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Leonardo in Britain
Collections and Historical Reception
Proceedings of the International Conference (London, 25-27 May 2016)
Edited by Juliana Barone and Susanna Avery-Quash
Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2019
Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part One
Olschki
Publishers in Florence has recently published (in English) the proceedings of Leonardo in Britain. Collections and
Historical Receptions, the international conference held in London between
25 and 27 May 2016. All nineteen essays presented in the work discuss the theme
of Leonardo’s reception in England between the 17th and the 19th centuries.
Here is the index. My review will focus on the first and second part of the
volume, presenting my comments to most of them:
Part I
Drawings and Paintings: British Collectors and Collections
- Martin Calyton: The Windsor Leonardos, 1519- 2019;
- Jacqueline Thalmann: Leonardo in the Collection of General John Guise (1682-1765);
- Sarah Vowles and Hugo Chapman: Leonardo Drawings in Bloomsbury and Beyond;
- Carmen C. Bambach: Leonardo’s St. Anne Types and the Dating of the National Gallery Cartoon;
- Caroline Campbell and Larry Keith: Towards a Biography of the National Gallery’s Virgin of the Rocks;
- Pietro C. Marani: Update on and Insights into the Royal Academy Copy of The Last Supper and its Reception in England in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century;
- Margaret Dalivalle: The Critical Fortuna of Leonardo in Seventeenth-Century England;
- Susanna Avery-Quash and Silvia Davoli: The National Gallery Searching for Leonardo: Acquisitions and Contributions to Knowledge about the Lombard School.
Part II
Around the Treatise on Painting: Art and Science
- J.V. Field: Leonardo’s Afterlife in the World of ‘New Philosophy’;
- Domenico Laurenza: Leonardo’s Science in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England: The Codex Leicester, the Codex Arundel and the Codex Huygens;
- Harry Mount: Leonardo’s Treatise of Painting: The First English Edition and the Manuscripts Owned by Patch, Smith and Johnson;
- Juliana Barone: Leonardo's Treatise on Painting: The First English Edition and the Manuscripts Owned by Patch, Smith and Johnson;
- Janis Bell: Rigaud’s Popular Translation of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting (1802);
- Charles Saumarez Smith: Attitudes to Leonardo at the Royal Academy of Arts, 1768-1830;
- Francesco Galluzzi: Alexander Cozens and Leonardo da Vinci: ‘Blot’ and Landscape Painting between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century.
Part III
Re-Reading Leonardo
- Lene Østermark-Johansen: ‘The Power of an Intimate Presence’: Walter Pater’s Leonardo Essay (1869) and its Influence at the fin de siècle;
- Claire Farago: Re-reading Richter and MacCurdy: Lessons in Translation;
- Francesca Fiorani: Kenneth Clark and Leonardo: From Connoisseurshio to Broadcasting to Digital Technologies;
- Alessandro Nova: John Shearman’s Leonardo.
Leonardo's
many roles
In fact, as
we happened to see talking about the different European repercussions of
the Treaty of Painting,
it is not correct to talk about Leonardo's 'role' in Great Britain. Instead,
one should analyse the artist's many 'roles' in English cultural life over
three centuries. One can immediately notice, for example, a difference between
France and England: In France, with the publication of the Treatise of painting both in Italian and French in 1651, Leonardo
became the ideal trait d'union
between Italian and French classicism, the one who had passed the baton between
the two countries, the anticipator of Poussin, the object of study and of
fierce controversy within the Paris Academy of Painting and Sculpture. All this
did not happen in London, where, moreover, the Royal Academy was founded only
in 1768. England knew best (or, in any case, held in greater consideration)
Leonardo as a scientist, the forerunner of empiricism and new English scientific
philosophy, and the precursor of Bacon (1561-1626) and Newton (1642-1726). At
the end of the seventeenth century Robert Hooke (1635-1703), a key figure in
the English scientific revolution, was, for example, nicknamed the 'London's
Leonardo' or the 'England's Leonardo'; to the contrary, no English artist was
compared to Leonardo as his heir or for having developed and updated his
poetics.
