Well, I'm Italian and reside in Great Britain, but I can't fathom why some of Leonardo da Vinci's greatest drawings reside in Great Britain too, at Windsor Castle to be precise. The key to Leonardo's genius lies in his notebooks, where he unravelled the secrets of anatomy, engineering, art – life itself. But one mystery has never been solved: how did his greatest drawings get from Italy to Windsor Castle – and at one of the bloodiest periods in English history? Were they smuggled in by King Charles I? Or the court painter Peter Paul Rubens? Art critic Jonathan Jones thinks he's finally cracked it...
For centuries, this object lay forgotten in the dark. War and fire raged all around it, and should have destroyed it. But it survived, and kept its precious cargo safe until one day it returned to the light. From that moment it was doomed.
This empty volume is a clue to the mystery I'm here to solve. The jewel of the British Royal Collection is a collection of 600 or so sheets of drawings and notes by Leonardo da Vinci. They constitute the greatest work of art in Britain – no debate. They star in every Leonardo exhibition around the world. But no one actually knows – least of all the Royal Collection, which would love to – how they got here in the first place. There is no record of the drawings' owner for most of the 1600s, before the first mention of them in the Royal collection in 1690 – after which they vanished again until their discovery in a chest, in the reign of George III.
Turning away from the husk of an album for now, I look at the drawings in Perspex mounts on what resemble big music-stands all along the desk. I have been looking all day through boxes of these sheets of ancient blue, red, and cream-coloured paper, manufactured in Italy in the 15th and early 16th centuries, that once lay secure inside that empty binding. At one point I accidentally held a blue sheet so the light was behind it and for a moment its desperate fragility became obvious. The design vanished and what remained was like a moth's wing - desiccated, webbed, strengthless.
The sheet of notes on the stand is, however, incredibly well-preserved, in ink whose crisp decisiveness communicates scientific authority. In the largest and most iconic drawing on the sheet, two halves of a womb have been pulled back to reveal a human foetus, legs folded up, big bald ball of a head turned downwards, face hidden behind a perfect hand resting on a perfect knee. It looks as if it is only sleeping, so respectfully has Leonardo drawn what is both a scientific illustration, and so much more. He cut the dead mother's womb open to expose the foetus within but, as he takes up his pen, the scientist becomes the artist. You share his feeling of humility and awe at the spectacle of humanity's beginnings: the infinite possibility. He marvels at the big feet, the perfect ear, and, most of all, the shining dome of the skull, containing the germ of nature's supreme marvel, a human mind.
Other images surround this drawing, including studies of the vascular walls of the uterus that mistakenly give it interlacing blobs called cotyledons, like those Leonardo had observed in a cow. Then there is the handwriting that, famously, flows in the opposite direction from most people's. An early set of reproductions of his anatomical drawings, engraved in 1796 soon after their rediscovery, renders this script as a blur. Nowadays, every word has been deciphered by scholars. On one of the sheets at Windsor, Leonardo makes clear from what gory solitude his study of the foetus was born: he remembers "passing the night hours in the company of these corpses, quartered and flayed, and horrible to behold".
What a man called Mr Dalton found at the bottom of a chest in a royal palace one day in the 18th century was, quite simply, the greatest collection of evidence of Leonardo da Vinci's genius that survives – or at least that is known to survive. Everyone knows Leonardo left notebooks that massively amplify his small corpus of paintings. It is in his notebooks, scattered in museums and libraries across Europe, that his designs for inventions, scientific researches, plans for unfinished works, caricatures, landscapes, maps, emblems, architectural designs, and iconic images such as Vitruvian Man, are to be found. What is less well-known is that the collection of his drawings and notes at Windsor Castle is far and away the best of all.
