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

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.

She hunted through inventories in which Leonardo da Vinci could be written as ‘Leonard’, ‘Leonardus’ or ‘Lionard’, and Vinci as ‘Vince’, ‘Vincia’ or ‘Vinsett’, and in which there was always the risk that his authorship had been mistaken for that of another Italian Renaissance artist like Raphael, Correggio or Zambelin – a strange spelling for Giovanni Bellini. She worked on these complex materials over several years to assemble the illustrious provenance for the Salvator Mundi, which would lead to the auctioneer at Christie’s confidently beginning his sale: ‘Lot 9b. Leonardo da Vinci. Salvator Mundi, Saviour of the World. The property of three English Kings, Charles I, Charles II and James II.’

      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.

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