Any new attribution to a major master has a lot of work to do. The readiness of experts to accept an attribution stands in inverse proportion to both the rank of the artist and the rarity of autograph works. On both counts, Leonardo stands at the top of the league. In this context, the reception of the Salvator Mundi has been positive, taken as a whole.1 Some have expressed surprise that Leonardo should have taken on such a hierarchical and even ‘dull’ subject. It may of course have been commissioned. If it was an ‘off-the-peg’ product, it radically transformed the communicative mode of stock Salvators, inducing that special air of spiritual ineffability of which we have spoken. There has also been criticism that the artist has not allowed for the optical effects that a sphere would have exercised on things behind it, but this fails to understand the limits of naturalism in the functioning of religious images.
The other chief concern has centred on how the present appearance of the painting relates to its original state. We have produced a careful account of the steps taken to remove the obscuring overpaint and to repair the damage so that the reader can bear witness to those exciting areas in which Leonardo’s own hand most evidently declares itself. Ultimately the fine details of attribution of grounds of style should be based on the images of the painting in its cleaned state (Plate 1). It should be said that if many Renaissance paintings in the world’s great galleries were to be seen stripped down to what survives of the artist’s own handiwork, we would be surprised. The Salvator is neither the worst nor the best I have seen. And it continues assertively to exercise that special, uncanny presence that characterizes all Leonardo’s own paintings. In this respect, as in others, it certainly looked at home amongst the masterpieces in the 2011 exhibition at the National Gallery in London. There will be a unique opportunity to compare the Salvator to Leonardo’s small corpus of paintings in 2019, if the painting is lent to the Musée du Louvre, Paris, as part of the exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death (24 October 2019–24 February 2020).
In this concluding section of the book, I will look at the two sustained and focused discussions by cataloguers of Leonardo paintings, the first by Luke Syson in the London catalogue, and the second in the latest editions of Frank Zöllner’s monograph, which has become a standard point of reference for information on Leonardo’s painted oeuvre and assessment of the status of each work.2
In the first chapter Robert Simon outlined the key role played by the National Gallery in disclosing the work to scholars on a confidential basis and its first public exhibition. The London show was attended by 323,897 ticketed visitors, a proportion of whom had endured very early-morning queueing in inclement weather conditions and paying inflated ticket prices on Internet sites. The Windsor drawings and the painting were catalogued by Luke Syson, main curator of the exhibition, who provided apposite accounts of the painting’s history as then known, its remarkable visual qualities, its iconography, and its emotional and spiritual content.3 We are happy here to endorse and extend Syson’s analyses. His catalogue entry attributes the painting to Leonardo without qualification and dates it to ‘about 1499 onwards’. This early date for its origins is convenient because a date after 1500 would have meant that it fell outside the scope of the London show, dedicated as it was to Leonardo’s work at the court of Milan. We have given a cluster of reasons for a later date. Syson follows Snow-Smith in thinking that it was probably commissioned by the invading French king, Louis XII, who, as we have seen, remains just one of a number of potential patrons or recipients. In many other respects, a good deal more has been discovered in the eight years since the London catalogue was published.
Syson’s catalogue entry remained the most substantial discussion until Zöllner’s addition of the Salvator to the 2017 and 2018 editions of his monograph. It is catalogued as ‘no. XXXII: Leonardo da Vinci and Workshop’ and dated to ‘after 1507’. The later dating seems to us closer than Syson’s early date. In the former edition Zöllner astutely recognizes the many features of the painting that lie outside the reach of Leonardo’s entourage and followers:
The New York Salvator Mundi surpasses all the other known versions of the subject from Leonardo’s circle in terms of its quality. Details such as the modelling of Christ’s blessing hand and the crystal orb, the execution of the filigree embroidery border around the neckline, and above all the suggestive handling of light and the sfumato all testify to a very high standard of technical accomplishment. The fingernails outlined with fine shading, which recall similar features in the Mona Lisa … and St John the Baptist … also argue in favour of an attribution to Leonardo, as do the shadowy eyes and heavy eyelids.
However, Zöllner detects more studio participation than Syson allowed.
The flesh tones of the blessing hand, for example, appear pallid and waxen as in a number of workshop paintings. Christ’s ringlets also seem to me too schematic in their execution, the larger drapery folds too undifferentiated, especially on the right-hand side. They do not begin to bear comparison with the Mona Lisa, for example.
There are answers to these criticisms. The ‘waxen’ definition of the blessing hand has been explained above as what may be called a ‘depth-of-field’ effect, designed to bring the hand forward against the softer modelling of the head. The hand’s understated anatomical veracity was never emulated by his studio assistants. The formalized quality of the curls is in keeping with the more theory-laden naturalism of Leonardo’s later paintings in which laws of vortex motion are expressed quite overtly. And, as is often the case with Leonardo, the ultramarine pigment of the blue draperies has deteriorated, compromising the original modelling. This can be seen notably in the London Virgin of the Rocks and Louvre Virgin, Child, St. Anne and a Lamb.
In the preface to his 2018 edition, Zöllner usefully provides an illustrated review of the major versions, again concluding that what he now calls the ‘Abu Dhabi Salvator’ is superior in quality to all the copies and variants. He is however disturbed by apparent changes in the draperies revealed in photographs published at various times after the London exhibitions and concerned by the lack of published images documenting the stages in the conservation. The account by Robert Simon in this book should serve to answer these concerns.
