Note One (Relics):
I said I found myself spellbound by the picture. That does not mean I necessarily like the picture. What it means is that Leonardo's Salvator Mundi came to haunt my thoughts. As if the picture had been burned into my retinas. Again and again, I found it floating in front of my eyes before I fell asleep at night: extraordinarily beautiful, Christ stood facing fully front as if in a Byzantine icon against a dark background. With his hands bestowing a blessing (fingers lit up in light) the luminescence of the chest and forehead dazzles.
It is extraordinary really.
When I first saw it, not long after the disaster in Fukushima, I was somehow reminded of the solemnity of the Kudara Kannon Statue (百済観音) at Horyuji. Carved (probably by Korean artists) out of a piece of camphor wood, it is gilded in bronze. Like Leonardo's Christ, Kannon holds one hand in blessing, and in the other holds a vessel containing the "nectar" of compassion. Also like the Leonardo, the Kannon looks straight at you--and yet looks beyond you. The Salvator Mundi--like Kannon-- blesses human kind as he makes his promise to save us.
Statuesque, solemn, like a Byzantine icon...
Incidentally, in 2011 I wrote a post on my old blog, Tang Dynasty Times, about the newly discovered Leonardo, as well as a celebrated court case about another Leonardo called, Leonardo in the Gilded Age. This post won 3QD's Strange Quark Prize (judged by Gish Jen) and thereby kicked off my very happy relationship with 3 Quarks Daily!
Over the years, following the news about the picture and seeing more and more images online, I felt that the picture felt so familiar--as if I had seen it before. The face is reminiscent of the Mona Lisa. But it is also reminiscent of Saint John the Baptist (especially the curls).
I was also immediately reminded of the 1500 Self-Portrait by Dürer (see just above). Who but Durer would paint himself as Christ Triumphant? (I strongly recommend Joseph Leo Koerner's book below on Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art if you are interested in the Northern tradition of painting Salvator Mundi pictures and the Durer Self-Portrait in particular).
You can see the Durer painting at the same time you see you can see the other early Leonardo painting, Madonna of the Carnation at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Visiting Munich is a top priority for me. Madonna of the Carnation is --along with the Benois Madonna in the Hermitage Museum-- considered to be the two early paintings that Leonardo referred to in his notebooks that he was working on in 1478. This was about the time that Leonardo was transitioning from being a pupil of Verrochio in Florence to make his own way as an independent artist, soon thereafter moving to Milan.
Both the Durer Self-Portrait and the Leonardo are dated 1500. Durer dated the picture himself (the 1500 date for the Leonardo is just an educated guess).
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But there was something else that I couldn't place my finger on.
Finally, breaking down, I bought a used copy of the Christie's catalog on ebay for $90. I thought it was steep, but in the end, my curiosity got the better of me and I was delighted to open it up and immediately see both the Durer and Bosch's orb shown side by side with the Salvator Mundi.
There was also a discussion of expert MET curator Luke Syson's proposal that Leonardo was consciously trying to emulate the face of Christ as seen in famous examples of acheiropoetos, like the Shroud of Turin and the Veil of Veronica. Of course, that is why I felt so emotional about the picture! Why it looked so familiar! How could I have forgotten that my friend Brooks Riley had suggested as much last year in her post at 3QD on Leonardo, Resisting Leonardo?
See my old post: Cabinets Of Wonder: The Shroud Of Turin & The Museum Of Jurassic Technology
Syson particularly focused on the Mandylion of Edessa (not the Shroud). There are three images that are said to be the authentic image of Edessa. One has long been held by the French crown and was kept in Saint Chapelle (along with the Crown of Thorns, for which the chapel was built) until the French Revolution. The other was kept (and still remains) in a church outside of Genoa, under Sforza control until 1499 when the French claimed it. Syson suggests that if Leonardo was painting the picture for the French crown (for Anne of Brittany and then later removed from France a hundred years later when the French princess Henrietta Maria married Charles I in 1625) then it is possible that he was commissioned to create the face in the likeness of the second Mandylion.
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Note Two (And what about that rock crystal orb?)