The English
reading of Leonardo can only fully grasped from examining the collecting of his
works, from paintings to drawings to manuscripts. To this end, two factors are
key: the archival research of how the collections were formed and, of course,
the study of the figures of collectors, intellectuals and merchants as well as
of their social networks. And this analysis cannot limit itself to considering
which documents (direct or indirect, pictorial or manuscripts) were in the
hands of collectors. It is also necessary to include those which were believed
to be by Leonardo, while eventually were not. In short, the question is – as
Martin Kemp wrote in his preface - why the works attributed to him went beyond
the circle of his closest students, but also encompassed others that today
would never be associated with da Vinci’s name. We need, in short, to go back a
few centuries, to understand that, at the time, the figurative examples of
Leonardo's art were extremely rare and that instead drawings were mechanically
associated on the simple basis of information collected from sources or
reproductions of his drawings made by third parties. From this point of view,
for example, it is appropriate to underline the role of the Bohemian engraver
Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677) who repeatedly reproduced grotesque portraits of
Leonardo in the collection of drawings of the Count of Arundel. Almost by
osmosis, from that moment on, many grotesque caricatures traceable in England
were attributed to Leonardo, strengthening his fame as artist with a passion
for physiognomy. Even Hollar himself, in 1646, engraved examples of heads with
particularly fine features, always assigning them to the Tuscan artist. This is
the case of a Portrait of a boy today
attributed to Benvenuto Garofalo: “iIt was already identified as such in 1646, when Wenceslas Hollar engraved it, and by the time it appeared in the sale of the Revd Dr Henry Wellesley in 1866 the sitter had also been granted a distinguished identity, 'Giovanni Galeazzo, Duke of Milan'. This shows the lingering influence of the early tendency to connect Leonardo with head studies of either great beauty or great ugliness'.”
(Vowles, Chapman, 55).
Collectionism and drawings
There are
not many English names associated with the collecting of Leonardo's works, especially
in the seventeenth century. Among the earliest ones, I would like to mention
Charles I Stuart (1600-1649), whose famous collection was dispersed years after
his beheading in 1649; Thomas Howard (1585-1646), the second Earl of Arundel
(1585-1646) and George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628). In her
most interesting essay, Margaret Dalivalle stressed that all of them were based
on diplomatic networks of scholars and international agents, who helped enrich
their collections. On Leonardo, the information available in England at the end
of the sixteenth century was that obtainable from both editions of Vasari’s Lives by Vasari (who, however, were in
Italian and whose circulation might have been fairly limited) and, above all,
through the English translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Treatise on Painting produced by Richard Haydocke in
1598 (fourteen years after the publication of the Italian princeps). The author made the hypothesis that Arundel's great
interest in Leonardo's graphics and manuscripts was also stimulated by the
awareness of their dispersion, which Lomazzo precisely narrated. His collection
was the result of the tenacious search for Leonardo's testimonies conducted
directly or indirectly between Italy and Spain, especially in search of the
albums owned by Pompeo Leoni, between 1620 and 1646. Ms Dalivalle, however, suggests not underestimating the role of Charles, Prince of Wales, and George Villiers,
Duke of Buckingham, who were, it seems, the first to have a direct contact with
Leonardo's sheets during their Madrid journey of 1623. Not to be undervalued,
then, is the presence, in that expedition, of Sir
Balthazar Gerbier (1592-1663) as diplomat, but also as adviser of the Duke of
Buckhingam on matters of art. Carducho, in his Diálogos de la pintura, recalled the Prince of Wales'
failed attempt to purchase two manuscript books owned by Juan de Espina y
Velasco. Buckingham, for his part, enjoyed far greater prestige with King
Charles than Lord Arundel. For instance, we know from Cassiano dal Pozzo's account of the
trip to France that
the Duke had tried to buy the Mona Lisa during his stay in Fointainebleau in
1625, probably through Gerbier's prior advice. Equally, we are also aware that
Buckingham eventually managed to buy a copy. At the time of his assassination,
the Duke certainly owned the aforementioned copy, and two other paintings
attributed to Leonardo.
Three cores
of Leonardo's drawings are present in British public institutions: the first is
located at the Royal Collection in Windsor; the second at the Christ Church in
Oxford and the third at the British Museum. Martin Clayton, Jacqueline Thalmann
and Sarah Vowles with Hugo Chapman reconstruct their origins and the relevant
historical events.
