CHAPTER

16 Look, Cook Forsook

THERE IS A FAMOUS ROW of houses on the crest of Richmond Hill on the outskirts of London, a higgledy-piggledy series of Jacobean and Georgian mansions with façades of creamy white plaster, weathered red brickwork, and black ironwork balconies. Across the street is a tree-lined promenade before a grassy meadow that slopes down to the River Thames. It looks like a Gainsborough brought to life. In the first half of the twentieth century one of these fine residences, Doughty House, was the home of the Salvator Mundi. Of this we are certain.

According to Christie’s, in 1907 Simon and Parish’s Salvator Mundi resurfaced for the first time in about two hundred years. An alternative view would be that it didn’t resurface, but rather emerged for the first time ever—a painting with no history at all. Whatever life it had led hitherto, it now had a visual and verbal identity for the first time, but not yet as a Leonardo.

From the mid-1800s Doughty House was the home of Sir Francis Cook. The Salvator was listed in the home’s abridged catalogue in 1907 as “1a. Milanese School (circa. 1520).” The unusual “a” tells us that it was inserted into a space in the collection between other pictures that Cook had bought earlier.

Six years later, a three-volume catalogue of the entire collection was published. This was written by the colorful Finnish art historian Tancred Borenius, commissioned by Sir Herbert Cook, who took on the management of the collection after his grandfather, Sir Francis, died in 1901, and then inherited it twenty years later. In this catalogue the Salvator listing appears in the same place it did in 1907, amid Milanese paintings by Luini, Giampietrino, and others. But this time it reads thus:

No. 106: Salvator Mundi. Bust of Christ, who has dark auburn hair and wears a blue tunic, with brown bands. He raises his right hand in benediction and holds in his left a transparent glass globe. The flesh tints are reddish. Dark background.

Cataloguing had advanced since the age of Charles I, but the basic combination of a description of the painting and an account of its history remained the same. Thus, in Cook’s 1913 catalogue we learn that the painting was “purchased for £120” by Sir John Charles Robinson (more on this fellow, who was essentially the art dealer who mediated the sale of the painting to Cook, later).

As for the attribution, the 1913 catalogue describes it as “Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (Free Copy After).” Boltraffio was one of Leonardo’s most gifted assistants, but according to Borenius this is no Boltraffio. It is a copy of a Boltraffio. Since Boltraffio often copied designs by his master Leonardo, that meant the Salvator was now considered a copy of a copy, the lowest rung on the ladder of art history.

There is no photograph of the Salvator in the 1913 catalogue, but there is a reference to one: “Photo Gray 28992.” This indicates that a photograph was taken by the renowned Edwardian photographer William E. Gray, who gave his negative a number. Gray was known for his photographs of paintings, and was an official fine art photographer to Edward VII and then George V. This must have been the photograph that Robert Simon found in the Witt Library at the outset of his research.

In the Cook catalogue, Borenius noted the poor condition of the painting: “This picture…has suffered both by over-cleaning and repainting.” The original, he said, was another version of the Salvator, painted by Boltraffio, and was in the collection of Signor Giovanni Battisa Vittadini, an Italian collector.*1

But if you look closely, there is a tantalizing ray of hope in the small print of this relentlessly negative catalogue entry, a short sentence underneath the main text, initialed “HC,” for Herbert Cook.

I will explain later what he wrote.

BETWEEN 1900 AND 1958, when the Cook heirs eventually sold the Salvator, a long line of distinguished art historians took a look at the family’s picture. Unfortunately, none of them recognized it as a Leonardo.

The first was Sir John Charles Robinson. Born in 1824 into a family of modest means in Nottingham, the son of a printer, Robinson was brought up by his grandfather, a bookseller. He studied painting in Paris, whiling away his spare time in the shops of antique dealers and the homes of collectors, where eclectic arrangements of sculptures, antiques, and trinkets filled sideboards, tables, and mantelpieces, overlooked by oil paintings whose subjects emerged from ever-darkening varnishes. When he returned to England he became a teacher, and in 1853 he was appointed as the first superintendent of art collections at the newly formed Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), then called the Museum of Ornamental Art, and later the South Kensington Museum.

His portrait by John James Napier shows a thin-faced man with a sandy beard and sunken, bloodshot eyes. His gaze is intolerant, irascible, and intelligent. Over the course of twenty-five years Robinson collected art for the V&A, as well as acquiring both on behalf of collector clients and for himself. He bought antiquities, works of art, bric-à-brac, and objects of vertu—altarpieces, reliquaries, tapestries, the marble moldings of tombs, shields, ivory carvings, walnut cabinets, and paintings of course, as well as plate, bronzes, painted terra-cotta statues, ebony and gilt metal bedsteads, wrought-iron candlesticks, and, above all, his first love, majolica ceramics. In those days you could buy a Donatello sculpture for £300 and a Luca della Robbia painted terra-cotta for £60.

His hunting grounds ranged from London’s and Paris’s great auction houses—Christie’s, Phillips, and Drouot—to jewelers in the backstreets of Venice and dealers in the villages of Portugal. He traveled to the Italian hinterlands—“where,” he wrote, “as a rule all classes are willing to barter away their artistic possessions”—and to Spain, whose northwest regions were “almost as unknown as the interior of Africa.” He often paid a generous commission to middlemen who would guide him to a particularly secretive vendor, as is still the custom today.

