"Q", the mastermind of MI6 and the boy from Florence

The magic of the unique - in her art chamber, Dr. Simone Herrmann looks at a work from the international art trade every 14 days. Episode 53: "Portrait of a Young Man" by Piero del Pollaiuolo, c. 1470

Maybe he felt it too, somewhere in the heart area. As if a small furry animal moves gently in his sleep. "Delicate," the British say about it. To the way the soft face of the boy, he may have been 15 or 16 years old, stands out against the azure sky with its swirling clouds. To the way Piero del Pollaiuolo painted the midnight blue velvet of his tunic, and the way the velvety folds bump against the stiff damask, sumptuously woven of silver and pale pink silk threads, the way each thread is painted - as if you could feel it between your fingertips, ticklish and silky. As if it were real. And how the damask crackles with every breath the boy takes. Perhaps Sir Thomas Ralph Merton (1888 -1969) poured himself a glass of port when he looked at Pollaiuolo's "Portrait of a Young Boy". Completely devoted to the pleasure of seeing, yet with the keen eye of a scientist.

Merton was the brains, the first "Q" of MI6. Eton boy, Oxford's youngest doctor of physics, mastermind, gentleman, aesthete. Son of an industrialist family from Wimbledon who had relations with Germany, one of his father's brothers founded the metal company in Frankfurt a. M., he pioneered in the field of spectroscopy and diffraction gratings. In the legendary first section of British foreign intelligence, MI6, headed by Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, he equipped such illustrious agents as writers Edward Knoblock, Compton Mackenzie, George Alexander Hill, and William Somerset Maugham with shooting walking sticks, telescopes, night-vision goggles, and other gadgets during the First World War. "Working tools" for spies like the Czech Emanuel Voska, whose fatalism and cold-bloodedness Somerset Maugham described thus: "Nefarious, wise, prudent, and absolutely indifferent to his own end." Voska had been capable of "killing a man without any emotion." Merton unmasked the secret ink of German spies and invented his own "do it yourself" mixtures for invisible writing from potassium, permanganate, antipyrine, and sodium nitrate; however, the one that could be made with sperm was withdrawn from circulation after first uses because of its, well, unsubtle odor.

Sir Thomas maintained England's last private laboratory at his feudal country estate, Stubbings House, in Maidenhead Thicket, Berkshire, until the 1960s. Sometimes there was said to be banging and flashing, pungent smells drifting through the corridors, which his wife Marjorie studiously overlooked. Would you fancy a cup of tea, dear?

Piero del Pollaiuolo (1441 - 1496), "Portrait of a Youth," tempera and oil on poplar wood, 49.2 x 35.5 cm; Sotheby's, London, March 25, 2021: "Modern Renaissance: A Cross Category Sale," estimate: 4 to 6 million pounds. sothebys.com

And he collected art. When John, the eldest of his five sons, wins the university prize for drawing at Oxford in 1930, he takes him to Florence. He wants to explore it in detail, to see the greatest masterpieces in the place where they were created. Interesting what these men had coaxed out of the pigments, Botticelli, Rosselli, and also this Pollaiuolo. Or Bernardino Fugai from Siena. Researchers they were, these painters, scientists like himself. Reality was their testing ground. Merton admired the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, read in his treatise on painting: "If the painter wants to see beauties that move him to love, he is master of bringing them into existence, and if he wants to see things monstrous and to frighten, or droll and to laugh, or to pity, he is master of them and God. And indeed, all that there is in the universe, whether in being and existence or in imagination, he has it, first in the mind and then in the hands, and these must be of such excellence as to produce a simultaneous harmony of relations crowded together in a single instant, as the (real) things do."

In this, Sir Thomas may have thought, artists were superior to the scientist; through his creative faculty, as Leonardo puts it, the artist acquires power over reality. The artist is the master of the world, signore e Dio.

For most of those painters of the generation before Leonardo, however, this thought is still a sacrilege. The artist as God. They shrank from it. Although pride in their talent and skill was already stirring, and although they too already saw themselves as researchers. Central perspective, anatomy, color theory - the artists of the early Renaissance conquered the visible world through science. Merton spent several months in Florence, looking, comparing and buying. 22 works by Italians, including drawings, plus ten paintings by the masters of the North, Hans Krell, Holbein, Beham and Cranach. His collection covers the period from 1450 to 1520, combining devotional painting and Madonna paintings with scenic-narrative such as predella or Cassoni painting, the Florentine wedding chests. But in the main, Merton discovers the portrait for himself. Portraits of an era in which art makes a quantum leap. Paintings of the first order emerged - for Merton, they were those "which in expression, attitude, and costume most vividly portray the life, taste, and color of the time." Sandro Botticelli's "Portrait of a Young Man with a Medallion," recently knocked down at Sotheby's for a record $92 million, was among them. And precisely that portrait by the hand of Piero del Pollaiuolo.

Piero del Pollaiuolo (1441 - 1496), "Portrait of a Young Man," tempera and oil on poplar wood, 49.2 x 35.5 cm; Sotheby's, London, March 25, 2021: "Modern Renaissance: A Cross Category Sale," estimate: 4 to 6 million pounds. sothebys.com

Piero is the younger of the two Pollaiuolo brothers. Antonio is the better known; Vasari praises him in his artist vitae as a goldsmith and sculptor, as a creator of anatomical studies and elaborately detailed engravings. His pattern studies for sumptuous fabrics were especially sought after - and were considered the hallmark of the Pollaiuolo workshop, which competed with that of Andrea del Verrocchio, the master teacher of the young Leonardo da Vinci. The brothers were close friends and artists of the city ruler of Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Between 1473 and 1475 they painted what is probably their best-known picture, "The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian," a painterly and compositional gem that has hung in London's National Gallery since 1857, of which Sir Thomas R. Merton was a member of the scientific advisory board and chairman between 1957 and 1965.

Piero's specialty were portraits of ladies in profile or semi-profile, sumptuously dressed with extreme refinement. They hang in the world's great museums, the Uffizi, New York's Metropolitan Museum, Berlin's Gemäldegalerie, where the wonderful, almost melodic profile portrait of a blonde young woman (c. 1465) can be seen. Arguably the most soulful neck line in the history of Western art! But the dynamic portrait of the Lord of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, from 1471 is also by him.

In comparison, he has depicted the youth, whose painting will be offered for sale on March 25 in the spectacular London Sotheby's auction "Modern Renaissance: A Cross Category Sale", very statically. Frontal like a marble bust. Piero must have portrayed him in the years around 1470, his clothing suggests. For he similarly depicted the combination of dark blue velvet and pink damask on the altarpiece of Three Saints of 1468 (Uffizi Gallery, Florence), once intended for the chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal in San Miniato al Monte. Saint Eustace, patron saint of hunters, wears this habit. Dark blue velvet, silvery damask in pale pink.

About ten to fifteen years later, Sandro Botticelli paints his ideal image of a youth in whom research believes to recognize Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de Medici, who after a quarrel with his cousin Piero de Medici - it was about a girl and a slap in the face - discarded his name and called himself "Il Popolano" , the Medici of the people. Giovanni died young, barely 30, after a life that would put any agent thriller to shame.

Piero del Pollaiuolo (1441 - 1496), "Portrait of a Young Man" and Sandro Botticelli (1445 - 1510), "Portrait of a Young Man with Medallion." sothebys.com

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