The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece. Ben Lewis

The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece - Ben  Lewis


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After a few years she returned to study, doing a Master’s degree followed by a PhD at Oxford. She now teaches at a number of Oxford colleges as a non-tenured tutor in Renaissance and early modern art history and the history of ideas.

      Searching for the Salvator in British archives, Dalivalle thumbed through reams of rarely-consulted documents on thin, yellowed paper, written in faded brownish ink. Under the vaulted sixteenth-century timber ceiling of the Duke Humfrey reading room in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where each panel is painted with an image of an open book, she pored through manuscripts. She ordered obscure volumes in the Rare Books department of the British Library, the quietest reading room of them all. She went to the archives of the Houses of Parliament, placing old bound volumes of their proceedings and reports between triangular wedges of grey foam so the books could not open flat, to protect their thick spines from damage. She examined bundles of documents in the archives of the royal family.

      Margaret Dalivalle declined a face-to-face meeting, but we exchanged many emails. She wore her learning a little heavily, to coin a phrase, and was defensive about what she had discovered, which, she said, would be published for the first time in a forthcoming, long-delayed peer-reviewed book. The fact is, a colleague of hers explained to me, her hopes for a permanent university post are dependent on this research, to which she has devoted the last eight years, entirely self-funded.

      I learned from Dalivalle how much pride she took in the skills required for her research, and how wary she was of the layman’s ability to understand the intricacy of her subject. Individual facts, she advised me, did not matter much on their own in provenance research; one had to consider the whole construction. That was good advice, which could be applied, in ways Dalivalle did not intend, to the broader framework of the Salvator Mundi project. Dalivalle’s work on the Salvator cannot escape the over-arching context of its origin, which was one of commercial interest in a certain outcome. She was given her task over a decade ago by a dealer who wished to sell his painting as a Leonardo, and had been recommended by a professor of art history who had nailed his colours to this cause.

PART II

       The King’s Painting

      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.’

      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


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