Robinson took Europe’s nineteenth-century catastrophes, whether floods or wars of unification, as opportunities. “Now is the time,” he wrote from Spain in 1866. “This country is in semi-revolution, money has disappeared, distress prevails, and whatever there is to be sold is on the market for a fraction of what would formerly have been asked.” In 1871, while the Prussians besieged Paris, he made his way to Spain, “not without some adventures,” he wrote, “the most exciting being a carriage drive from Versailles to St. Denis, where, from the summit of one of the towers of the old abbey, a splendid panorama of the siege was to be seen.” Anyone accompanying him on such an expedition, like his museum colleague Richard Redgrave, inspector general for art at South Kensington, found himself rummaging through “heaps of dust-collecting articles.” Robinson was well used to looking at dirty, damaged pictures and spotting the greatness behind the grime.

Thanks to him, during his tenure the V&A accumulated the best collection of Italian Renaissance sculpture in Europe outside Italy. But he shared the trait of so many connoisseurs, past and present: snootiness. The trade secret of connoisseurship is that art historical acumen carries little weight unless it is accompanied by a superior air toward rivals, sometimes patronizing, and scathing when necessary. Robinson eventually clashed with the director of the V&A, Henry Cole. At the time the market was flooded with copies and forgeries, and Robinson told the museum that Cole was buying “made-up” pieces, and had fallen “into a hotbed of falsification and fraud in matters of art.” On one occasion Cole acquired a set of playing cards supposed to be French, late fifteenth century. Robinson said they were fakes. Cole sent them to the British Museum to get a second opinion, which went in his favor, but Robinson wrote a twenty-three-page report in response, calling for scientific tests. The tests were carried out and showed the cards were not genuine.

Robinson had other gripes. He complained to Cole that his £600 annual salary was too low, and he clashed with the museum’s board over the amount of money he was spending on acquisitions. By 1863 he had been demoted to “art referee,” a kind of external consultant. Then, on May 12, 1868, he opened the kind of letter still written today: “Sir, I am directed to inform you that the room recently occupied by you in the South Kensington Museum is now required and to request that you will be good enough to clear out your desk at your earliest convenience.” He had been fired.

Fortunately, he had other sources of income. He set up the first art collectors’ association, the Fine Arts Club, and was later appointed Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Above all, he bought and sold art and antiquities to a circle of collectors that included the legendary German art historian Wilhelm von Bode, who admired his discerning eye.

ROBINSON WAS WORKING IN a new, more disciplined age of art dealing. He and his peers took the view that museums, private homes, and auction sales were full of falsely attributed copies, because there couldn’t possibly be that many Leonardos, Michelangelos, Raphaels, and Rembrandts in existence. In short, the supply far exceeded what could ever have been produced. So it was at this time that art historians got to work separating the men from the boys, the works by the master from those by his pupils, assistants, and followers.

The godfather of this new approach was Giovanni Morelli, an Italian art historian and member of Italy’s first national parliament. Morelli himself owned two Leonardo workshop Salvator Mundis, one of which he attributed to Marco d’Oggiono and which is now in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. He introduced a supposedly scientific method to connoisseurship, founded upon “indisputable and practical facts.” Each artist, he argued, could be identified through the ways in which they painted particular features and details—fingers, faces, and other anatomical motifs, drapery, and landscapes. An art historian should operate like a detective, a Polizei-Kommissär, distinguishing these clues and spotting similarities between the vast sea of unnamed and undated works of art to identify the artist, or at least the timeframe and place in which they were painted. Morelli, the patron saint of “the eye,” could identify an artist, or so he claimed, by the ears, that is, by the way he or she painted them. “Bellini’s ear is round and fleshy; that of Mantegna is longish and more gristly,” he wrote in The Works of the Italian Masters, published in 1880 under the pseudonym Ivan Lermolieff.^*2 In that book Morelli provided diagrammatic woodcut illustrations of the typical ears of Renaissance artists such as Botticelli, Lippi, Signorelli, and Leonardo. He produced similar diagrams of artists’ hands.

The relatively new technology of photography was vital to this new practice. Photography studios like Alinari did a thriving business photographing works of art in museums, churches, and collections up and down Italy. Connoisseurs assembled their own cabinets crammed with thousands of these images, as precious to them as the works of art they reproduced were to collectors. They laid them out on tables, matched like with like, moved them into new sequences, building up tentative chronologies and geographies of style. On the backs of them they scribbled notes about the supporting historical documents they had read.

As a result of this practice, the authorship of virtually every undocumented Renaissance painting was now up for discussion. In 1903 Robert Ross, the dealer, Burlington Magazine contributor, and former lover of Oscar Wilde, wrote a poem called “A Christmas Attribution,” about the experts vacillating over attributions:

’Twas whispered by Fry,

[Roger Fry, art critic]

…it was muttered by Dell…

[Robert Dell, first editor of the Burlington]

And at Holmes…

[Charles Holmes, another Burlington editor and an artist]

…for a space was permitted to dwell,

And B. B.

[Bernard Berenson’s nickname]

…heard faintly

The sound of a sell.

It was nursed out at Foster’s…

[an auction house in London]

…and sold for a song.

At Willis Rooms…

[concert venue and music hall]

…it was called “Edwin Long.”

[a kitschy nineteenth-century British artist, who specialized in Oriental scenes with women in see-through dresses]

In Christie’s by Douglas as Longhi baptised,

[This could refer to either of two well-regarded Venetian painters who had this surname; one was known for scenes of his hometown, the other for portraits.]