I'm not sure why this isn't more often acknowledged. Perhaps republicanism makes us want to talk up notebooks in public collections; perhaps internationalism makes us want to praise Italy's Codice Atlantico. More pathetically, deference to Bill Gates leads experts to collaborate in talking up the Codex Leicester, which he owns. Obviously, every letter of every word, every nuance of shading, from the hand of Leonardo is precious. But much of Italy's Codice Atlantico is concerned with abstruse problems; many pages have no drawings or only tiny ones. The same goes for the Codex Arundel, held in the British Library. By contrast, the album at Windsor combines Leonardo's greatest scientific research – his anatomies – with an abundance of artistic designs. It is the perfect Leonardo museum, bound in a book – or it was bound in a book, until its images were mounted and displayed by curators at the Royal Collection.
The Mona Lisa and the handful of Leonardo's other surviving paintings are like a mask he wore. They are wonderful performances that play on our deepest psychological responses. Leonardo anticipated the surrealists in using raw psychic material in his art, as he explains in a note in the Vatican that recommends staring at a wall until you see images of mountains and battles. Yet they are not what he considered the core of his life's work. When Vasari and Sigmund Freud wrote about Leonardo, they wondered why he failed to finish paintings. The answer is that he was less interested in commissioned works than in his own quest to understand nature and humanity. It's in his manuscripts – more like scientific notes than the drawings of other artists – that you find the record of this.
This is a detective story about art and war in the bloodiest period of British history. In the 17th century, Charles I was beheaded after causing a civil war that killed multitudes of his people. Somehow, while all those people were dying, the most precious and delicate relics of the Italian Renaissance – these drawings and notes – came to Britain.
I may not be a Harvard professor of religious symbology or know much about the bloodline of the Magdalene, but I do enjoy a mystery and so I set out to solve this one. And I succeeded. Final proof is elusive, always, but in this case the circumstantial evidence is so overwhelming, I think I've got my man. I know who brought Leonardo's greatest drawings to Britain.
The hunt begins in Milan, where in June this year big screens were being set up in front of the cascading gothic cathedral for people to watch one of Italy's first World Cup games. In the nearby Ambrosiana museum and library, which holds the Codice Atlantico, is an inscription engraved in marble that makes an amazing claim: that, in the 17th century, Count Arconati, who gave the Codex to this library, fought off a bid of £1,000 from the English king – "ANGLIAE REX" – to keep them in Italy.
It was in Milan that Leonardo first started to make notes about everything. Born in 1452 in Tuscany, educated as an artist in Florence, he seems to have rebelled against the life of a jobbing painter and came to Milan hoping its ambitious ruler Ludovico Sforza would pay him to think. In Florence, he left the unfinished Adoration of the Magi, a painting that tries to be about everything – architecture, history, nature. Its teeming images of horses, battles and a staircase to nowhere strain to understand the world in a way that exceeds what others expected of art.
This boundless curiosity is there in the pages and pages of notes he wrote until the end of his life, at Amboise in the Loire Vallery in 1519, where he had moved to be painter to the French king. Leonardo's will shows his great anxiety about the posthumous fate of his illustrated writings. He never published a word, but even so believed he was writing books. He left his notebooks to his favourite pupil, Francesco Melzi, a Milanese of noble birth: Melzi is to inherit, says the will, "each and every one of the books, which the Testator now possesses".
Melzi took the books and unbound papers back to his own city, Milan, and did his best to organise them. He showed them to interested people such as the art chronicler Vasari, and laboured to produce at least one workable book manuscript from Leonardo's notes: a Treatise on Painting, whose manuscript is now in the Vatican. A version of this was published in France in 1651. But, by then, Melzi was long dead, and Leonardo's notebooks were on their complicated journey around Europe.
Melzi's heirs in Milan did not understand the peculiar documents they had inherited; they let the notes rot, allowed visitors to take them away wholesale. Eventually, the Italian sculptor Pompeo Leoni got his hands on huge quantities of Leonardo's drawings and notes, and bound them into leather volumes.
By 1690, the most significant of Leoni's albums was in the hands of the British monarchy. How did such a precious volume get to Britain without being noticed? Why wasn't its arrival recorded? How did it survive? And the underlying mystery – why were the puritanical British, whose island was regarded by Renaissance Italians as an obscure barbarian land, even interested in it?
