The incomparable Leonardo volume (around 1590) that provided the exciting proof of provenance Courtesy of Royal Collection Trust

Were the wonderful Leonardo drawings at Windsor once owned by Charles II? Scholars have been intrigued by the idea, but there has been no proof. Their earliest documentation in the Royal Collection dates from 1690, when Constantijn Huygens Jr, secretary to William III, spent a morning leafing through the bound album. So, when I stumbled on a report in an English publication of 1680, it was not so much eureka! as gotcha!. Here, unmistakably, was an eyewitness account of Leonardos drawings being in Charles IIs Whitehall Cabinet.

The testimony came from a blue-chip sourceWalter Charleton (1619-1707), physician-in-ordinary to Charles I and Charles II. Prominent in his own day, he is now eclipsed by more famous friends, John Evelyn, Anthony Wood and Margaret Cavendish. In March 1679, as Harveian Orator of the Royal College of Physicians, Charleton gave the inaugural lectures in the new anatomy theatre. These were published in 1680 as Enquiries Into Human Nature: in VI. Anatomic Praelections in the New Theatre of the Royal Colledge of Physicians in London. The opening words of the sixth lecture, Of motion voluntary, are startling:

For Painting, I recommend to them the incomparable Lionardo da Vinci, della Pittura: not only because he was eminently skilld in all parts of Anatomy, as appears by the accurate Figures that illustrate and adorn Vesaliuss noble Volume De Corporis humani fabrica, all of which were drawn and cut by Da Vincis own hands; and the original Draughts of which are yet extant in a large Manuscript of his in Folio, in the Italian language (but written from the right hand to the left) carefully preservd in HisMajesties Cabinet at White-Hall, where I have had the good fortune sometimes to contemplate them: but alsobecause in his Treatise Della Pittura just now mentiond, he seems to me to have describd the figures, motions, forces and symmetry of the limbs, their Articulations and Muscles, in various postures, more clearly than any Writer I have hitherto read.

Charletons intimate contact with the Leoni-Leonardo album is palpable, and felicitous; we could scarcely conjure a more fitting 17th-century English reader. Discussing Leonardos writings on animal and human musculature, he cites a passage in the editio princeps (Paris, 1651) of the artists Trattato della pittura. To identify a text that confirms Charles IIs ownership of the album during the 1670s connects Leonardos anatomydrawings and the treatise on painting, and situates them in the frontline of 17th-century scientific theory, was, for a Leonardo nerd like me, equivalent to finding the missing evolutionary link. The new discovery holds out the promise of further eureka moments among the papers of Charletons networks, and a glimmer of hope that we may yet ascertain how Leonardos celebrated drawings entered the Royal Collection.

Margaret Dalivalles discovery is discussed in more detail in Leonardos Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts, published on 17 October by Oxford University Press. She teaches at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Oxford

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Missing Leonardo link: writer discovers that Da Vinci's anatomy drawings were owned by Charles II - Art Newspaper