And at Buttery’s hatch…

[Horace Buttery, restorer and art dealer]

…relined and resized.

[Two restoration processes designed to improve the look and feel of the picture]

Horne thought the picture a rather late Etty…

[William Etty, a nineteenth-century English history painter]

And then relapsed into Baldovinetti,

[Alesso Baldovinetti, an early Renaissance painter in Florence]

While Ricketts and Shannon, and D. S. MacColl…

[Charles Ricketts was an author, illustrator, and printer; Charles Haslewood Shannon was a contemporary portrait painter; MacColl was Keeper of the Tate.]

Said Alunno van Ruben, Amico di Bol.

[Here come the linguistic jokes, using the Italian for pupil, alunno, and adding a van to Rubens while losing the “s,” and then comes friend, amico, of Ferdinand Bol, another Dutch seventeenth-century artist.]

What a jumble of names! A long list of dealers and art critics argue over and revise the attribution of the painting, which at some point undergoes dubious restoration. Plus ça change.

For Giovanni Morelli, the misattribution of works made by assistants to their masters was only one of the problems his method could overcome. There was another equally malign process that he set out to counter: the works of the masters were also often misattributed because they had been subject to misguided and invasive restorations. Time and again in Italian Masters he described pictures as “much damaged by restorations…Suffered so much by various restorations…almost entirely ruined by a new restoration.” In the introduction to the book, Morelli wrote:

By far the greater number of pictures which have descended to us from the best periods have been subjected to barbarous restorations, so that instead of beholding the physiognomy of a master in his work, the connoisseur sees only the black mask with which the restorer has covered it, or, at best a skinned and utterly disfigured surface. In such a ruin there is no possibility of recognizing the hand of the master, or of distinguishing an original from a copy. Only a close observation of the forms peculiar to a master in his representation of the human figure, can lead to any adequate results.

Morelli had many followers, among them Sir John Charles Robinson. Studying the Ashmolean’s collection of Michelangelo and Raphael drawings at Oxford, Robinson produced the first catalogue raisonné of a body of drawings. He was careful to make distinctions between preparatory drawings by artists and later copies by assistants. In many instances the drawings were unsigned and undated, and he could only attribute them based on the evidence of style.

Robinson took a conservative approach to attributions even with his own collection. In 1868 he sent a large part of it to be auctioned at Christie’s, to support himself after he lost his job at the V&A. He wrote a fond farewell to his paintings in the form of a pamphlet, Memoranda for Fifty Pictures. “The present highly finished little picture offers a typical example of the works of the ‘little masters,’ the copyists of Michelangelo,” he wrote of one work. He had a Boltraffio, “that rare follower of Leonardo,” and another work that had been attributed to Leonardo when he bought it but which he was now only prepared to assign to the “Milanese School.” He wrote: “There can be little doubt that this picture was executed during the lifetime of Leonardo, and that it is one of those works produced in the district of Milan, at the period of the enthusiastic admiration, which the novel and fascinating manner of the great Florentine seems to have excited among the painters, both young and old, of the Lombard School.” That could easily have been a description Robinson would have given to the Salvator Mundi.

Robinson was a specialist in Leonardo and the work of his followers, and he pioneered a revival of interest in their work in Britain. In 1851, on his first trip to Italy, he had filled pages of his diary with notes on The Last Supper. And in the 1880s and 1890s he discussed Leonardo and his followers in letters and in meetings with the Leonardo experts of his day, like the art historian and connoisseur Jean Paul Richter, who was the first to study Leonardo’s notebooks, later publishing them as The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci.

Richter and Robinson were always arguing over what was a Leonardo and what wasn’t. In 1886, Robinson wrote to Richter telling him he had found a new Madonna and Child by Leonardo. Richter wrote back telling him he knew the painting and it was only by a follower, Marco d’Oggiono. In 1887 Richter went to visit Robinson in London and reported that a painting owned by his host was a “marvelous” Boltraffio, which Robinson had rated a Leonardo. Robinson soon put it on the market. Richter told a German collector he thought the price was too high for a work by a follower, but it went to an American collector for a large sum. That painting is almost certainly the Girl with Cherries at the Met in New York, formerly attributed to Ambrogio de Predis and now attributed to Marco d’Oggiono, an indication of how mobile attributions to Leonardo’s followers have always been.^*3

Robinson discussed with Wilhelm von Bode the Pala Grifi, an altarpiece in Berlin, today attributed to a team of Marco d’Oggiono and Boltraffio. Was it by Leonardo, or one of his followers? If so, whom? Robinson found a drawing that looked like a preparatory sketch for the piece, and Bode asked him to try to buy it for him—unsuccessfully. If anyone at the time would have been thrilled to discover a Leonardo, and to gain widespread acceptance for it, it would have been Robinson. It seemed he would never succeed, but not for lack of trying.

One day, around the turn of the century, Robinson found or was shown a shabby painting of Christ that bore the hallmarks of the school of Leonardo da Vinci. No one knows exactly where he got it from, since his handwritten account books (held in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford) stop in March 1898. There are a few vague possibilities that come up if you trawl the databases of works of art. There is a Mr. Ley who put an advertisement for his shop in a newspaper in 1872. “Mechanical curiosities repaired,” it says, and gives an address near Leicester Square. He offers a “Luini Head of Christ” from the collection of an Italian painter and printer, Luigi Calamatta, who had died in 1869.

