The grand passions of Charles I

In 1625, an art-mad king ruled a country with no native tradition in painting and scant knowledge of the Italian Renaissance. In 1649, a country with no king offered for sale some of the greatest European paintings ever created. Charles I’s brief, doomed reign determined not only revolution in England’s political life but also in its visual culture.

After Oliver Cromwell and his puritan followers triumphed in England’s civil war and Charles was executed, Cromwell dispersed almost all the king’s art collection, which was unrivalled before or since in scope and refinement, at the Commonwealth Sale — a beguiling revelation of mid-17th-century taste. Correggio’s silken-textured shimmer of gold, white and rosy shadow “Venus with Mercury and Cupid” fetched £800. Titian’s human drama of divine revelation, with cat and dog squabbling beneath the glinting tablecloth, “The Supper at Emmaus” was £600. Tintoretto’s exotic crimson-blue “Esther before Ahasuerus” made £120, Bronzino’s precise, graceful “Portrait of a Lady in Green” £100, Veronese’s fleshy comedy “Mars, Venus and Cupid” £11.

These are among over 100 trophy works reunited, for the first time, in the Royal Academy’s stellar, majestic, improbable and utterly engrossing exhibition Charles I: King and Collector.

From the moment in 1623 when as a gauche, puny Prince of Wales he sought a bride in Madrid and returned instead with Titians and a passion for the European baroque, Charles became a connoisseur of Old Masters and a patron of the latest international styles. Art was the way to his heart and consolation to his nervous mind. His collection is a feast, telling of wealth and learning, love and inspiration, diplomacy and war.

A bright-eyed little girl peers out from a pyramid of gods and goddesses as Minerva (Wisdom) vanquishes warrior Mars in Rubens’s eloquent “Peace and War”, a gift from the painter most likely given on behalf of Habsburg ruler Philip IV hoping to buy England’s neutrality. To celebrate the birth of the future Charles II, the king presented his spendthrift queen Henrietta Maria with Orazio Gentileschi’s lyrical “The Finding of Moses”, where iridescent robes of the pharoah’s daughter and her retinue flutter hopefully against a dawn sky.

In the Gonzaga collection, purchased by Charles when Mantua became expensively embroiled in the Thirty Years’ war, the king discovered his favourite living Italian painter Guido Reni; Reni’s “Toilet of Venus”, with mischievous red-haired Cupid holding up a pearl earring and three Graces adorning nearly naked Venus with tiara, bracelet and sandals, has the lustrous charm and humour typical of playful erudite Stuart society — anathema to the puritans.

At £200, the Reni was the most expensive contemporary work sold at the Commonwealth Sale; it went to Spain, although George I eventually bought it back. Titian’s masterpieces also found royal homes: the subtle, sensuous “Conjugal Allegory” entered Louis XIV’s collection, and Philip IV acquired the stately “Charles V and Dog”, model of machismo imperial portraiture. Returning from the Louvre and the Prado, these are outstanding highlights.

Saved from Cromwell’s sale was one monumental piece: Mantegna’s flinty, sombre panels “The Triumph of Caesar”, depicting across 70 sq m a procession of soldiers, standard-bearers, musicians, exotic animals and prisoners. This parade of power and plunder, splendid yet bleak, came to Charles from the Gonzaga, and military pride kept it for the nation: Cromwell, recognising in Caesar a general like himself, reserved the work for his new republic.

All collections come about by interactions of chance, fashion and personal taste, but this show thrillingly unfolds a uniquely disturbing relationship between power, the culture of the times, and psychology. For while Charles opened up English visual understanding by his own European breadth of vision, he lost himself in absolutist fantasies which his flamboyant — mostly Catholic — art richly nourished.

Charles’s sense of unreality courses through these galleries. It is there in the first work on display: Van Dyck’s eerie “Charles I in Three Positions”, commissioned to aid sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini make a marble bust of the king. In the central likeness, Charles, eyes expressionless, countenance blank, looks out as if baffled; in the portraits on either side, he dully confronts himself: a discomforting, almost surreal musing on identity.

Alongside, in “Self-portrait with a Sunflower”, Van Dyck ostentatiously includes a chunky gold chain just received from Charles. A breeze blows through the artist’s tousled hair and the plant’s thick petals, animating a composition that declares the painter as perfect courtier, his devotion to his monarch paralleling the flower turning naturally to the sun.

More than fawning, this is an idealised vision of painting apprehending both the natural world and mystical truth. That concept underpinned art at the Carolingian court. In Van Dyck’s portraits a king grander, taller, nobler than the stunted, stubborn, sad actuality becomes transcendent, infallible: man and role are inseparable.

Although not formally groundbreaking — the style derives from Titian and Rubens — in their virtuosity and vivacity, dazzle yet intimacy, high colour, bravura loose brushwork and baroque gestures, Van Dyck’s swagger portraits transformed English art. “Charles I and Henrietta Maria with Prince Charles and Princess Mary (The Greate Peece)” is a grave dynastic portrait that also expresses marital tenderness. In “Charles I on Horseback”, the king is remote, high above our stirrup level viewpoint, almost godly; pose and woodland setting echo Titian’s famous equestrian portrait of Charles V. “Charles I in the Hunting Field”, returning from Paris for the first time since the 17th century, is sumptuous and disingenuously relaxed: the monarch, hand on hip in wide-brimmed hat and silvery doublet, surveys his lands, the nonchalance of a gentleman hunter crossed with regal self-assurance.

Sometimes casual social cruelty flits across these glamorised renderings. In the towering “Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson”, the queen (who was tiny, skinny and had buck teeth) leads by the hand her dignified, pathetic dwarf servant. In “George Villiers and Francis Villiers”, the Duke of Buckingham’s sons, squashed into lace collars and scarlet and gold satin, are pictures of anxiety and grief after their father’s assassination. But mostly everything is surface brilliance, figures gliding before our eyes like a masque: dreamy, escapist, a refuge.

The contrast with art of the northern Renaissance is stark: at Dürer’s beautifully modelled, warm-hued “Burkhard of Speyer”, or Holbein’s arrestingly frank “Derich Born”, we stop as if before living, breathing individuals. Important northern works such as Jan Gossaert’s unidealised, agonised, contorted, near-life-size nudes “Adam and Eve” — which inspired Milton’s “Paradise Lost” — are deeply compelling; Charles either inherited them or received them as gifts, but apparently did not care for their direct, forthright manner.

How painting conveys different sorts of truth is perhaps the greatest of the many pleasures to be gleaned from this immensely rewarding show.

To April 15, royalacademy.org.uk

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