The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece. Ben Lewis
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Anxious to do his duty well,
Van Dort there, conscientious elf,
from hanging up his pictures, fell
One day to hanging up himself.15
Ten years later a second inventory was made of Charles I’s collection, and this one, the Commonwealth Inventory of 1649–51, does mention, for the first time, a picture that could be the Salvator Mundi.
At the close of the English Civil War, the defeated king was beheaded in January 1649. Two months later, Parliament, now representing a ‘Commonwealth’, not a ‘kingdom’, decided that all the late king’s possessions, including his art collection, should be valued and then sold. The funds raised were to pay off the royal debts – the king owed money to hundreds of servants, tradesmen and craftsmen. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘That gallery to whose formation politics had been sacrificed … was now, in turn, sacrificed to political and ideological revolution.’16
An inventory was produced for this sale of ‘the late king’s goods’. Item number 49 was a ‘Peece of Christ done by Leonard’. There was only one well-known artist at the time called Leonard, or Leonardo. It is not a very precise description, but just one single-figure type of portrait painting of Christ in Leonardo’s style has ever been known, and that is as the saviour of the world, or Salvator Mundi. The ‘Peece of Christ’ was valued at a mere £30.
The Commonwealth Inventory’s entry for the ‘Peece of Christ’ introduces a new mystery to the painting, namely its price. Thirty pounds for a Leonardo – around £3,000 in today’s money – is rock bottom for one of the ten most desirable Renaissance masters on the mid-seventeenth-century European art market. But it might add another piece of evidence to the provenance narrative. One of the distinguishing features of Simon’s Salvator
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