Another possibility surfaced in the 1872 sale at Phillips of the collection of the late English picture dealer William Pearce of New Bond Street. One of the final lots, seemingly added at the last minute, was a Luini Salvator Mundi, which was sold to the picture dealer and restorer Louis Hermann. Perhaps Hermann later sold it on to Robinson. We shall never know, because the account books of Pearce and Hermann have not survived.

What we do know is that Sir Francis Cook only acquired two paintings in 1900, the last year of his life. One was the Salvator, the other was an Annunciation “of the Umbrian School,” which had been previously attributed to Cola dell’Amatrice and was later assigned to Evangelista da Piandimeleto. Both came via Robinson, and they may both have come from the same dealer. Neither was shown in Cook’s galleries until after he died.

The Salvator Mundi may have come from a British collection, or it may have come from Europe. It could have been hanging somewhere on the wall of an old Catholic church or institution in Britain for most of the nineteenth century, and have arrived in the country from France after the Napoleonic Wars, or from Italy. There was a steady stream of British amateurs who traveled to Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century and brought works of art back with them.^*4 The turmoil in Italy produced by the wars of unification, one of the effects of which was the closure of many religious institutions, and the instability in France, produced by invading Prussian armies and assorted revolutions, stirred up the muddy bottoms of the rivers of art history once again. This brought to the churning surface another tide of Renaissance antiques and artworks that could now be pried out of their former owners’ flailing hands. Robinson may only have tipped off Cook about the picture, as he sometimes did, rather than sold it to him. There is not much about the history of the Salvator before 1900 that is more than conjecture.

Wherever it came from, Robinson, with all his experience of examining badly damaged Renaissance works of art, took a long hard look at the Salvator Mundi and did not see a Leonardo. But he did see something he could sell, perhaps for a healthy profit, to his most voracious collector client, the millionaire British textile merchant Sir Francis Cook, whom he described as “an excellent good man.”

FRANCIS COOK WAS BORN in 1817, the second son of seven children. He was a classic example of the self-made Victorian art collector, an entrepreneur working his way into high society by building a large business, donating to good causes, and collecting art, in a manner that differed little from that of Charles I and his court.

His father, William, was a self-made businessman, a sheep farmer’s son who, beginning with “five sovereigns, given him by his father, in one pocket and in another a letter of introduction,”^*5 set off for London and landed an apprenticeship with a linen draper. Eventually he took over his employers’ firm and grew it into an immense wholesale business that traded silk, linen, wool, and cotton goods across the British Empire. His headquarters in London was referred to as “an eighth wonder of the world.” Suffice to say, William Cook had become a very wealthy man.

His son Francis, who had become a partner in the firm in 1843, eventually took over its operations. He cultivated the image of a man without airs and graces. He walked to his local train station to commute to work, and was seen unconcernedly carrying brown paper parcels of the kind usually reserved for the arms of delivery boys. He was described as being very careful with his money, very controlling of his (first) wife Emily, and very fond of art.

In 1849 Francis and Emily moved into Doughty House, a square-built Georgian mansion with a cottage attached to it. His niece Maud Gonne would remember its “two long picture-galleries,” and a “winter garden with tropical palms and bamboos the whole height of one side of the house.”^*6

Cook met Robinson in the 1860s and began collecting art in earnest in 1868, buying a hundred paintings from Robinson’s collection in one fell swoop. He aimed to assemble a comprehensive collection of Old Masters, just like Charles I, but with an extra two centuries to cover, and he bought as fast as Charles I’s nobles had done. By 1876 he had amassed over 510 paintings, though by his death the number had shrunk somewhat because, his grandson remembered, “Sir Francis himself, like all wise collectors, was constantly ‘weeding’ his Gallery.”

In the 1870s he added the Long Gallery, an incongruous two-story neoclassical extension at the back of his house, inspired by Buckingham Palace’s own Long Gallery, and lit by a skylight that ran its whole length. The gallery was extended in the 1890s when another skylit space, an octagonal room, was added at the end, modeled this time on the Uffizi’s Tribuna. Cook crowded his whole house with his pictures, organizing them, as was the convention, geographically according to “school”—Florentine, Siennese, Umbrian, Milanese, Flemish, English, French, and German. He also collected Greek and Roman marbles, Etruscan pottery, Roman glass, Egyptian antiquities, jewels, ivories, amber, bronzes, miniatures, Oriental ceramics and majolica, and antique and contemporary furniture.

The art market boomed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Raphael’s Alba Madonna sold for £14,000 in 1836; almost fifty years later, in 1885, the National Gallery in London bought his comparable Ansidei Madonna for more than four times as much—£70,000 (around £7 million today). Prices for Italian Renaissance painters shot up. As the art periodical the Connoisseur put it in 1901:

Within the last decade the number of collectors has grown by leaps and bounds, as those of us know to our cost who began to collect some years ago and whose desires are less limited than our purses. One has but to compare prices now with prices ten or twenty years ago to realize how enormous has been the increase in the interest in and desire for things old and beautiful and rare.

Prices grew faster after 1870, when a series of economic recessions and agricultural depressions compelled hard-up British aristocrats, incentivized also by tax rebates, to sell their collections—often to newly wealthy American businessmen. Cook’s grandson remembered proudly that Sir Francis avoided the “ten thousand pounders,” and that “Thanks to Sir Charles’ extraordinary knowledge and flair at a time when experts were few and opportunities many is due the successful acquisition by Sir Francis of numberless treasures worth today ten times what he paid for them.”