Some suggested that no one but Leonardo had the skill to paint that orb at that time. The restorer, Dianne Dwyer Modestin, has remarked about the extraordinary detail of the orb under microscope. Leonardo expert Martin Kemp also has written movingly about the orb in his memoir, Living with Leonardo (I cannot recommend this book enough! I could not put it down). Trained in science, Kemp was quick to note that this orb was unique in Renaissance painting, being a perfect rock crystal sphere with inclusions. Rock crystal was used during the Renaissance for reliquaries and was highly valued. Leonardo Patron Isabella d'Este had asked Leonardo to give his opinion on vases made in materials such as agate, jasper and amethyst and made note that Leonardo particularly liked crystal because of its clarity. Kemp did a study of Salvator paintings with orbs and found that while brass and glass orbs were quite common, none could be found made of rock crystal.
The orb as a crystalline sphere immediately calls to mind the exterior shutters of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delight.
This is impossible to see at the Prado because the triptych is permanently displayed open.
Here is a video of a rare opening of the shutters.
Bosch depicts the third day of creation. According to the Book of Genesis, God said, "Let the waters under heaven be gathered together and the dry land emerge."
The choice of non-colors (grisaille) on the outer shutters of the triptych is very conventional--but instead of the usual depiction of donors or saints, Bosch gives us the earth as it was before the ruin at the hands of mankind. This is not the moment of creation but rather is a picture of a glass globe of the kind that emperors hold in their hands to express their dominion over the world.
In the top corner is God. And this inscription:
"For he spake, and it was done; he commanded and it stood fast." (Psalms 33:9)
I've always love to imagine the enormous delight that guests of the Duke of Nassau (original patron of the triptych?) when the gray world of the outer triptych opened to display the shock of all those colors (colors of the new world?) depicted on the inside of the triptych.
Painted between 1490-1510?
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Note Three (Renaissance Painting Practices)
Walter Isaacson, in his fantastic new biography on Leonardo, quotes Martin Kemp in his fantastic new biography on Leonardo:
"The process of production is more in keeping with the commissioning of a superbly made chair from a major craftsman, "Kemp wrote...."We do not ask if a certain glued joint in the chair was made by the head of his assistants--providing the joint holds and looks good."
In the case of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, as it was with the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, "we should modify the traditional questions asked by art historians: Which version is the "authentic" or "autograph" or "original" one? Which are mere "copies"? Instead, the proper and more interesting questions to ask are How did the collaboration occur? What was the nature of the team and the teamwork?
Interestingly, contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami (Dustin Yellin is an interesting case) work using a production team.
Note Four (Restoration)
Etienne Gilson writes that the "restoration of paintings is one of the surest methods scientifically to substitute new paintings for the old ones."
And: Cecilia Giménez was scorned after her amateur efforts to repair a faded painting of Christ – but in the years since, the disaster has been transformed into a windfall as her story is being turned into a comic opera, called (you guessed it: behold the Man!) ! You can't make this stuff up!
Note Five (Aquamarine):
The use of aquamarine in the picture is noteworthy for two reasons. First it is unusual to see that much blue used to depict Christ (it is traditionally associated with Mary). And, because of its extraordinary expense, experts are quite sure Salvator Mundi was no ordinary copy! But incidentally, the copy of the Mona Lisa in the Prado, is a copy but also uses very expensive pigments, including aquamarine and vermilion (not very much though) so we know that that studio copy had a patron of some wealth.
This is from an old post I did at Vox Nova (Patheos):
Made from ground up lapis lazuli, Victoria Finlay, in her book, Color: A Natural History of the Palette, begins her chapter on blue with these words:
One Day many years ago somebody told me that all the true ultramarine paint in the world came from one mine in the heart of Asia.
It's true, it seems that all the ultramarine paint in the world was painstakingly derived from the lapis luzuli rocks mined from one place in northeast Afghanistan. Located not far from Bamiyan; from the Sar-e-sang mine in Afghanistan, donkeys transported the expensive pigment in rough sacks over an ocean of mountain ranges-- East to Central Asia and beyond, and West to Venice and beyond.
In Europe, the precious pigment was so expensive that it was worth more than gold, and the legendary painters of the Renaissance were forced to wait till their patrons provided them the pigment before they could apply the heavenly blue to Mary's robes (for by this time the color was symbolic of Mary).
