Ben Lewis

The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece


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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 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

      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

      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.

      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.

      Among