The prices Cook paid are often recorded, somewhat indecorously, in the 1913 catalogue: just £120 for the Salvator Mundi for example. But Robinson was as hard-nosed a businessman as any art dealer today. His account books show that he added huge markups to the prices he himself had paid. He bought a Rubens for £90 and sold it to Cook for £300. He paid £70 for a Tintoretto and sold it to Cook for £500. He bought a Pontormo for £5 and sold it to Cook for £375. A Veronese he bought for £42 went to Cook for £700. His underhand business practices are perhaps best described by C. F. Walker, an agent of the Florentine dealer Bardini, who once knocked on the door of Robinson’s Harley Street apartment, found it unlocked, and left this account:

I went to see Sir Robinson this morning but I could not find him. I went into his living room to wait for him and I found myself in an antique store. Dozens of paintings leaning against the walls, marble busts, bronze, old frames…It made me think a lot, and since he was not coming back, I went out, thinking I would come back the next day, making one promise to myself: find out who I was dealing with. What I came to know is that Sir Robinson is a dealer who, when he sees an object which he knows he can sell, sends right away a third party to buy it. This third party then shows it to an amateur, who calls Robinson for his opinion, which is of course positive.

However much Sir Francis overpaid, his investments were still sound, as his collection increased in value many times over. At the time he died he owned about 450 pictures, including five Rubenses, five Jacob van Ruisdaels, five van Dycks, three Rembrandts, three Poussins, two Titians, two Dürers, two Claude Lorrains, a van Eyck, a Frans Hals, a painting by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Mantegna, a Raphael, and a Velázquez. Today, these works have ended up in the world’s leading museums, mostly in America, sold off by Cook’s descendants in the first half of the twentieth century. They include the Courtauld Institute and the National Gallery in London, the Met in New York, and, above all, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Five of the most famous Old Master paintings in the world come from Cook’s collection: Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi’s Adoration of the Magi, van Eyck’s Three Marys at the Sepulchre, Velázquez’s Old Woman Cooking Eggs, Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women, and Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Boy.

It was, however, sometimes difficult for Cook to find major works by Renaissance masters at prices he was prepared to pay, so he bought minor works and copies. He had a little Raphael predella, for example, but he also had copies of three of the Florentine master’s well-known paintings. He did not own any Leonardos, but he had a small number of works by Leonardo’s Milanese contemporaries. It was probably in this context that Robinson approached Sir Francis in the last year of his life with an apparently inferior work in a Leonardesque style that would fill a gap in his collection: the Salvator Mundi. Cook bought it, but clearly did not rate it highly, because he didn’t hang it in his gallery.

Sir Francis died on February 17, 1901, leaving a fortune of £1.6 million. Newspapers reported that a thousand mourners attended his funeral and that businesses closed their doors that day out of respect. His art collection was inherited by his elder son, Frederick, who served as an MP for Kennington; his ceramics and antiques went to his other son, Humphrey Wyndham. Frederick only added one picture to the collection, but his granddaughter remembers that “he entered into his inheritance with zest and I am sure enjoyed playing the leading part, looking proudly at the vast array of paintings through clouds of tobacco smoke and slapping everyone on the back with loud cheerful greetings.” In the meantime, Sir Francis’s grandson Herbert Cook took over management of the collection. Now, for the first time, there was a glimmer of hope for the Salvator Mundi.

LIKE MANY OF THE offspring of wealthy art collectors today, Sir Herbert Cook went into the art world. He studied law, practicing as a barrister at Middle Temple in London in his mid-twenties, as well as carrying out his duties as head of the family business. But his passions lay elsewhere. He became an “amateur”—the word was still used as it was in the age of Charles I, and it meant a self-taught connoisseur.

In the 1890s Sir Herbert began to contribute to art journals such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, combining Giovanni Morelli’s detective work with research into historical documents buried in archives. He placed a primacy on the visual study and analysis of works of art, telling the reader he had “repeatedly…personally seen and studied” the works he wrote about. He exchanged letters with the legendary art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson and his equally engaged and engaging wife, Mary, and with the English art critic and future Bloomsbury Group member Roger Fry. Together they set up Britain’s first art historical periodical, the Burlington Magazine.

The Burlington professed its independence from the market. It aimed to replace impressionistic and mythologizing art criticism with the “disinterested” research of historical documents and the study of the details of an artist’s style, most conveniently done with photographs of works of art. It observed and criticized the phenomenon of collectors who bought for profit, which it called “the possibilities of collecting at one and at the same time works of art and money,” declaring sanctimoniously:

To collectors of this class, rapid alterations in the values attached to particular works are as important as the fluctuations on the Stock Exchange are to the broker, and thus a disturbing element is introduced into that estimation of real values which our study proposes. The atmosphere becomes tainted, and the study itself acquires ill-repute by the presence of these knowing ones, these tipsters of the saleroom.

Nevertheless, the leading figures of the Burlington Magazine were usually both dealers and critics, and as connoisseurs and art historians they also often charged for their opinions, or took a percentage of the sale price of a work of art they had assessed. Then as now, art historical scholarship was intertwined with the market.