Finlay says in today's money, a pound would cost about $3000.
The color is truly heavenly-- just look at the Wilton Diptych-- shown here. That is all lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. It is the same color blue that was used at Kizil in what is now Western China and the same color blue that was used in painting the great Buddhist statues that stood over the Bamiyan valley for 1400 years.
In Medieval Byzantium dark blue was the color reserved for an empress. It was also--along with gold--the costliest material of all and so was used in paintings of the Virgin Mary as an expression of devotion.The color became, therefore, a symbol of Mary, and this is where the term, la sacre bleu comes from too...
Cennino Cennini, in Il Libro dell'Arte, wrote that "Ultramarine blue is a color illustrious, beautiful and most perfect, beyond all other colors; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would still not surpass."
Even the great Michaelangelo was famously unable to finish his painting The Entombment because his promised shipment of ultramarine fell through.
Note Six (Pentimenti)
One of the most important clues that x rays tell us is what is happening beneath the surface of the painting. In this case, what was shown were countless changes of heart made by the painter as he created this work. The Italian word pentimenti means "regrets" and these refer to the changes made during the act of creation. Not surprising, Leonardo is known for his creative work that exhibits many revisions and improvisations during the act of painting. Compared to the final version, he had painted the thumb in a straighter position. He later painted over this to create the curved position of the right thumb we have today. As I mentioned, this kind of re-working during the painting process is typical of Leonardo, but it also suggests (not conclusively) that this is the original work since the other copies have the more bent thumb--as in the final version.
Pigments and binders are also analyzed to try and find signature Leonardo techniques. For example, Martin Kemp describes his usual method of painting over his first underdrawing with a light wash of lead (this was not widely shared with other painters) and his laying of a white lead priming directly onto some of his panels without an intervening layer of gesso. His technique of using his hand to model the flesh tones (something seen in the Salvator Mundi) is also idiosyncratic to Leonardo.
Note Seven (Good Old-Fashion Connoisseurship)
If you are interested in this subject, I really recommend reading, The Eye, by Philippe Costamagna. A specialist in 16th century Italian painting and a museum director in Corsica, Costamagna is a proud proponent of good old-fashioned connoisseurship. This is almost a dirty word in today’s American art world, which has removed art history from being considered a humanities subject and is turning it into a social science with a strong distrust of aesthetic intuitions and body know-how. Of course, the idea of a specialist gaining expertise by basically looking at every picture he or she can manage to see in her area of specialization and creating a memory palace in the mind—which can function as a catalog of all that he or she has seen, so as to be able to just “know” if something is authentic or not-- seems less scientific than the technical, analytical and textual training that is received today. And yet, this is a kind of “know-how” that has always been a part of the art world.
In Costamagma's words: “We stand in front of a work. Boom, we suddenly, instinctively know the artist who painted it”
Having a good eye is what they call it. And, this detached, de-contextualized objective seeing is straight out of Kant. To really see means to really look. And connoisseurs are people who have trained their eyes for decades, focusing on one particular period they would see every example of the artist or genre as possible in order that their eyes would form an expertise allowing them to recognize the hand, style palette of any given artist. To be trained as an “eye” was one of the hallmarks of an advanced degree in art history in days past.
I recommend reading this with The American Leonardo, by John Brewer, about a disputed Leonardo painting which led to a protracted court battle during America's gilded age. This occurred when identification and authentication depended on experts who could just know if a work was genuine or not and they did this by immersing themselves in the artists’ lives and seeing and really looking at everything they could. Costamagna compares the eye to “a nose: in the perfume world. There are musical people who can “know” they are listening to Mozart in just the first note or can hum the entire ring cycle because the music is so deeply inscribed in their minds (my friend can do this).
Peter Greenaway in his documentary Rembrandt's J'Accuse (2008) thinks it is a terrible shame the way we have all become visually illiterate. And perhaps musically, as well?
I agree it is very sad the way we have turned away from memorizing poetry and that art and music has been cut in elementary schools. Children are being forced into so much text-based hoop jumping but we really are losing our cultural sensitivity. We are losing our body know-how.