The answer to that last question is not hard to find in London. On Whitehall is the last surviving part of Whitehall Palace – Inigo Jones' towering classical box of a Banqueting Hall with ceiling frescoes by Peter Paul Rubens. This and other surviving islands of Baroque London are proof enough that the British court was acutely interested in art and architecture in the early 17th century. Charles I imported the Catholic splendour of the Baroque to Britain – he was portrayed in marble by the Pope's personal artist Bernini, and employed court artists such as Rubens and Van Dyck, as well as the Italians Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio.
When Charles was still prince, he visited Madrid in a daring undercover mission to make a political marriage. He didn't get married in the end, but he did see a lot of art, and cheekily asked for Titians as presents. It's surprising how political this all is, four centuries on. Royalists make such a fuss about Charles as a tasteful, sensitive soul – ignoring evidence that he was a stupid, dogmatic, inadequate man who brought his people to civil war; a backlash against him was inevitable. Jerry Brotton's book The Sale of the Late King's Goods (2007) sees Charles I's art collecting far more sceptically, as a story of deals and negotiations with no love at its heart. Maybe. But as far as I can see, from looking at paintings such as Moses in the Bulrushes by Orazio Gentileschi, and still more at his daughter Artemisia's Self-Portrait as the Muse of Painting, Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria presided over a court that rivalled the artistic excellence of continental capitals. The London of Charles I was becoming more civilised, in a European Catholic way.
Upon his accession in 1625, one of King Charles I's very first acts was to swap a portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein for a painting that belonged to the French king – Leonardo da Vinci's Saint John the Baptist, today in the Louvre. Bare-shouldered with an enigmatic smile, pointing up at heaven – in fact his vertical finger caresses a cross so dark you don't immediately see it in the shadows – Leonardo's Baptist seems more profane than sacred. To the Protestants responsible for the fate of Charles' art collection after his beheading, its sexual quality can only have added to its repellent papism. It was sold abroad and ended up back in the French royal collection.
What happened, in the brutal 17th century, to bring Pompeo Leoni's Leonardo album to London? In the Pizza Express on Windsor High Street, the Royal Collection's dapperly dressed Leonardo expert, Martin Clayton, shares his hunch – just a hunch, he insists – that, who knows, maybe Charles I himself grabbed the album on his youthful adventure to Madrid. Nice hunch. But when I mention it later to Martin Kemp, professor of art history at Oxford, he jokes that Clayton is a "courtier", predisposed to find evidence of royal good taste.
I go to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to follow up another lead: Thomas Howard, Second Earl of Arundel and Charles I's most knowledgeable adviser on art. I've read a slightly breathless tribute to Arundel, claiming he knew more about Italy than any Englishman before him. I've come here to see if that's even slightly plausible. The Ashmolean owns many Greek and Roman sculptures from Arundel's collection, and it's obvious looking at them that he was no mere aristocratic snaffler. He excavated sculpture himself in Rome and obtained, at what must have been huge expense and effort, authentic examples of Greek art from Asia Minor.
Arundel collected drawings, too. He had so many drawings that a purpose-built room had to be created for them in his mansion on the Strand. When he was living in exile in Italy at the end of his life, he told the diarist John Evelyn the true story behind the plaque in the Ambrosiana library in Milan. It was not really the king, he explained, but he, Arundel, who had tried to buy the Codex Atlanticus. The king had given permission to use his name. Now, he said, he could see his "folly" – the Codex wasn't worth the £1,000 he had offered. But how did he know this? I think the truth is, he had seen better. He had seen the Leoni album that was to end up in the Royal Collection.
During the civil war, when Arundel was living in exile, the Bohemian artist Wenceslas Hollar published engravings of Leonardo's drawings. The engravings depict the very Leonardos now at Windsor. Only a couple have a credit saying they come from the Arundel collection – but it would be a fair assumption that if Arundel had one drawing, he had them all: by this time, all 600 or so drawings were bound in Leoni's single album. There are two possibilities here: either Arundel had bought Leoni's album himself in Madrid; or Charles I had imported it, and it came into Arundel's hands during the civil war.
