England, it was Lomazzo’s account of Leonardo that influenced the earliest understanding of the artist in Britain. The chapter tracks the absorption of Vasari’s text in seventeenth-century England through the interventions of key individuals at the Stuart courts, before and after the Interregnum. A particular focus is the prominent role of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, who collected Leonardo’s writings and drawings from the Jacobean period until the mid 1640s. The dispersal of his collection throughout the seventeenth century, and the acquisition in the 1670s of the Windsor Volume by Charles II, and the Codex Arundel by the Royal Society, signal key staging posts in the reception of Leonardo in Restoration England.

The Discovery of a Masterpiece

Chapter 1 presents a first-person account of the discovery of the Salvator Mundi, from its appearance as a copy at an American auction to its establishment as the lost original painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Robert Simon presents a chronological account of his involvement with the acquisition, research, conservation, and scholarly verification of the work over the period from 2005 to 2011, when the painting was included in the landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, Leonardo da Vinci Painter at the Court of Milan. The modern provenance of the painting is reviewed, focusing on its tenure in the Cook Collection of Richmond, its sale in 1958, and its reappearance in New Orleans. The conservation of the painting by Dianne Dwyer Modestini is discussed, as well as the research process, and the introduction of the painting to art historians, Leonardo specialists, the press, and, eventually, the public.

Epilogue

The Epilogue looks at two sustained and focused discussions by cataloguers of Leonardo paintings. The first is by Luke Syson in the London catalogue. The second is in the latest edition of Frank Zöllner‗s monograph, which has become a standard point of reference for information on Leonardo’s painted oeuvre and assessment of the status of each work. The Epilogue concludes that whatever the fate of this painting, the art world should regard itself as privileged to have such a significant painting in its domain.

‘A Pitiable Sight’

Chapter 11 considers access to Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi in England c. 1630–50. It proposes that the painting was inaccessible in the queen’s private apartments in the 1630s, which accounts for its invisibility in surviving documentation and its escape of campaigns of iconoclasm focused on royal chapels during the civil wars of the 1640s. It proposes the painting first came into public view in 1649, when it was put on display at the Commonwealth Sale. This is attested by lists prepared for foreign buyers by agents in London. The chapter expands to include works attributed to Leonardo from the collection of Charles I, in the hands of French and Flemish dealers in the 1650s.