Inventing Leonardo

Abstract

From the evidence of contemporary literary sources, manuscript inventories, correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, Chapter 8 considers the penetration of literary concepts of Leonardo as an artist and thinker (pictor doctus), how the early reception relates to the wider ‘invention’ of Leonardo as a cultural entity, and whether a distinctly ‘British version’ of Leonardo can be detected. It focuses on the introduction into England of sixteenth-century Italian receptions of Leonardo via Richard Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura, and from contact with Giorgio Vasari’s Lives. It proposes that, due to the scarcity of Vasari’s text in early modern England, it was Lomazzo’s account of Leonardo that influenced the earliest understanding of the artist in Britain. The chapter tracks the absorption of Vasari’s text in seventeenth-century England through the interventions of key individuals at the Stuart courts, before and after the Interregnum. A particular focus is the prominent role of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, who collected Leonardo’s writings and drawings from the Jacobean period until the mid 1640s. The dispersal of his collection throughout the seventeenth century, and the acquisition in the 1670s of the Windsor Volume by Charles II, and the Codex Arundel by the Royal Society, signal key staging posts in the reception of Leonardo in Restoration England.