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

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

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