Sir Herbert was a great connoisseur of Leonardo, and when he saw fit he was quick to make an attribution to the master. In 1909 a new Leonardo emerged from the fog of nineteenth-century art collections, the first in many centuries and the last before Simon and Parish’s painting. The Benois Madonna, it was called. Sir Herbert went to see the picture when it was put on show in St. Petersburg. He had it photographed and proceeded to publish it as an early Leonardo for the first time in the Burlington in December 1911. He wrote:

How wonderfully human it all is!…The child trying to focus its vision on the flower held out to it—the backward tilt of the head—the eager clutch of the tiny hands—the happy interest and devotion of the girl-mother…And how lovingly he has played with the pretty coils of hair, plaited as only Leonardo knew how, and the folds of sleeve and mantle! Yes, it may be precious, but that is Leonardo’s way too; and it may have strange harmonies and stranger beauties of subtle import, but that is Leonardo’s spirit, the spirit which was afterward to find fullest expression in the exotic beauty of the Mona Lisa’s haunting smile.

Two years later, in 1913, the Benois Madonna was bought by the tsar of Russia for a record $1.5 million.

In March 1912 Sir Herbert became the first British connoisseur and critic to endorse the attribution by Wilhelm von Bode of the Ginevra de’ Benci—up until that point attributed to Verrocchio—to Leonardo. Here, he showed that he knew how to work with copies to discover details about an original. The Ginevra had no date on it. So when was it painted? Cook knew of another copy in the possession of a Florentine aristocrat, in which the composition was wider, meaning that you could see the sitter’s hands, and she is wearing a ring. From this he deduced that she had just been, or was just about to be, married. Documents showed that Ginevra was married in 1473. The juniper bush was further evidence of the date—it is a symbol of chastity. The wider setting of this composition would normally suggest that it was the original—unless the other picture had been cut down in size at some point, something that often happened in the history of Renaissance paintings, even Leonardos. Analysis of the original Leonardo showed, indeed, that the panel had been trimmed at some point. Sir Herbert could confirm that it was the original, and give it a date. It was good detective work, but for Herbert such specific clues were not the basis of his attribution to Leonardo: “Each creation of Leonardo (as I believe) stands alone, united only by an indefinable bond of quality and instinct with that mysterious spirit of subtle fascination which eludes mere words.” Even back then, there was the zing.

Sir Herbert saw a huge gulf between the quality of a Leonardo and that of work by his followers, although that did not mean he derided their work. Like Robinson, he was a champion of the “Little Leonardos,” and of Milanese painters in general. Back in 1898, before he was managing his grandfather’s collection, he was one of a committee of five who staged an enormous exhibition, Pictures by Masters of the Milanese and Allied Schools of Lombardy, at the New Gallery in London, featuring three hundred works attributed to Leonardo, his followers, and other Milanese Renaissance artists. Sir Herbert said the exhibition was “intended to illustrate the history of a particular school of Italian painting, and afford an opportunity of appreciating the scale of its excellence.”

The exhibition included a photographic section, with over a hundred black-and-white images of works that the curators considered important, but which they had not borrowed for the exhibition, for one reason or another. Among them was a Salvator Mundi attributed to Boltraffio, and owned at the time by the leading Milanese collector Giovanni Battista Vittadini. Today it is in an anonymous private collection, and not very securely attributed to Boltraffio. Sir Herbert wrote that Boltraffio’s paintings “charm by their high finish and by their absence of vulgarity or display.” They had a “singular refinement.” There were two particular series of works by Boltraffio that he was aware of: “His sacred subjects are not numerous—a few Madonna pictures—and two or three renderings of the Salvator Mundi.” The Salvator Mundi was on Sir Herbert’s radar.

Leonardo’s assistants were talented, but they weren’t Leonardo. Sir Herbert accused art historians of diluting the master’s greatness by ascribing the works of his studio to him. In articles in the Burlington he set to work analyzing various Leonardesque series, including the St. John the Baptist and, the strangest of all of them, a number of topless Mona Lisas. From these studies, the brilliant millionaire-scholar-collector became the first to truly understand how Leonardo ran his studio:

Leonardo did indeed treat the subject himself in a drawing or cartoon to which his pupils had access and from which each worked out his own version with varying degrees of freedom. That this was constantly the practice is proved by the innumerable copies, more or less contemporary, which were made of Leonardo’s motifs.

The Salvator Mundi series emanating from Leonardo’s studio had been admired by Sir Herbert since his Milanese exhibition in 1898. It is highly likely that he had been looking out for a Salvator Mundi for himself since that date, and that Robinson knew that. The fact that Sir Francis acquired it in the last year of his life adds to the likelihood that Sir Herbert was a prime force in the acquisition of the Salvator Mundi.

After his grandfather died, Sir Herbert rehung the entire collection, and as the abridged 1907 catalogue states, “a few additions were made.” The Salvator Mundi was one of them. Sir Herbert moved the painting, this Cinderella of art history, to a prominent place in the most important of his family home’s exhibition spaces, the Long Gallery. It was hung in a historically appropriate position, surrounded by the other great Milanese works in the Cook Collection, the Luini Madonna and Child with St. George and an Angel, Vincenzo Foppa’s Madonna and Child and Angels, and Giampietrino’s Nativity. It can just about be identified in one photograph, on the right wall, far down toward the end on the second tier.

IN 1913 SIR HERBERT commissioned three art historians to write separate volumes on his family’s collection of Italian, Dutch, and Flemish pictures, and works from other schools. Tancred Borenius was given the Italian volume. Born in Finland in 1885, Borenius was close to the Bloomsbury Group and had worked as an art adviser for British aristocrats and royals. He was a specialist in the early Italian Renaissance, and became the first professor of the history of art at the University of London; he is later said to have worked for British intelligence and to have been the man who lured Rudolf Hess to Britain.

