ART THROB #30: Salvator Mundi (c.1500), attrib. Leonardo da Vinci (1452—1519)

Leonardo da Vinci (attrib.) (1452—1519), Salvator Mundi (c.1500)

45.4 cm × 65.6 cm (25.8 in × 19.2 in) 

Oil on walnut

Private collection

I’ve not seen Salvator Mundi in the flesh and wasn’t aware of it until it recently hit headlines when it was put up for sale. Dubbed by many, including auction house Christie’s in a bid to woo elite custom, as the ‘male Mona Lisa’, the painting was inevitably subject to comparisons with La Gioconda, many of them unfavourable. Suddenly everyone became an art historian, citing various aspects of the painting that just didn’t seem to add up. While the Mona Lisa plays with you and the viewer is permitted a role in the painting — Is she looking at me? What’s her ‘enigmatic smile’ all about? — an apparent lack of psychological complexity may be perceived in Salvator Mundi. Add to this the straightforward posture (da Vinci is said to prefer more complex, twisted ones), the plain background (if he’d put in some imaginary mountains and rivers, all would have been well), and the glass orb which, although painted skilfully, does not distort the the hand and garment that we can see through it. Surely da Vinci — the physics wizard we think we know — would have wanted to get that optical detail right? For many too, Salvator Mundi felt simplistic and unfinished (although da Vinci was known for having multiple projects on the go simultaneously, not all of which he saw through to the end). How could Salvator Mundi be a da Vinci, people asked, when it looks so much like a poor imitation of one? Even the Royal Academy got in on the game:

A true #LeonardodaVinci, or the art world's priciest case of mistaken attribution – what's your take on #SalvatorMundi? https://t.co/NIF0OcZtdr

— Royal Academy (@royalacademy) 16 November 2017

Given the evidence, it had to be the work of a student of the school of da Vinci who had access to da Vinci’s preparatory drawings, or a copyist, didn’t it?

I get why there have been doubts. At first sight Salvator Mundi may well seem to betray everything many of us have come to think we know about da Vinci, the ultimate renaissance man, superman, genius — the romantic myth that is easy to fall for. Yet while extensive overpainting and restoration has left precious little of the original Salvator Mundi (this time-lapse sequence gives a sense of the painting’s journey), enough remains to at least keep people divided. For example, anyone with only a passing interest in da Vinci’s techniques will have observed the sfumato — the smoky effect in Christ’s face achieved partly by the use of the heel of the hand (in this case da Vinci’s actual hand) to manipulate the paint — a technique that is classic Leonardo. Then there’s the pentimenti (traces of alterations in a painting — in this case the position of Christ’s right thumb — that show the artist has changed his or her mind), considered important by art historians in determining the authenticity of a painting as they are details that a copyist would be unlikely to include and demonstrate consistency with other works by the artist. And while we’re on the subject: what about that beautiful right hand? Surely such exquisite execution of something notoriously difficult, with the foreshortening in the arm and the suggestion of muscle beneath the skin, is enough alone to convince? The gorgeously rendered textures too — the clothing and hair, which is painted in little ringlets and rivulets that flow like water — are virtuosic, while the problematic glistening crystal orb is almost too much to process. In it the artist painted a contradiction, an organised scattering of light giving texture and tangibility to an object that’s almost invisible. Oxford art history colossus and da Vinci specialist Martin Kemp describes ‘an amazing series of glistening little apertures — they're like bubbles, but they're not round — painted very delicately, with just a touch of impasto, a touch of dark’, suggesting rock crystal, on which Leonardo was an expert (‘He was asked to judge vases that Isabella d'Este was thinking of buying, and he loved those materials.’) Examining the hand underneath the globe in Salvator Mundi, Kemp did indeed notice a distortion — not one heel, but two: 

‘The restorer thought it was a pentimento, but I wondered if he was recording a double refraction of the kind you get with a calcite sphere. If this proves to be right, it would be absolutely Leonardesque. I like these things when they're not just connoisseurship. None of the copyists knew that. They just transcribed it. Some of them do better than others, but none of them got this crystal with its possible double refraction.’ 

Source: Blouinartinfo International, The Male "Mona Lisa"?: Art Historian Martin Kemp on Leonardo da Vinci's Mysterious "Salvator Mundi", by Andrew M. Goldstein (Nov. 2011)

You don’t have to be an art connoisseur or scholar, however, to reflect on what Salvator Mundi may have meant to its intended audience. How would Leonardo’s contemporaries have viewed it, and in what setting? Put yourself in the place of a person in 1500, in the intimate setting of a catholic church. Gazing up at the painting as you kneel before it by flickering candlelight, with the sound of a choir and the intoxicating smell of incense, how would you feel? The painting’s black background (as opposed to an imaginary landscape) situates the figure in a shadowy church, while the fact that da Vinci used a local model dressed in contemporary garb helps compound the sense of a living Christ actually being there, emerging from the darkness. In addition, the straightforward posture and foreshortening in the right arm creates the illusion that Christ is about to bless us. Considered by Kemp as ‘a devotional Mona Lisa’, Salvator Mundi is a haunting, hugely powerful painting, every bit as psychologically powerful as La Gioconda, if not more so (especially if viewed in a setting as close to that for which it was intended). Those who have seen Salvator Mundi in the flesh describe it as having a powerful presence that elicits a sense of devotion and awe. Seeing it for the first time, Martin Kemp describes it as having ‘that kind of presence that Leonardos have… which is kind of almost inside your body, as it were… It's got that kind of uncanny vortex, as if the hair is a living, moving substance, or like water, which is what Leonardo said hair was like. So it almost ceases to become hair, and it becomes a source of energy in its own right.’ Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones too describes how ‘[t]he less than perfect condition of this eerie icon was obvious, but so was its bizarre brilliance. It holds a room in a very odd and disconcerting way. Christ’s steady gaze is unsettling, uncomfortable, frightening.’

So is Salvator Mundi a da Vinci or not? Allowing for the possibility that some of it may have been painted by a pupil or assistant of the da Vinci workshop while da Vinci himself finessed certain features, the evidence offered by the painting — the forensic detail of the sfumato, the opinions of respected experts and the effect of the painting on the viewer — speaks loudly and convincingly. Certainly, its influence was such that it established the Salvator Mundi as a genre with conventions to be followed (Durer, Titian and others also created their own versions that included the essential elements of the plain background, the straightforward posture, and the orb). It would seem too that the mysterious new owner of Salvator Mundi found 450 million reasons to believe in the painting’s authenticity. Their motivation? Ego alone fails to explain their anonymity (and in any case, the commission and purchase of art has always involved large sums of money, if it wasn’t for which, much of what has come to be recognised as high art wouldn’t exist). A lot of the attention directed towards Salvator Mundi was less about the painting itself than the idea of a cherished artist we think we’ve come to know. Perhaps the prospect of owning a painting that has somehow become more than a painting — almost a form of time travel, as all Leonardos have become — was too much to resist. More than anyone, Salvator Mundi’s new owner has afforded the privilege of experiencing the painting in such a way that seeing it in a gallery never can. It will be able to let its guard down. But if the buyer happens to see fit to lend it to galleries so more people can see it, perhaps their money really will have been well spent.