Chapter 3
The Subject Matter
The Salvator Mundi is recognized as one of the canonical images in Christianity and was particularly favoured for private devotion, like small-scale Madonnas. The title is used automatically by art historians for any image that adopts a format in which Jesus is shown offering his blessing and holding the orb that signals his care of the world and its inhabitants. However, a caution is in order. The title is not attached as a matter of course to any of the images in the early documentation of the Leonardo and Leonardo-related images known to us. This seems to be the case with English and non-English sources. What we call the Salvator Mundi appears in documents under various titles, such as ‘Christ, the Redeemer’, and ‘Our Lord’, sometimes with a longer description.1 Its format could be signalled by terms such as ‘half’ (half length) or ‘head’ (in the sense of a ‘portrait’, though this might apply to images other than those with the orb and blessing hand).
An exceptionally early appearance of the title Salvator Mundi for an image of Christ occurs in the innovative, Eucharistic altarpiece by Fra Bartolommeo of Christ and the Four Evangelists from 1516 in the Pitti, in which a full-length blessing Christ stands in a swaying pose on an altar above a chalice, a tablet inscribed ‘SALVATOR MUND.’, and a roundel, through which can be seen an extensive landscape. This exceptional format and iconography for an altarpiece has little connection with the stock devotional images of the Salvator on smaller scales.2
Matters are further complicated by the existence of other types of ‘Salvator Mundi’, most notably when a young or even infant Christ is equipped with a sphere and shown as blessing. An early example of a young Christ is a painting from the late fifteenth century attributed to Biagio d’Antonio in Dijon.3 A banderol beside the globe carries the biblical ‘EGO SUM VIA’ (I am the way: John 14:6). As we shall see, there were Leonardesque versions of the Young Christ as Salvator Mundi that cause problems when we attempt to identify paintings in inventories.
The phrase ‘Salvator Mundi’ occurs once in the Vulgate in the gospel of St John (4:42), when the Samaritans recognize that Jesus is ‘truly the saviour of the world’ (hic est vere salvator mundi), but this does not seem to be associated with the pictorial genre. The cluster of biblical texts normally cited for the Salvator were inscribed on the second state of the etching made by Wenceslaus Hollar (Fig. 1.3), here in the King James version: Matthew, 11:28, ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’; and John, 14:6, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’.4 The latter was standard, were any text to be inscribed on a Salvator Mundi, following the precedent of the Christ Pantocrator, familiar from Byzantine apse mosaics and icons. The verses from Matthew continue, ‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.’ As we shall see, the crossed bands of Christ’s costume, based on the stoles of an ordained priest, may allude in an innovatory manner to the yoke that Christ is inviting his followers to take upon themselves.
Tracking the phrase in the liturgy is problematic, given chronological and local variations. Its most conspicuous manifestation is in the hymn Salvator Mundi Domine for Christmas Eve and the days of the Octave over Christmas. As such it features in notable compositions by John Sheppard, Thomas Tallis (twice), Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and Giovanni Bassano.5 This more regular musical usage does not seem to have been taken up for the pictorial genre.
For the purposes of what follows, we will continue for convenience to use the standard art-historical title, whilst bearing in mind that it was not in regular use during the Renaissance or even in the seventeenth century.
The format of the stock type almost invariably exhibits a hierarchical, unyielding quality in which Christ looks fixedly at the spectator, asserting his just and benign sovereignty over mankind. The iconic frontality of body, face, and gaze is shared with one of the stock images of God the Father as the stern judge of the Old Testament, but the incarnated Christ is typically characterized as exercising his rule more tenderly, in keeping with his merciful personality in the New Testament (if not at the Last Judgment).
The frontality and close focus is shared by related images of Christ without the globe.6 He is frequently portrayed as blessing. Sometimes he displays his stigmata. In others he is presented portrait-like without other iconographic features. Sometimes little more than his head is shown. These related images tend to be described as Saviours of the World, but it is better if the title Salvator Mundi is limited to images featuring the sphere of the world. The painting signed and dated in 1511 by Salaì (Giovanni Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno), Leonardo’s rascally assistant, clearly dependent on his master’s example, is of the ‘portrait type’, without either a globe or a gesture of blessing (Fig. 2.8).7
A closely related small painting of Christ was sold at Sotheby’s London on 5 December 2018.8 The execution of this painting is consistent with someone who was very much an insider in Leonardo’s workshop, and is rather more accomplished than that of the Ambrosiana ‘Salaidino’ painting. The exact relationship between the Sotheby’s panel and the Ambrosiana painting, and indeed the Salvator Mundi, remains to be established, but they do indicate the involvement of Leonardo’s circle in the ‘portrait’ type.