Either way, what is clear is that the album had reached court circles before the death of Charles I. So do we owe its provenance to the brilliant collecting instincts of these two men? I don't think so. Arundel and Charles were intense, but narrow, men. They were interested, informed, even passionate when it came to art – but they weren't geniuses. And the acquisition of the world's best collection of Leonardo notes and drawings points to a collecting genius.
In 1629, someone came to the court of Charles I who understood Leonardo da Vinci better than anyone. I first saw the clue to my man's identity in a portrait of Arundel in the National Gallery in London. It's a very loving portrait. The artist obviously admires and likes Thomas Howard, seeing in him not merely a powerful courtier but a friend. Did I say the clue was in the painting? The clue is the painting.
It is one of several portraits of Arundel by his friend, the artist, diplomat, courtier and scholar Peter Paul Rubens. Born in Germany to an Antwerp family, getting his higher education in an extended trip to Italy, Rubens became the greatest of all Baroque painters. He is a supreme court artist who proves what every courtier, and perhaps every intellectual wants to believe – that erudition and style can transmute into genius. No one can dispute Rubens' genius even if it is a system of quotations, a supercharged commentary on Caravaggio and Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael and – obsessively – Leonardo.
Rubens was particularly transfixed by the legend of Leonardo's lost, painting The Battle of Anghiari. He got his hands on a 16th-century drawing of this vanished painting, adding his own swirling horses' manes and bulging eyes. It haunts his lion hunts, battles, conversions of St Paul, every horse and monster he ever painted. Where did Rubens learn enough about Leonardo to be able to convincingly reimagine a lost work by him?
There is a drawing in the Royal Collection in which, in preparation for his battle painting, Leonardo portrays horses' faces in frenzy. Teeth champ, eyes bulge. Of all the drawings by Leonardo that survive, this is the closest in spirit to Rubens' drawing of The Battle of Anghiari. Rubens knew the drawing, and he therefore knew the Leoni album. We have to go back to that crucial fact: all the drawings were by now in a single album. To know one was to know them all. When Rubens came to London, his mission was to make peace between the Spanish and the English courts. What better way to charm Charles I than pointing him to a truly unique treasure? It was Rubens who pointed the king and Arundel towards the Leonardo he loved himself - the expression and movement you encounter in the drawings at Windsor, from his designs for The Last Supper to his monstrous caricatures. When, in a book-lined study in Oxford, I mention Rubens to Kemp, he gets quite excited. Follow up the Rubens lead, suggests Kemp, my Deep Throat, and you won't go far wrong.
Rubens left the English court in 1630. In Antwerp, he reworked one of his greatest paintings, a river landscape that is a fantastical version of the Thames running through a dreamlike England. In this landscape Rubens sets the story of Saint George and the Dragon. The holy knight George is personified by Charles I; the damsel he rescues is Queen Henrietta Maria. Rubens had started it during his visit to London, but later added horrific details – half-eaten corpses, the dragon's victims.
The body nearest to us lies on its front. The skin has been removed, either by the dragon's fiery breath or the process of decay. The man's flayed arms reveal their inner structure: muscles and tendons laid bare. On the torso you can see vertebrae, ribs, internal organs. He might have been dissected. I think these corpses allude directly to the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. The flayed corpses surround Saint George just as Leonardo's anatomical drawings surrounded Charles and his circle in life, on the advice of Rubens.
A detective story usually starts with the corpse. In this case, it is the final clue that links Peter Paul Rubens, the British monarchy, and the genius of Leonardo da Vinci. It tells us how his masterpiece got here.