Borenius’s accounts of the provenance and acquisition of works in the Cook Collection are reliable. He was helped by the accounts Sir Francis kept, which have now been lost. Sir Herbert also consulted with Sir John Charles Robinson, who was still alive, “and although the memory of a man in his eighty-ninth year can hardly be accurate in every detail, yet his wonderful vitality and still active interest in art matters have been of great service to myself in editing this catalogue.”

Borenius was prepared to push an attribution if he believed in it. Thus he attributed the small painting St. Jerome Punishing the Heretic to Raphael, quoting Bernard Berenson among others in support of his thesis. But when he looked at the Cook Salvator he did not see a Leonardo, nor even a work by one of his followers, but instead a copy of a workshop painting.

Sir Herbert, too, did not think his Salvator was a Leonardo, but neither did he think it was as poorly done as Borenius did. The annotation he added to the attribution—the brief sentence I mentioned earlier in this chapter—was “I should prefer to say a parallel work by some contemporary painter of Leonardo’s school—H.C.” Sir Herbert had lifted the Salvator up a peg by putting the entire workshop in the frame, but he had not elevated it to a work by the master. Nevertheless, he wrote in the Burlington around this time: “In the sphere of painting so little comparatively remains to us of Leonardo’s own creations that what is vaguely called the Leonardesque demands our closest study.”

THE BEACON OF HOPE which Sir Herbert offered the Salvator was quickly snuffed out. Other art historians, with varying relationships to Leonardo, passed through the Long Gallery without noticing the picture up on the wall in one corner. Even Bernard Berenson and his wife, Mary, when they visited Doughty House in 1916, scribbled down in their notebooks what they had seen, but failed to mention the Salvator.

In 1916 Sir Herbert became a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, and in 1923 of the National Gallery. In the 1930s he sat on the board of the National Gallery. He knew its thirty-year-old director, Kenneth Clark, who simultaneously held the position of Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and was the personification of Britain’s emerging patrician ideology of national heritage in the mid-twentieth century. Together they worked on what they called the “Paramount Pictures List,” a shortlist of “supreme masterpieces” that had to be “acquired for the nation at any cost” so as to prevent their being bought up by wealthy Americans. There was, of course, another reason why Sir Herbert was on the National Gallery board. Kenneth Clark wanted him to donate pictures from his family’s collection—but he didn’t.

Born into money in 1903, Kenneth Clark was an art historical prodigy who gravitated toward the supreme being of art history: Leonardo. A protégé of Bernard Berenson (though Berenson later castigated him as “a great vulgariser”), he was suave and engaging, a socialite as well as an aesthete, as brilliant at bringing art to life with words as he was at managing elite professional networks; a popularizer of culture with an unrivaled ability to make his air of superiority charming.

In the mid-1930s Clark delivered a series of lectures on Leonardo that were published in 1939 as his monograph Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist. Around the same time he catalogued the six hundred Leonardo drawings held at Windsor Castle, which the Earl of Arundel had bought in the reign of Charles I and which had later somehow passed into the Royal Collection. Clark toiled for three years, describing each folio in elegant and vivid, if somewhat old-fashioned, prose, meticulously identifying where drawings could be linked to paintings, and articulating a development of Leonardo’s style and media. He came across two drawings that he recognized were close to three versions of the Salvator Mundi he was familiar with—the Yarborough, Vittadini, and Cook ones—as well as the Hollar etching. He analyzed the style of the drawings beautifully in the drafts for a lecture, now in his archive at Tate Britain: “A drawing for a sleeve for a lost picture of Christ Blessing, commissioned about 1504, is in red and black chalk on red paper and shows Leonardo taking full advantage of these opulent media in a way in which the fastidious taste of his earlier years might have rejected.” But for Clark, neither the Cook version nor any of the others he knew was the original of “the globe-bearing Christ which is lost.” He had also examined the Cook, which he forsook.

Jean Paul Richter also visited the Cook Collection with his wife. In 1922 he was revising the art historical sections of the Baedeker guide to London for a new edition. In his diaries, he records how he and his wife discussed one of the Cook Collection’s masterpieces, Titian’s Schiavona, which he thought was by the sixteenth-century North Italian portraitist Giovanni Battista Moroni. He argued with his wife about it the following week, and she told him, “You are a blind chicken.” There was, however, no mention of, let alone marital bickering over, the Salvator Mundi.^*7

In 1932 the then curator of the Cook Collection, S. C. Kaines-Smith, compiled an updated catalogue. His notes described the Salvator as “frightfully over-painted” and “not to be restored.” In 1940 a restorer, W. H. Down, was invited to assess works in the collection. The Salvator Mundi, he reported, was in a “most amateur state of repaint,” and he included it in a list of “pictures mostly in bad condition, which must be tested to ascertain whether of sufficient quality and value to justify the necessary outlay for restoration.”

The Cook Salvator had found no saviors in turn-of-the-century England—a fact that can be read in two ways. You may consider it impossible that so many scholars and dealers, all of them accustomed to seeing Italian Renaissance paintings in terrible condition, plastered with over-paint, restorations, and dark varnishes, all trained to identify the author of a painting from the qualities of the hands as well as the ears, could miss a Leonardo staring them in the face, as the Salvator does. Alternatively, you might conclude (more favorably to Simon and Parish’s cause) that it was yet another misfortune for the world’s unluckiest masterpiece, to re-emerge at a time when the thrust of art history was the de-attribution of paintings previously assigned to the great names.