The sphere of the Salvator Mundi compositions had been adopted widely across cultures to manifest a ruler’s command over the world and had become closely associated with Christian imagery following Charlemagne’s adoption of the orb (topped by a cross) and sceptre. Subsequent Holy Roman Emperors and other crowned rulers in Europe are frequently depicted frontally, holding the orb in their left hand and sceptre in their right. A spectacular example—exuding benign authority—is the golden seal of Charles IV on the hugely important bull that resulted from the Diet of Metz in 1356–7 (Fig. 3.1). The bull codified the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire and remained in operation for more than four hundred years. It is the governmental orb that distinguishes the Salvator Mundi from what is better characterized as Christ Blessing.
Fig. 3.1The Golden Seal of the Bull of Charles IV, 1356, Hauptstaatsarchiv, Stuttgart.
In Britain from the time of Edward the Confessor in the twelfth century, the insignia of the sceptre and orb were deployed to denote the monarch’s power. They were the culminating symbols of power presented to Queen Elizabeth I before the actual crown was placed on her head. We will see King Charles I, apparently owner of two Salvators, holding a spectacular orb (Fig. 3.2). After the execution of Charles I, the royal regalia were destroyed, and on the restoration of the monarchy, a new orb and sceptre were necessarily made for Charles II.
Fig. 3.2Studio of Sir Anthony van Dyck, King Charles I of England, oil on canvas, 128 × 100 cm, c. 1636–40, private collection.
The standard rulers’ orb comprised a metallic gold sphere, often in gold, with a decorative, bejewelled band around its horizontal equator and one or more circumferential bands passing through its upper and lower poles. However, in painted images of the Salvator Mundi the orb comes in a surprising variety of guises. It was one of the few features that presented the artists with some inventive and virtuosic potential within what was otherwise a rather invariant portrayal. There are at least eight discernible types:
(i)opaque, generally metallic and frequently golden;
(ii)opaque with an inverted T-band: a horizontal band around its equator and a vertical band passing over the upper pole. This format seems to have become associated with the mediaeval ‘T & O’ maps of the world, in which the bands demarcate Asia, Europe and Africa;
(iii)opaque with an indication on its surface of lands and seas, as a terrestrial globe;
(iv)transparent or translucent, either solid or hollow;
(v)transparent with a T-band;
(vi)transparent, partly filled with water;
(vii)transparent with an internal terrestrial globe;
(viii)transparent with a ‘landscape’ running inside it at equatorial level or below.9
The number of variants confirms how the wide range of alternatives granted some innovatory latitude within a subject that presented limited opportunities for formal improvisation or special effects. An early example of the last and most surprising of the eight types is in Simone Martini’s very damaged fresco made for the entrance porch for Notre-Dame-des-Doms in Avignon and now in the Palais des Papes. Christ solicitously holds a glassy sphere containing wavy water on which floats a small boat, some dry land supporting flora and fauna, and a starry sky with the sun and moon.10 Two sinopia under-paintings were discovered, the second of which (Fig. 3.3) shows that he was considering adding the inscription ‘EGO SUM LUX MUNDI’ (I am the light of the world).
Fig. 3.3Simone Martini, Blessing Christ, second stage of sinopia, c. 1341, Avignon, Musée du Palais des Papes (formerly Cathedral of Notre-Dame-des-Doms, façade).
Both the opaque and transparent spheres frequently bear a vertical cross. This globus cruciger presented further scope for subtle improvisation. A nice example is Andrea Previtali’s Salvator of 1518 in which he takes obvious delight in the virtuoso rendering of a thin glass ball with a refined T-band and delicate cross (Fig. 3.4).
Fig. 3.4Andrea Previtali, Salvator Mundi, 1518, London, National Gallery.
The orbs are most frequently cradled with care in Christ’s left hand, but occasionally are supported on a ledge with Christ’s hand resting over the top of the sphere. It is for the most part obvious that the spheres denote the globe of the earth, the orbis terrarum, but the transparent or translucent forms could be seen as representing the cosmos. This is specifically the case with the painting by Carpaccio in the New Orleans Museum of Art in which the solid globe of the earth is nestling at the centre of the transparent orb of the heavens (Fig. 3.5).11 Carpaccio’s orb appears to be made from glass, fittingly in Venice, which boasted a major glass industry. Previtali had also worked in Venice. A comparable orb with a central terrestrial globe is held by a splendidly enthroned Christ with the symbols of the Evangelists by Fernando Gallego in the Prado (Fig. 3.6), painted in the early 1490s in a predominantly Netherlandish style.12 Gallego had earlier painted an elaborate astrological ceiling of the Sky of Salamanca in the library of the University of Salamanca, and was clearly alert to cosmological imagery.13 Leonardo, as we will see, devised his own variation on the cosmological type.
