‘A Pitiable Sight’

Chapter 11 considers access to Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi in England c. 1630–50. It proposes that the painting was inaccessible in the queen’s private apartments in the 1630s, which accounts for its invisibility in surviving documentation and its escape of campaigns of iconoclasm focused on royal chapels during the civil wars of the 1640s. It proposes the painting first came into public view in 1649, when it was put on display at the Commonwealth Sale. This is attested by lists prepared for foreign buyers by agents in London. The chapter expands to include works attributed to Leonardo from the collection of Charles I, in the hands of French and Flemish dealers in the 1650s.