Desperately Seeking Leonardo

Silvia Davoli considers Britain’s long infatuation with the Renaissance Master and explains how the desire to buy a genuine Leonardo led to a new approach in collecting Italian art

- Silvia Davoli

POLITICAL upheavals on the Continent between the 1770s and 1870s wrought fundamental changes to the trade-in Old Masters. Prosperous Britain benefitted: the sale of the Orleans collection in 1793 saw outstanding works, such as Sebastiano del Piombo’s The raising of Lazarus and Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, come to this country. After the French invaded Holland in 1795, many Dutch collections were eventually dispersed on the English art market, as were many of the Italian paintings acquired by the French army in Italy in 1796, sold by art dealers including Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun and Noel Desenfans.

The increased demand resulting from this sudden availability of Old Masters meant that, by the 19th century, the supply of high-quality paintings from Europe began to dwindle, although art dealers continued to fuel the market with optimistic attributions. Scrolling through auction catalogues of the period, it is evident that there were too many Correggios, Michelangelos, Raffaellos and Leonardos on the market.

The National Gallery in London had been established relatively late compared with other similar institutions—in 1824—and found itself quickly having to form, with public money, a collection that could compete with its Continental counterparts (in contrast to the Louvre in Paris or the Bode Museum in Berlin, it did not have its roots in a royal collection). Of the leading Italian masters whose work the newly appointed trustees aspired to own, certainly the most sought after was Leonardo. The scarcity of his paintings—only 14 survive, excepting his frescoes, with a further two attributed without consensus—added to the artist’s mystique and made the quest to obtain an authentic one more exciting.