The controlled role of studio intervention in very high-quality products was designed to frustrate the patron’s or purchaser’s detection of lesser hands, and continues to make the modern art historian’s job very tricky. Fortunately, the technologies of very high-resolution scanning and scientific examination—above all infrared reflectography in the case of Leonardo’s paintings—have given us new tools for seeing both the surfaces and inner layers of paintings on panel. We are now able to perform new kinds of detective work. Availing ourselves of all the art-historical resources, our view in this book is that any studio intervention was limited at most to repetitively routine details, such as some portions of the knotwork on the decorative bands of Christ’s tunic.
Such issues involve very fine judgements, involving not only Leonardo’s distinctive gifts of eye and hand but also the intellectual foundations of his remaking of nature. With Leonardo, we have not only to take into account the artistry of his art but its special content—emotional and scientific.
In her three-volume monograph, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, to be published by Yale University Press during the course of 2019, Carmen Bambach repeats her attribution of the picture to Boltraffio with some scattered interventions by Leonardo. We are confident that the full review that we have provided will served to undermine what seems to us to be an arbitrary judgement. While Boltraffio used the resources of Leonardo’s studio in Sforza Milan to produce paintings that exploited the ‘Leonardo brand’, there is no evidence that he was active in Leonardo’s workshop after 1500, and the hypothetical mode of collaboration remains implausible. In any event, Boltraffio’s characteristically slick and polished modelling of skin tones is notably different from Leonardo’s surface ambiguity and absence of defined edges post-1500.
Ultimately, as the cliché goes, time will tell. We now accept by long custom paintings that might struggle to be accepted if they suddenly appeared out of nowhere. This is particularly the case with the strangely uneasy Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in the National Gallery in Washington. I wonder what would be made of the St. John the Baptist in the Louvre if it emerged unheralded in a provincial auction room. For the Salvator Mundi we have mustered a wide variety of evidence and a very likely provenance that promises an accelerated entry into the inner sanctum of the temple containing Leonardos.
Even by the standards of the fortuna of Leonardo paintings, the story of the Salvator Mundi is exceptionally adventurous, even in recent times. From the hands of the rascally Salaì, its future is unclear before it entered the great collection of the Stuart king, Charles I, and his French queen, Henrietta Maria, seemingly alongside another painting of the Young Christ as Salvator Mundi by a follower of Leonardo. The complex and sometime elusive account of the whereabouts of the pictures, narrated in detail by Margaret Dalivalle, comprises a story that is interwoven with some of the most spectacular and violent events in British history. The ownership of the Salvators was buffeted by the king’s execution and the disposal of his goods. On the restoration of Charles II one of the pictures was restored to the Royal Collection, and seemingly passed into the hands of a later Duke of Buckingham. A taste for fine pictures of religious and secular subjects and the fate of the Stuart kings are integral parts of the same narrative.
At some as yet unknown point, the paint layers and warping panel were assaulted by at least one highly injudicious restorer, effectively disguising an autograph painting as a botched copy. In the prestigious Cook collection and sale its true identity remained concealed under overpaint, as it did at its auction in a regional auctioneer’s in the USA. Then, in the hands of its hopeful owners and diplomatic conservators, the frog was transformed into a prince.
What seemed to be the final act in the new history of the Salvator Mundi involved its purchase for $127.5 million by Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian billionaire who was building up a major art collection—as well as acquiring AS Monaco Football Club. He purchased the picture from Yves Bouvier, who owns a series of Freeports for the tax-free storage of very valuable works of art. Bouvier had briefly owned the Salvator, having purchased it from the owners through a private sale mentored by Sotheby’s. Rybolovlev had earlier collected Eastern Orthodox icons, and it is not difficult to see how the typically hieratic, frontal presentation of holy figures in Russian devotional images would have resonated powerfully with the traditional composition and the spiritual power of the Salvator Mundi. However, behind the apparently straightforward purchase lay a series of fractious issues that have been and are now subject to more than one legal action. This is not place to rehearse these matters.4 It is not the painting’s fault that it became the subject of financial and legal disputes.
The story of its ownership appeared to be settled, at least for the time being. However, in autumn 2107, Christie’s in New York announced that the Salvator was to be sold on 15 November during a major sale of modern and contemporary works—as a celebrity picture rather than an ‘old master’.5 Before the auction, the image of Christ was dispatched on a marketing tour of Hong Kong, San Francisco, and London. Someone had guaranteed the price at a mighty minimum of $100 million. The bidding started below this, but rose in a series of tense and seemingly reluctant steps to a scarcely credible $450 million, shattering the world record price for a work of art. Leonardo breaks all the rules. The name of the buyer did not immediately emerge. The press ran with reports that it had been purchased by one of two Saudi Arabian princes. Christie’s then seemingly settled the speculations by announcing that the painting had been acquired by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism and would find its home in Louvre Abu Dhabi. The remarkable ‘world museum’ designed by Jean Nouvel is richly populated with notable loans from the Louvre in Paris, including Leonardo’s so-called ‘La Belle Ferronière’, and a growing number of acquisitions, of which the Salvator is by far the most spectacular. However, at the time of writing the Salvator Mundi has still not made its public debut in the museum, and there is no definite news about its actual ownership or its current and future location.
Sensationalised speculation in the news media has rushed in to fill the vacuum, often accompanied by unsupported assertions that the world’s most expensive painting is not by Leonardo, or is a studio product of modest value. The debate has been dominated by the quest for stories of a journalistic kind rather than analysis of the actual painting.6 The account we have provided is intended to help the reader understand the integral position of the Salvator Mundi in Leonardo’s oeuvre and the sequence of events that have preceded its current inaccessibility.
Whatever its fate, we can confidently say that it not only settles into the small stock of Leonardo paintings but also adds a new dimension to his extraordinary range of artistic communication. Having a new Leonardo painting is a huge privilege for all of us.