ALL THIS TIME, the Cook family business, Cook, Son & Co., was faring badly. The coming of the twentieth century, the acquisition of the Salvator Mundi, and the death of Sir Francis all marked a turning point in the fortunes of the company. A business model that was forward-thinking in the mid-nineteenth century had become old-fashioned. Far worse was the rise of high-street chain stores like Marks & Spencer, which bought direct from manufacturers, cutting out the distributors. Sir Herbert had no head for business, and the interwar years were difficult times for cloth merchants. By 1920 the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, and went public in an effort to raise funds. The following year it lost over £400,000. Sir Herbert, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, resigned in 1931. He died in 1939.

His son and successor, Sir Francis Ferdinand Maurice Cook, born in 1907, proved to be even less business-minded than his father. The great-grandfather had been a collector, the grandson an art historian, and so, following the tradition of so many similar families, the next Cook scion, Sir Francis Ferdinand, was an artist, at least in his own mind. Sir Francis Ferdinand painted hundreds of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, with a bright palette and generically modernist style. His life was as colorful as his pictures: he owned a pink Rolls-Royce for a time, and married seven times, divorcing his first wife for adultery during their honeymoon, and his third for the same offense—although not at such an early stage of their marriage. He was divorced by his fifth wife for committing the same sin himself. One contemporary from an arts board he sat on called him “a degenerate Baronet.”^*8 When he died in 1978 he bequeathed 1,400 of his pictures to the island of Jersey, where he had moved after the war, along with a converted chapel in which to display them, known as the Sir Francis Cook Gallery.

The breakup of the Cook Collection had begun immediately after Sir Herbert’s death. Fifty pictures were sold within months, including the van Eyck Three Marys at the Sepulchre. The British government, even on the eve of the Second World War, had offered £100,000 for it, but a Dutch collector put up £250,000 (the equivalent of £60 million today), and the picture went to Holland, where Hermann Goering was soon chasing it. Others went to the Met and the Frick Collection in New York.

When the Second World War began, Sir Francis Ferdinand Cook shipped most of the valuable works remaining in the collection to one of the family’s country estates. The Salvator Mundi was, predictably, not one of these, and it was packed away in the cellar of Doughty House. In 1944 a German bomb fell on the family home, which suffered extensive damage, but the Salvator, for once, was unscathed. After the war, various touring exhibitions of works from the Cook Collection were organized. The Salvator Mundi was included in one of these, titled Sacred Art, and was sent to the bomb-ravaged cities of Wolverhampton, Bolton, and Eastbourne in 1947 and 1948. In the exhibition catalogues it was once again downgraded to simply “Milanese School, c. 1500.” It was then placed in storage in west London.

Sir Francis Ferdinand sold off the collection slowly from 1944 onward, often struggling to find buyers. The biggest customer was Samuel H. Kress’s American foundation, which bought scores of Cook paintings, donating twenty-one of them to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The biggest prize was the Filippo Lippi and Fra Angelico collaboration, bought on the recommendation of Bernard Berenson. By 1952, 242 paintings from the Cook Collection had been sold, but scores still remained, among them the Salvator.

The costs of storing all this art were high. Sir Francis Ferdinand generously lent many works to museums and institutions across Britain. There was even a loan to Canterbury Cathedral. But he decided to sell off most of the remaining pictures in a sale devoted entirely to the family collection. On Wednesday, June 25, 1958, top international Old Masters dealers and a sprinkling of Britain’s greatest art historians gathered under the chandeliers of Sotheby’s Bond Street salesroom, whose walls were decked out with the Cooks’ largest and most valuable paintings. In total, 136 lots were on offer, including the Salvator Mundi. Agents representing the most powerful London Old Masters dealer, Agnew’s, were there, alongside the Arcade Gallery; Charles Duits, with branches in London and Amsterdam; Giovanni Salocchi, who sold antiques and Old Masters in Florence; and Pieter de Boer from Amsterdam, who had done a roaring trade with Nazis during the war. The German-born Jewish émigré art historian Alfred Scharf, a specialist in Renaissance art who worked at the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in London, and whose Polish wife, Felicie Radziejewski, was herself an art dealer, also attended. The lawyer, former secret agent, wine connoisseur, art historian, and collector of miniatures Robert Bayne Powell raised his hand to bid. Sir Kenneth Clark, at the time chairman of the Arts Council and also of Britain’s first independent television channel, ITV, bought two pictures. Ellis Waterhouse, one of the first scholars of the history of collecting and a lifelong friend of art historian Anthony Blunt, later to be exposed as a Soviet spy, visited the sale and studied the paintings. He was keenly aware of the problem of attributions. At the beginning of the twentieth century he wrote that “most Italian Renaissance paintings were wrongly attributed and at least half of them were unlisted.” Waterhouse scribbled assessments of interesting lots in his personal copy of the catalogue. It was here that he dismissed the Salvator Mundi with one word: “wreck.” Thus, a roll call of the most distinguished art historians, dealers, and collectors on both sides of the turn of the twentieth century had all looked at the Cook Salvator Mundi. They all dismissed it.

The sale total was £64,680. The dealers and art historians bid up many of the lots to high prices, but not the Salvator Mundi. However, one man in the audience was interested in the painting—a little-known collector from New Orleans, who was traveling in Europe and buying art with his wife, Minnie. Warren Kuntz bought the Salvator Mundi for just £45, a sum so low it suggests he was the only bidder.