paintings, which he knew the king loved. Or perhaps he could at least convince the king to moderate the oppression of Catholics in England. Of that fateful evening Panzani wrote, ‘Especially pleasing to the Queen was that by Vinci, and that by Andrea del Sarto.’ However, the queen said ruefully that she would not be able to keep them for herself, because they were so good that ‘the King would steal them from her’.
Meanwhile, Charles had been informed of the newly arrived masterpieces. He came hurrying down the corridors with a few of his courtiers, including the brilliant architect Inigo Jones, who shared the sovereign’s enthusiasm for Italian painting. Charles and Jones then played a game. Charles removed the labels bearing the names of the artists which Panzani had attached to each picture, and Jones attempted to identify the works’ creators, based on the style and technique. Thus began the discipline of connoisseurship in Britain, a parlour game for the wealthiest strata of society, but also, let us not forget, the sine qua non of the discipline of art history.
Inigo Jones, wrote Panzani, ‘threw down his riding cloak, put on his spectacles, took hold of a candle and turned to inspect all of them minutely together with the King’. The candle flickered over the outlines of portraits of noblemen and women, lighting up the spidery lace of their collars and cuffs, the sheen of their buckles, buttons and scabbards, and flourishes in their moustaches. Jones ‘accorded them extraordinary approval’, then pointed to one, and – Panzani writes with a trace of the suppressed smirk that one would expect from a citizen of the birthplace of the Renaissance watching the efforts of an English novice – ‘The King’s architect Jones believes that the picture by Leonardo is the portrait of a certain Venetian Ginevra Benci and he concludes it from the G. and B. inscribed on her breast. As he is very conceited and boastful he often repeats this idea of his to demonstrate his great knowledge of painting.’
Jones got the artist more or less right. This was a painting attributed by everyone at the time to Leonardo, although today it is ascribed to his most sensitive pupil, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio. But Jones got the identity and gender of the sitter wrong – perhaps understandably, given the gloom. He was in fact looking at a beautiful and ethereal image of a young man, his hand inside his cloak covering his heart, gazing slightly askance as if lost in a daydream. The sitter was probably the Italian poet Girolamo Casio. Today the picture hangs at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.
From Charles I’s passion for art and for Leonardo da Vinci sprang the birth of the international art market, which has evolved to the business we know today. It began thirteen years earlier, in 1623, when Charles was heir to the throne. He had travelled to Madrid with the intention of returning with a bride, the Spanish Infanta Maria. He failed to win the hand of the Spanish princess, but he did return with a new love – art.
According to an account by the English author and diplomat Henry Wotton, Charles had set off for Spain with his friend the courtier George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was then in his early thirties and, according to many who set eyes on him, ‘the handsomest-bodied man of England; his limbs so well compacted and his conversation so pleasing and of so sweet disposition’.1 Charles and Buckingham travelled incognito, ‘with disguised beards and borrowed names of Thomas and John Smith’2 and with only three servants. The journey was not as secret as they pretended, however. Charles’s father, King James I, had sanctioned this romantic quest after having spent years trying to negotiate the marriage of his son to a Spanish princess, all in vain. Christian Europe had been split in two by the Reformation, with the Roman Catholic empires and the pope on one side, 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 Buckingham’s planning was slipshod. They didn’t have the right small change to pay the ferry across the Thames at Gravesend – ‘for lack of silver, they were fain to give the ferryman a piece of two and twenty shillings’3 – and this immense overpayment aroused suspicions. At Canterbury they were stopped by local officials, but made their escape after Buckingham, who was Lord Admiral of the Fleet, pulled off his beard, revealed his true identity and said he was on his way to perform a surprise inspection of the navy. In Paris the pair bought wigs and charmed their way into the French royal palace, surely with French officials winking at each other over the Englishmen’s poor disguises. There they set eyes on Henrietta Maria, the daughter of the French King Henry IV, who would one day be Charles’s actual bride. But she was Plan B.
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
Charles rode alongside the Spanish king, under an ornate canopy, through the streets of Madrid, the capital of a freshly baked empire that stretched from North Africa to Latin America. The air reverberated with fanfares of trumpets and drums, while tapestries and carpets hung in decorative celebration from crowded balconies, wafting slowly in the spring breeze. The King of Spain temporarily relaxed the rules that limited the cost of clothing a subject might wear, and offered his nobility loans of up to 20,000 ducats so his court could impress the visiting English prince. There was jousting and bullfighting in the city’s enormous central square, the Plaza Mayor. Charles sat in a balcony neighbouring that of the Spanish princess, as close as decorum allowed, and seemed smitten. The spectacle was so expensive that locals joked that Charles had managed to sack the city without an army.
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
Charles spent eight months hanging around in Madrid, waiting for a breakthrough in the marriage negotiations. He had time on his hands, and he spent it in the company of Buckingham and assorted courtiers and art advisers, visiting the magnificent palaces of the Spanish sovereign and the mansions of his nobles, and shopping for art. In the seventeenth century Spain held much the same power over the English psyche as Paris did in the twentieth: it was the epitome of
