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

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