Drawn to a conclusion: the incredible journey of Leonardo's art
1519 Leonardo da Vinci dies at Amboise in France. Leaves his notebooks to his favourite pupil, Francesco Melzi, who takes them to Milan
1566 Melzi shows Leonardo's anatomical drawings to art historian Giorgio Vasari
1590s Many of Leonardo's papers come into the possession of Pompeo Leoni, a sculptor from Arrezzo; he binds them into albums and later takes them to Madrid
1600-1608 Dutch painter Peter Paul Rubens lives and works in Italy, studying the art of Leonardo and other Renaissance masters
1603 Rubens' first trip to the Spanish court in Madrid
1610 Leoni dies in Madrid. Several volumes of Leonardo's drawings and notes remain there
1623 Prince Charles visits Madrid, travelling incognito, and tries to obtain paintings by Titian as gifts
1625 Accession of Charles I to the throne. Swaps Holbein portrait of Erasmus with the King of France for Leonardo da Vinci's Saint John the Baptist
1629-30 Rubens visits British court as peace ambassador from Spain. Begins work on Landscape with Saint George and the Dragon. Knighted by Charles I
1634 Rubens finishes canvases for Banqueting House, London
1639 Charles disastrously appoints the aesthete Earl of Arundel as commander of his army against Scottish rebels
1640 Death of Rubens
1642 War breaks out between King and parliament. Arundel flees abroad. Wenceslas Hollar engraves Leonardo drawings apparently owned by Arundel
1646 Death of Arundel in Italy
1649 Execution of Charles I. Much of his art collection sold, including Leonardo's Saint John, now at the Louvre
1690 Dutch artist Constantine Huyghens sees Leonardo da Vinci album at Kensington Palace
1760 Reign of George III begins. Pompeo Leoni's album is discovered in a chest in the royal household
1930 By this date all drawings from the Leoni volume are removed to be conserved and displayed.
This empty volume is a clue to the mystery I'm here to solve. The jewel of the British Royal Collection is a collection of 600 or so sheets of drawings and notes by Leonardo da Vinci. They constitute the greatest work of art in Britain – no debate. They star in every Leonardo exhibition around the world. But no one actually knows – least of all the Royal Collection, which would love to – how they got here in the first place. There is no record of the drawings' owner for most of the 1600s, before the first mention of them in the Royal collection in 1690 – after which they vanished again until their discovery in a chest, in the reign of George III.
Turning away from the husk of an album for now, I look at the drawings in Perspex mounts on what resemble big music-stands all along the desk. I have been looking all day through boxes of these sheets of ancient blue, red, and cream-coloured paper, manufactured in Italy in the 15th and early 16th centuries, that once lay secure inside that empty binding. At one point I accidentally held a blue sheet so the light was behind it and for a moment its desperate fragility became obvious. The design vanished and what remained was like a moth's wing - desiccated, webbed, strengthless.
Other images surround this drawing, including studies of the vascular walls of the uterus that mistakenly give it interlacing blobs called cotyledons, like those Leonardo had observed in a cow. Then there is the handwriting that, famously, flows in the opposite direction from most people's. An early set of reproductions of his anatomical drawings, engraved in 1796 soon after their rediscovery, renders this script as a blur. Nowadays, every word has been deciphered by scholars. On one of the sheets at Windsor, Leonardo makes clear from what gory solitude his study of the foetus was born: he remembers "passing the night hours in the company of these corpses, quartered and flayed, and horrible to behold".
What a man called Mr Dalton found at the bottom of a chest in a royal palace one day in the 18th century was, quite simply, the greatest collection of evidence of Leonardo da Vinci's genius that survives – or at least that is known to survive. Everyone knows Leonardo left notebooks that massively amplify his small corpus of paintings. It is in his notebooks, scattered in museums and libraries across Europe, that his designs for inventions, scientific researches, plans for unfinished works, caricatures, landscapes, maps, emblems, architectural designs, and iconic images such as Vitruvian Man, are to be found. What is less well-known is that the collection of his drawings and notes at Windsor Castle is far and away the best of all.