The
collection of the Royal Collection (555 autographed sheets of a fundamentally
'artistic' topic plus about sixty copies and works by Leonardo's students) is by far
the most numerous and has the characteristic of coming largely from a group of
drawings which were aggregated together since 1519, or since the death of
Leonardo and the passage of the folios in the hands of Francesco Melzi. From
Melzi the folios went to Pompeo Leoni. Leoni, who lived between Italy and
Spain, owned two albums of Leonardo's drawings: one is the Atlantic codex (now
in the Ambrosiana Library) and the other the so-called "Leoni Album",
which is the one found in Windsor. Clayton formulated various hypotheses on the
arrival of the album in England, certainly by 1629, when it was in the
possession of Lord Arundel, but most likely between 1625 and 1626. The issue
is, basically, to understand whether the album came directly to Arundel or
intermediate passages involved the Prince of Wales and/or the Duke of
Buckingham. Moreover, the Leoni Album should not be confused with the two above
mentioned codes in the possession of Juan de Espina, which are still preserved
in Madrid today. By 1690 the album passed into the hands of the English Crown;
nevertheless, it went through seventy years of substantial oblivion, until a
gradual rediscovery in the second half of the eighteenth century, with the
publication of part of the drawings (by Francesco Bartolozzi and others between
1795 and 1811), until the first overall inventory was made in the early
nineteenth century.
The core of
the Christ Church drawings is actually quite limited, and is the result of the
collecting activity of General John Guise (1682-1765). The most interesting
aspect, however, is that when, by testamentary disposition, it reached Oxford,
about forty sheets were attributed to Leonardo, while currently only seven are.
Guise had studied at Christ Church and here he had met and attended Henry
Aldrich (1648-1710), a collector himself; it was probably through Aldrich that
he came into contact with some prints taken from works by the Tuscan artist and
with the printed editions of the Treatise
on Painting of 1651. The case of the English general fits perfectly with
our attempt to understand the mechanisms through which the amateurs made
attributions to Leonardo, in the substantial absence (or extreme rarity)
of directly observable originals. First
of all, a portrait of a young man today assigned to Sodoma bears the words “By Leonardo da Vinci. Portrait of Raphael
from Urbino". It being understood that it is not clear when these
writings were inserted (and probably they were on different occasions), it is
evident that the drawing had an evocative power for the collector because it
was assumed to offer the historical evidence of the meeting (and the passing of
the baton) between da Vinci and Sanzio.
 |
| Sodoma, Portrait of a Young Boy, Christ Church, Oxford, JBS 313 Source: https://www.pinterest.it/pin/496944140112969411/ |
Similarly,
a portrait of a Venetian nobleman today attributed to Giovanni Bellini was
believed to be the effigy of Ludovico Sforza. Another of the forty sheets that
came to the Christ Church collection reproduced a torso of a Roman sculpture
and contained the description "Engraved
in the house of Ciampolino 1513 in Rome". Assigned as it was to
Leonardo, it testified to his presence in the Eternal City and the study of
ancient art. In short, Guise believed he had highly evocative drawings of
particular historical moments, and for this reason he had purchased them
(probably before 1720), taking particular account, rather than on stylistic
aspects that he could not know, on the written testimonies reported on the
sheets, as they were matching with printed sources. In fact, what is considered
today the most important specimen preserved at Christ Church is the cartoon
representing the grotesque bust of a man, which Bernard Berenson, relying on
Vasari, thought to be Scaramuccia, king of the gypsies, but which certainly
entered in the Guise collection because it was perfectly part of the well-known
tradition of Vinci's physiognomic studies. It should be remembered that about
half of the forty sheets that made up the Guise collection came from the
collection of Carlo Ridolfi (1594-1658), author of
the Wonders of Art (1648), perhaps arrived in England
(Thalmann's hypothesis) through Marshal Schulenberg (1661-1747), who lived in
Venice for a long time.
