Desperately seeking Leonardo
Silvia Davoli considers Britain’s long infatuation with the Renaissance Master and explains how the desire to buy a genuine Leonardo led to a new approach in collecting Italian art
The search for a painting by the Master changed the course of art collecting, says Silvia Davoli
POLITICAL upheavals on the Continent between the 1770s and 1870s wrought fundamental changes to the trade in Old Masters. Prosperous Britain benefitted: the sale of the Orleans collection in 1793 saw outstanding works, such as Sebastiano del Piombo’s The raising of Lazarus and Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, come to this country. After the French invaded Holland in 1795, many Dutch collections were eventually dispersed on the English art market, as were many of the Italian paintings acquired by the French army in Italy in 1796, sold by art dealers including Jean-baptiste-pierre Le Brun and Noel Desenfans.
The increased demand resulting from this sudden availability of Old Masters meant that, by the 19th century, the supply of highquality paintings from Europe began to dwindle, although art dealers continued to fuel the market with optimistic attributions. Scrolling through auction catalogues of the period, it is evident that there were too many Correggios, Michelangelos, Raffaellos and Leonardos on the market.
The scarcity of his paintings made the quest for an authentic one more exciting
The National Gallery in London had been established relatively late compared with other similar institutions—in 1824—and found itself quickly having to form, with public money, a collection that could compete with its Continental counterparts (in contrast to the Louvre in Paris or the Bode Museum in Berlin, it did not have its roots in a royal collection). Of the leading Italian masters whose work the newly appointed trustees aspired to own, certainly the most sought after was Leonardo. The scarcity of his paintings—only 14 survive, excepting his frescoes, with a further two attributed without consensus—added to the artist’s mystique and made the quest to obtain an authentic one more exciting.
The trustees felt the challenge keenly, particularly as the Louvre could boast no fewer than seven, including its version of The Virgin of the Rocks, the insuperable Mona Lisa and Bacchus. From 1831, the National Gallery possessed—or so it thought —one: Christ Among the Doctors. However, by 1848, the painting’s attribution was already in question and it was eventually accredited to Luini.
British interest in Leonardo can be traced to the 17th century, when collectors and connoisseurs visited the Continent and admired his work in various collections and churches. Undeterred by the difficulty of acquiring a painting, collectors such as Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel, succeeded in securing some of the most famous and important bound volumes of his drawings, such as the ‘Arundel’ codex (now in the British Library) and the volume of 283 sheets illustrated with drawings
Interest in his work led to a flourishing market in the sale of printed reproductions
of anatomy, plants, animals, landscapes, architecture and engineering, thought to have been given to Charles II by Arundel’s grandson. A highlight of the Royal Collection, some 200 of the finest of these drawings are on show at the Queen’s Gallery in London until October 13, having toured the country earlier this year in celebration of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death (Exhibi
tion, January 30). Eighty will then be exhibited at The Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh (November 22–March 15, 2020).
Another volume of drawings was sold in 1717 by the painter Giuseppe Ghezzi to Thomas Coke, later the 1st Earl of Leicester. The so-called Leicester Codex remained at Holkham until 1980, when it was purchased by the industrialist Armand Hammer. In 1994, it was bought by Bill Gates for $30.8 million. An additional three codices, whose provenance is obscure, reached Engand sometime in the 18th or 19th centuries and were donated to the V&A in 1876.
Meanwhile, several artists in Britain were also enthusiastically collecting Leonardo’s drawings, namely Peter Lely (1618–80), Jonathan Richardson Sr (1667–1745) and Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830). Richardson praised Leonardo’s design skills in his theoretical writings; today, his drawings, together with those acquired by Lawrence, are scattered between Christ Church in Oxford, the British Museum and the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne, France. Some of those owned by Lely ended up in the Louvre.
The growing interest in Leonardo’s works led to a flourishing market in the sale of printed reproductions of his paintings, which, as did first-hand accounts from Grand Tourists returning from Italy, contributed greatly to the spread of his fame. Prints were the crucial formative visual source for artists such as William Hogarth, who praised Leonardo’s realism in The Analysis of Beauty (1753) and used reproductions of the Last Supper fresco as a compositional model for his own work—see, for example, An Election Entertainment (1754), now in Sir John Soane’s Museum, London WC2.
By the early 19th century, London could be regarded as one of the most important centres (together with Paris and Milan) for Leonardo’s graphic work. This compensated for the lack of paintings: British institutions
For the National Gallery, Eastlake focused on Leonardo’s artistic circle
could boast only a copy of The Last Supper, made by three of his pupils in about 1515–20 and brought here in 1817 (it was purchased by the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in 1821), and the Sant’ Anna cartoon, sometimes called the Burlington House cartoon, a fullsize preparatory study probably made for
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (now in the Louvre), which the RA had acquired in 1779 (it was purchased for the National Gallery, with a special grant and contributions from the Art Fund, in 1962).