I'm not sure why this isn't more often acknowledged. Perhaps republicanism makes us want to talk up notebooks in public collections; perhaps internationalism makes us want to praise Italy's Codice Atlantico. More pathetically, deference to Bill Gates leads experts to collaborate in talking up the Codex Leicester, which he owns. Obviously, every letter of every word, every nuance of shading, from the hand of Leonardo is precious. But much of Italy's Codice Atlantico is concerned with abstruse problems; many pages have no drawings or only tiny ones. The same goes for the Codex Arundel, held in the British Library. By contrast, the album at Windsor combines Leonardo's greatest scientific research – his anatomies – with an abundance of artistic designs. It is the perfect Leonardo museum, bound in a book – or it was bound in a book, until its images were mounted and displayed by curators at the Royal Collection.
The Mona Lisa and the handful of Leonardo's other surviving paintings are like a mask he wore. They are wonderful performances that play on our deepest psychological responses. Leonardo anticipated the surrealists in using raw psychic material in his art, as he explains in a note in the Vatican that recommends staring at a wall until you see images of mountains and battles. Yet they are not what he considered the core of his life's work. When Vasari and Sigmund Freud wrote about Leonardo, they wondered why he failed to finish paintings. The answer is that he was less interested in commissioned works than in his own quest to understand nature and humanity. It's in his manuscripts – more like scientific notes than the drawings of other artists – that you find the record of this.
This is a detective story about art and war in the bloodiest period of British history. In the 17th century, Charles I was beheaded after causing a civil war that killed multitudes of his people. Somehow, while all those people were dying, the most precious and delicate relics of the Italian Renaissance – these drawings and notes – came to Britain.
I may not be a Harvard professor of religious symbology or know much about the bloodline of the Magdalene, but I do enjoy a mystery and so I set out to solve this one. And I succeeded. Final proof is elusive, always, but in this case the circumstantial evidence is so overwhelming, I think I've got my man. I know who brought Leonardo's greatest drawings to Britain.
The hunt begins in Milan, where in June this year big screens were being set up in front of the cascading gothic cathedral for people to watch one of Italy's first World Cup games. In the nearby Ambrosiana museum and library, which holds the Codice Atlantico, is an inscription engraved in marble that makes an amazing claim: that, in the 17th century, Count Arconati, who gave the Codex to this library, fought off a bid of £1,000 from the English king – "ANGLIAE REX" – to keep them in Italy.
It was in Milan that Leonardo first started to make notes about everything. Born in 1452 in Tuscany, educated as an artist in Florence, he seems to have rebelled against the life of a jobbing painter and came to Milan hoping its ambitious ruler Ludovico Sforza would pay him to think. In Florence, he left the unfinished Adoration of the Magi, a painting that tries to be about everything – architecture, history, nature. Its teeming images of horses, battles and a staircase to nowhere strain to understand the world in a way that exceeds what others expected of art.
This boundless curiosity is there in the pages and pages of notes he wrote until the end of his life, at Amboise in the Loire Vallery in 1519, where he had moved to be painter to the French king. Leonardo's will shows his great anxiety about the posthumous fate of his illustrated writings. He never published a word, but even so believed he was writing books. He left his notebooks to his favourite pupil, Francesco Melzi, a Milanese of noble birth: Melzi is to inherit, says the will, "each and every one of the books, which the Testator now possesses".
Melzi took the books and unbound papers back to his own city, Milan, and did his best to organise them. He showed them to interested people such as the art chronicler Vasari, and laboured to produce at least one workable book manuscript from Leonardo's notes: a Treatise on Painting, whose manuscript is now in the Vatican. A version of this was published in France in 1651. But, by then, Melzi was long dead, and Leonardo's notebooks were on their complicated journey around Europe.
Melzi's heirs in Milan did not understand the peculiar documents they had inherited; they let the notes rot, allowed visitors to take them away wholesale. Eventually, the Italian sculptor Pompeo Leoni got his hands on huge quantities of Leonardo's drawings and notes, and bound them into leather volumes.
The answer to that last question is not hard to find in London. On Whitehall is the last surviving part of Whitehall Palace – Inigo Jones' towering classical box of a Banqueting Hall with ceiling frescoes by Peter Paul Rubens. This and other surviving islands of Baroque London are proof enough that the British court was acutely interested in art and architecture in the early 17th century. Charles I imported the Catholic splendour of the Baroque to Britain – he was portrayed in marble by the Pope's personal artist Bernini, and employed court artists such as Rubens and Van Dyck, as well as the Italians Artemisia Gentileschi and her father Orazio.