Note Eight (Consensus)
As in standard models on hard science, attribution is based on consensus among experts. For me, the most noteworthy aspect of this Leonardo discovery is the level of consensus. Of the scholars called upon to examine the picture out of its frame and alongside other early work by Leonardo, only one had qualifications. This was Carmen Bambach, who was inclined to see Boltraffio as playing a major role. The most persuasive dissenting opinion that I read was written by German art historian Frank Zollner in his newly updated Taschen publication.
He seemed inclined to favor another Salvator Mundi picture which was discussed as being the prototype original Leonardo in 1978. This picture, called the de Ganay Salvator Mundi, has a much more impressive French Provenance and also for a time carried a Leonardo attribution (and this picture is maybe a better match for the preparatory drawings in the Royal Trust Collection).
Its provenance originally places the de Ganay in the collection of Anne of Brittany, the wife of the King of France, Louis XII, who was Leonardo's last patron. The de Ganay sold at auction to a private collector for $332,000 in 1992. I would say they got a bargain.
Isn't it gorgeous?
Also a note about the restorer. Dianne Dwyer Modestini was married to one of the world's greatest connoisseurs and restorers of Renaissance painting, Mario Modestini, and is an internationally recognized art restorer and academic in her own right. I found this video in which she discusses the loss of her husband and the Salvator Mundi to be very moving.
Note Nine (Experts Versus the Peanut Gallery)
From Bloomberg:
“All of the most relevant people believe it’s by Leonardo, so the rather extensive criticism that goes ‘I don’t know anything about old masters, but I don’t think it’s by Leonardo’ shouldn’t ever have gone to print,” says British old masters dealer Charles Beddington. “Yes, it’s a picture that needed to be extensively restored. But the fact that it’s unanimously accepted as a Leonardo shows it’s in good enough condition that there weren’t questions of authenticity.”
I highly recommend reading this above short article from Bloomberg for an understanding of what is so annoying about the peanut gallery. Many years ago the Atlantic had a very thought-provoking article about what the Internet is doing to our brains. It was called Is Google Making us Stupid? And it posits way that online reading is turning us into pancake people. That is to suggest that not only are we reading FAR FEWER books but our understanding of basic concepts from science to art and music is becoming more and more superficial. This is to suggest that we no longer know what we don't know. My own opinion is that since I have not seen the picture in person yet, I cannot make any kind of judgement (since my judgements would only be based on aesthetic calls and emotional reactions anyway). However, I also tried to learn everything I could to write intelligently about this issue. Books recommended on Leonardo are as follows (And if you have any favorites, I am all ears!) I have grown concerned in my own life about the noise of my online life. Social media especially for me has become a time black hole and one day recently I woke up feeling very manipulated. Before the Internet I probably actively read and could talk about 4-6 books a month.
Note Ten: (Since the beginning of time, the super wealthy have over-paid for art)
It speaks volumes that Salvator Mundi was sold in Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Why? Because that is where people spend the big bucks. So, if you are concerned about someone being ripped off, that is where I would look. Have you seen The Price of Everything? The HBO documentary about the contemporary art market does not intentionally mean to be cynical or vilify--but nevertheless the result is intensely obnoxious (I warn you: it might make you throw up in your mouth).
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My 2016 3QD post on Leonardo: Eyes Swimming with Tears
Cabinets Of Wonder: The Shroud Of Turin & The Museum Of Jurassic Technology
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Recommended Books
Living with Leonardo: Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond, by Martin Kemp
The Eye: An Insider's Memoir of Masterpieces, Money, and the Magnetism of Art
Ross King's Leonardo The Last Supper
John Brewer's The American Leonardo
Walter Isaacson's new biography Leonardo da Vinci
Frank Zollner's Leonardo da Vinci
Christie's Special Publication Leonardo Da Vinci Salvator Mundi
Martin Kemp's La Bella Principessa
Peter Silverman's Leonardo's Princess
Noah Cherney's The Thefts of the Mona Lisa
Martin Kemp's Mona Lisa: The People and the Painting
RA Scotti's Vanished Smile the Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa
Goethe's Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper
Joseph Leo Koerner's The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art
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