 |
| Leonardo, Grotesque Bust of a Man, Christ Church, Oxford, JBS 19 Source: http://www.openculture.com/2017/09/leonardo-da-vincis-bizarre-caricatures-monster-drawings.html |
The British
Museum's collection has completely different characteristics from the first
two, because it does not come from an original nucleus or from the collectible
effort of a single person, but is the result of a series of 'extemporaneous'
acquisitions that occurred during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is
impossible to follow the events here. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning some
aspects. The British Museum was without Leonardo's drawings at the time of its
foundation; only in 1824 it obtained some of them following the inheritance
of Richard Payne Knight (1751-1824). On that occasion eighteen drawings
attributed to Leonardo entered the collection, for the most part studies of
heads, which today, except for two, are assigned to other names, including a dozen
portraits attributed to an anonymous Dutchman. This raises legitimate doubts about
the real competence of the British curators at the time. Even Passavant, in 1831, visiting the museum's
collection, assigned a drawing to the Vinci which was not his. Therefore, it
must be remembered, once again, that the number of original works accessible
also to experts in the sector was extremely limited; Windsor's collections were
little known, and if anything, one could resort to the seventeenth century
engravings by Hollar or the late eighteenth century engravings by Bartolozzi.
All the events of British collecting were then based on a sort of 'original
sin'. In 1830, in fact, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), president of the Royal
Academy at the time, died, and the British Museum was offered the entire
collection of drawings by ancient masters of the deceased. The government did
not consent to the purchase of the material for 18 thousand pounds and the
drawings were gradually dispersed. The Lawrence collection also included several
drawings by Leonardo. In the following decades the British Museum, mainly by bidding
in auctions, managed to recover some of them, always appealing to the
government for ad hoc allocations to partially compensate the serious mistake
made with the Lawrence inheritance. However, purchases were increasingly
difficult, due to the surge in the prices of Leonardo's graphic tests and much
had to be renounced when prices reached levels that were not affordable for a
museum institution.
 |
| Leonardo, Head of a Warrior, London, British Museum Source: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/225833001 |
The National Gallery
 |
| Leonardo, The Virgin of the Rocks, London, National Gallery NG1093 Source: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/leonardo-da-vinci-the-virgin-of-the-rocks |
Leonardo's
first work to be bought by the National Gallery was the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks in 1880. The museum
– which existed since 1824 – already included The Christ among the doctors by Bernardino Luini, at the time
believed to be a Leonardo. In the essay The
National Gallery Searching for Leonardo, Susanna Avery-Quash and Silvia
Davoli recalled that as early as 1854 Otto Mündler argued that it was undoubtedly a
Luini. The twenty-four years that it took for it to be recognized as such in
the museum catalogue also demonstrate how great the desire to own a work by the
artist from Vinci was (especially if we take into account the competition with
other European museum institutions and, in particular, with the Louvre).
Talking about the National Gallery museum policy in the second half of the
nineteenth century means dwelling first of all with Charles Lock Eastlake’s work, his first Director after the
reform of 1855. The main merit of the English connoisseur, in the substantial
absence of works by the artist on the market, was that of helping reconstruct
the Lombard artistic context in which Leonardo worked for several years. Eastlake's
approach, which had clear encyclopaedic purposes and aimed to gather testimonies
of the development of the various Italian art schools on the walls of the
museum, was subsequently judged to be not sufficiently attentive to purely
aesthetic aspects. The fact remains that, at the death of Eastlake, and again
in the following years, thanks to the work of the successive directors and the
group of connoisseurs who had dealt with Eastlake in support of his research,
the National Gallery was finally able to offer to the visitors a sufficiently
complete picture of early 16th century Lombard painting (Bergognone,
Boltraffio, Francesco Melzi, Andrea Solario, Bernardino Lanino). Moreover, a series
of purchases aimed to reconstruct the Florentine circles in which Leonardo had
moved (Piero di Cosimo, Lorenzo di Credi). Physically, the Lombards were
exposed all together, in a crescendo that saw in Correggio the artist of the
highest level influenced by Leonardo, while the paintings of the artist from
Vinci were in the context of the Florentine school. This entailed having to
make choices that might seem inconsistent: when, for example, the Virgin of the Rocks entered the English
collection, it was exhibited in the context of Florentine works, although
dating back to the period when Leonardo was in Lombardy.
End of Part One
Go to Part Two
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