When Charles was still prince, he visited Madrid in a daring undercover mission to make a political marriage. He didn't get married in the end, but he did see a lot of art, and cheekily asked for Titians as presents. It's surprising how political this all is, four centuries on. Royalists make such a fuss about Charles as a tasteful, sensitive soul – ignoring evidence that he was a stupid, dogmatic, inadequate man who brought his people to civil war; a backlash against him was inevitable. Jerry Brotton's book The Sale of the Late King's Goods (2007) sees Charles I's art collecting far more sceptically, as a story of deals and negotiations with no love at its heart. Maybe. But as far as I can see, from looking at paintings such as Moses in the Bulrushes by Orazio Gentileschi, and still more at his daughter Artemisia's Self-Portrait as the Muse of Painting, Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria presided over a court that rivalled the artistic excellence of continental capitals. The London of Charles I was becoming more civilised, in a European Catholic way.
Upon his accession in 1625, one of King Charles I's very first acts was to swap a portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein for a painting that belonged to the French king – Leonardo da Vinci's Saint John the Baptist, today in the Louvre. Bare-shouldered with an enigmatic smile, pointing up at heaven – in fact his vertical finger caresses a cross so dark you don't immediately see it in the shadows – Leonardo's Baptist seems more profane than sacred. To the Protestants responsible for the fate of Charles' art collection after his beheading, its sexual quality can only have added to its repellent papism. It was sold abroad and ended up back in the French royal collection.
I go to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to follow up another lead: Thomas Howard, Second Earl of Arundel and Charles I's most knowledgeable adviser on art. I've read a slightly breathless tribute to Arundel, claiming he knew more about Italy than any Englishman before him. I've come here to see if that's even slightly plausible. The Ashmolean owns many Greek and Roman sculptures from Arundel's collection, and it's obvious looking at them that he was no mere aristocratic snaffler. He excavated sculpture himself in Rome and obtained, at what must have been huge expense and effort, authentic examples of Greek art from Asia Minor.
Arundel collected drawings, too. He had so many drawings that a purpose-built room had to be created for them in his mansion on the Strand. When he was living in exile in Italy at the end of his life, he told the diarist John Evelyn the true story behind the plaque in the Ambrosiana library in Milan. It was not really the king, he explained, but he, Arundel, who had tried to buy the Codex Atlanticus. The king had given permission to use his name. Now, he said, he could see his "folly" – the Codex wasn't worth the £1,000 he had offered. But how did he know this? I think the truth is, he had seen better. He had seen the Leoni album that was to end up in the Royal Collection.
Either way, what is clear is that the album had reached court circles before the death of Charles I. So do we owe its provenance to the brilliant collecting instincts of these two men? I don't think so. Arundel and Charles were intense, but narrow, men. They were interested, informed, even passionate when it came to art – but they weren't geniuses. And the acquisition of the world's best collection of Leonardo notes and drawings points to a collecting genius.
In 1629, someone came to the court of Charles I who understood Leonardo da Vinci better than anyone. I first saw the clue to my man's identity in a portrait of Arundel in the National Gallery in London. It's a very loving portrait. The artist obviously admires and likes Thomas Howard, seeing in him not merely a powerful courtier but a friend. Did I say the clue was in the painting? The clue is the painting.
It is one of several portraits of Arundel by his friend, the artist, diplomat, courtier and scholar Peter Paul Rubens. Born in Germany to an Antwerp family, getting his higher education in an extended trip to Italy, Rubens became the greatest of all Baroque painters. He is a supreme court artist who proves what every courtier, and perhaps every intellectual wants to believe – that erudition and style can transmute into genius. No one can dispute Rubens' genius even if it is a system of quotations, a supercharged commentary on Caravaggio and Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael and – obsessively – Leonardo.