Things were not much better from the private collector’s perspective: ‘Perhaps the fact of there being so painful a lack of genuine works by Leonardo during his long stay in Milan, may account for the common wish to credit him with the more or less successful pictures of his pupils,’ wrote Jean Paul Richter in his magnum opus Literary Works of Leonardo (1883). After visiting a great number of private collections in England in the mid 19th century, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, another German art historian, remarked that there were many paintings ‘clumsily attributed to Leonardo’.
These false attributions were so common that some critics assumed that The Virgin of the Rocks—at the time the only painting by Leonardo in private hands in Britain— was a work after Leonardo made by one of his pupils. It is now unanimously recognised as being by the Master himself.
An exception among collectors was Francis Richard Charteris, Lord Elcho (the future Earl of Wemyss and March, 1818–1914), who, as early as 1846, began to form a collection of paintings by followers of Leonardo, such as Bernardino Luini and Ambrogio Bergognone, which he acquired from the noble Milanese Litta family. He also owned a copy of the Mona Lisa believed to be by a contemporary of Leonardo.
Faced with the near impossible task of acquiring a genuine painting by Leonardo, Sir Charles Eastlake, the National Gallery’s first director, adopted a similar approach, as a collecting strategy—to contextualise the great Masters. He resolved to focus on Leonardo’s artistic circle, especially his network around Milan, where the Master had formed and influenced a large group of artists, pupils and followers. These Leonardeschi, as they are known, included Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (1467–1516), Ambrogio de Predis (1455–1508), Bernardino de’ Conti (1465– 1523), Andrea Solario (1465–1524), Marco d’oggiono (1470–1549), Bernardino Luini (1480–1532), Giampietrino (1495–1549) and Cesare da Sesto (1477–1523).
Eastlake’s strategy was initially rejected by the gallery’s trustees, who were desperate to buy a painting signed by Leonardo. Eventually, however, he managed to convince them that it was a good idea, at least until an authentic painting emerged on the market. By accumulating a chronologically and stylistically coherent group of works by Leonardeschi, the gallery would prepare the ground for the arrival of an authentic Leonardo (which eventually happened with
The Virgin of the Rocks in 1882). In this way, visitors would be able to appreciate not only Leonardo’s skills, but also the impact of his work on other leading artists of his day.
In his quest to acquire paintings, Eastlake visited Milan and its surrounding territory, accompanied by his agent Otto Mündler. Thanks to his contacts, the pair were given access to prestigious Milanese private collections, such as those of
This process of rediscovery and inclusion continues, driven by the market
Count Castelbarco, Count Melzi d’eril and Marquess Litta, who offered them a number of remarkable paintings by Leonardo’s followers. ‘Our object is always to break into private houses, which are sure to retain pictures by native painters… The different schools of painters, which clustered in the North of Italy—milanese, Bergamese, Brescian, Paduan and Venetian—are now getting disentangled in my mind, and I begin to know their differences and affinities,’ recalled Lady Eastlake, who often accompanied her husband on these missions.
The first Lombard works were acquired in 1857. These comprised paintings by Ambrogio Bergognone (1453–1523) and Vincenzo Foppa (1430–1515), Lombard masters demonstrating the Milanese style a generation before Leonardo. Bergognone’s The Virgin and Child with St Catherine of Alexandria and Catherine of Siena (about 1490) was immediately followed by Foppa’s The Adoration of the Kings (about 1500).
Eastlake also purchased paintings by Leonardo’s principal pupil Boltraffio (The Virgin and Child, 1493–99) and by followers such as Solario (Portrait of Giovanni Cristoforo Longoni, 1505) and Bernardino Lanino (The Madonna and Child with Saints, 1543), which clearly show the stylistic influence. Above all, the consistent use of sfumato (a technique producing softened outlines by gradually shading tones and colours into one another) and the unmistakeable facial types were derived directly from Leonardo
Eastlake was a pioneer of modern art history and the approach of looking at ‘schools’, rather than only individual famous masters, and at the reciprocal influences on painters active at the same time. Thanks to his efforts, curators, collectors and art historians at last began to show an interest in Leonardo’s followers, particularly those close to the Master, such as Luini, whom Ruskin dubbed the ‘Lombard Correggio’.
In 1898, the Burlington Fine Arts Club organised an exhibition ‘The Masters of the Milanese and allied Schools of Lombardy’. Although the show lacked an authentic Leonardo, its curator, collector and connoisseur Sir Herbert F. Cook, was able to gather a significant number of gems by painters who undoubtedly absorbed his influence, all of which came from private British collections.
This process of rediscovery and inclusion continues today, although it is now more driven by the market than museums’ collecting strategies. In January, a 17th-century copy of the Mona Lisa was estimated by Sotheby’s New York at $80,000–$120,000 and sold for an astonishing $1,695,000 (£1,379,730). Most famously, in November 2017, Christie’s New York sold the Salvator
Mundi (about 1500) for $450.3 million, setting a new record for the most expensive painting ever auctioned. Long thought to be a copy of a lost original (20 other versions are known, done by students and followers of Leonardo), the Salvator Mundi has now been reattributed to the Master himself.
Leading experts may not all agree, but it shows that there is still a possibility of finding a painting that turns out to be by Leonardo after all.