There is a drawing in the Royal Collection in which, in preparation for his battle painting, Leonardo portrays horses' faces in frenzy. Teeth champ, eyes bulge. Of all the drawings by Leonardo that survive, this is the closest in spirit to Rubens' drawing of The Battle of Anghiari. Rubens knew the drawing, and he therefore knew the Leoni album. We have to go back to that crucial fact: all the drawings were by now in a single album. To know one was to know them all. When Rubens came to London, his mission was to make peace between the Spanish and the English courts. What better way to charm Charles I than pointing him to a truly unique treasure? It was Rubens who pointed the king and Arundel towards the Leonardo he loved himself - the expression and movement you encounter in the drawings at Windsor, from his designs for The Last Supper to his monstrous caricatures. When, in a book-lined study in Oxford, I mention Rubens to Kemp, he gets quite excited. Follow up the Rubens lead, suggests Kemp, my Deep Throat, and you won't go far wrong.
Rubens left the English court in 1630. In Antwerp, he reworked one of his greatest paintings, a river landscape that is a fantastical version of the Thames running through a dreamlike England. In this landscape Rubens sets the story of Saint George and the Dragon. The holy knight George is personified by Charles I; the damsel he rescues is Queen Henrietta Maria. Rubens had started it during his visit to London, but later added horrific details – half-eaten corpses, the dragon's victims.
The body nearest to us lies on its front. The skin has been removed, either by the dragon's fiery breath or the process of decay. The man's flayed arms reveal their inner structure: muscles and tendons laid bare. On the torso you can see vertebrae, ribs, internal organs. He might have been dissected. I think these corpses allude directly to the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. The flayed corpses surround Saint George just as Leonardo's anatomical drawings surrounded Charles and his circle in life, on the advice of Rubens.
Drawn to a conclusion: the incredible journey of Leonardo's art
1519 Leonardo da Vinci dies at Amboise in France. Leaves his notebooks to his favourite pupil, Francesco Melzi, who takes them to Milan
1566 Melzi shows Leonardo's anatomical drawings to art historian Giorgio Vasari
1590s Many of Leonardo's papers come into the possession of Pompeo Leoni, a sculptor from Arrezzo; he binds them into albums and later takes them to Madrid
1600-1608 Dutch painter Peter Paul Rubens lives and works in Italy, studying the art of Leonardo and other Renaissance masters
1603 Rubens' first trip to the Spanish court in Madrid
1610 Leoni dies in Madrid. Several volumes of Leonardo's drawings and notes remain there
1623 Prince Charles visits Madrid, travelling incognito, and tries to obtain paintings by Titian as gifts
1625 Accession of Charles I to the throne. Swaps Holbein portrait of Erasmus with the King of France for Leonardo da Vinci's Saint John the Baptist
1629-30 Rubens visits British court as peace ambassador from Spain. Begins work on Landscape with Saint George and the Dragon. Knighted by Charles I
1634 Rubens finishes canvases for Banqueting House, London
1639 Charles disastrously appoints the aesthete Earl of Arundel as commander of his army against Scottish rebels
1640 Death of Rubens
1642 War breaks out between King and parliament. Arundel flees abroad. Wenceslas Hollar engraves Leonardo drawings apparently owned by Arundel
1646 Death of Arundel in Italy
1649 Execution of Charles I. Much of his art collection sold, including Leonardo's Saint John, now at the Louvre
1690 Dutch artist Constantine Huyghens sees Leonardo da Vinci album at Kensington Palace
1760 Reign of George III begins. Pompeo Leoni's album is discovered in a chest in the royal household
1930 By this date all drawings from the Leoni volume are removed to be conserved and displayed.
- Excellent Web Gallery of Leonardo's Works
- Check out my old post on Leonardo at Kinkazzo's Kanon: Leonardo da Vinci
- ...and see my page: BECOMING LEONARDO
- ...as also my post: GETTING TO KNOW A GENIUS
- ...as well as the interesting article by Anne Quito: Our cult of “genius” is blinding us to true genius all around, say Leonardo da Vinci’s biographers