Fig. 3.5Vittore Carpaccio, Salvator Mundi, New Orleans, Museum of Art.
Fig. 3.6Fernando Gallego, Christ as Salvator Mundi with the Symbols of the Evangelists, 1494–6, Madrid, Prado.
In the fifteenth century, the Salvator Mundi rose to particular prominence in Netherlandish art. The northern lineage of Leonardo’s image appears to be strong, not least in terms of optical virtuosity. The Braque Triptych in the Louvre by Rogier van der Weyden, in which the blessing Christ with his golden globus cruciger (Fig. 3.7) is flanked by the Virgin and St John the Evangelist, seems to have set in train a series of images of the blessing Christ portrayed on his own.14 Antonello da Messina, whose innovative work was much inspired by Netherlandish examples and was known in Milan, created a compelling image of the Blessing Christ in 1465 (London, National Gallery), but without the orb.15
Fig. 3.7Rogier van de Weyden, Braque Family Triptych, detail of the centre, Louvre, Paris.
It has been claimed that Leonardo drew his inspiration directly from a Salvator Mundi on canvas in Urbino, now much damaged (Fig. 3.8).16 Although the orb has disappeared, the cross on top has survived. It has been attributed to a variety of artists, including Melozzo da Forli, Bramantino, Pedro Berruguete, and Bartolomeo della Gatta. If by Melozzo, it might have been seen by Leonardo when he was in Urbino on Cesare Borgia’s business in 1502.17 The fact that it has not found a natural place in the oeuvres of any the painters named as its potential author may indicate that it is an imitation of Leonardo’s painting that has taken its author beyond his normal limits. If it was one of Leonardo’s sources of inspiration, this would favour a starting date for his version no earlier than 1502, when he visited Urbino.
Fig. 3.8Unknown Artist, Salvator Mundi, Urbino, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche.
Alongside the sphere and blessing hand, the other insistent iconographical feature in Leonardo’s Salvator is the cross-shaped configuration of substantial strips of fabric across Christ’s chest. These are not a standard part of his costume in earlier images, but feature prominently in the many later versions. The most obvious reference is to the crossed stoles that ordained priests are required to wear when administering the mass and performing other sacramental duties.18 Indeed, this reference is likely to have been picked up by contemporary viewers. However, Christ’s garments as a whole do not allude to the standard vestments of priests—the amice, alb, cincture, maniple, stole, and chasuble (in order from inner to outer). Moreover, unlike the priest’s stole, which is tucked into the cincture (girdle or belt) around the white alb, the orphrey bands in Leonardo’s image are marked at their point of intersection by a crystal jewel and they are clearly not two separate strips, one overlying another. Given the prominence of the conjoined bands, it makes sense to see them as Leonardo’s emphatic interpretation of the yoke that Christ in St Matthew’s Gospel invites us to assume in order to bear his ‘sweet’ burden.
The facial type, hair, and beard of these Renaissance Saviours are consistent with what had become the authorized ‘portrait’ of Jesus. A hybrid had arisen over time from various likenesses that were claimed to have authentic status, particularly those created through miraculous processes of imprinting, painting, or sculpting. The best known of the images made without the intervention of the human hand was the ‘Veronica’, the Sudarium (the towel or veil) on which Christ’s features were impressed on his agonizing journey towards the summit of Mount Calvary.19 The Vatican owned what was widely believed to the true version of the cloth that Veronica had proffered to the suffering Christ to wipe his bloody face. Formulaic paintings purporting to be replicas of the seldom-seen original were very popular souvenirs for pilgrims, and their purchase promised the sinner a notable remission of days in Purgatory.
The stock visual formula was supplemented by the apocryphal letter of Publius Lentulus to Caesar Tiburius, which probably originated in the thirteenth century and had gained considerable currency as an authentic description.20 It exists in a number of variants, one of which recounts that his hair was the colour of chestnut and that it fell ‘straight to the ears’ before becoming curly. The most widely cited Latin text tells us that,
He is a man of medium size; he has a reverend aspect, and his beholders can both fear and love him. His hair is wavy and curled, with a bluish and bright sheen, flowing over his shoulders. It is parted in two on the top of the head, in the mode of the Nazarenes. His brow is smooth and serene with a face without wrinkle or blemish, with a soft red complexion. His nose and mouth are neither too prominent or reticent. His beard is abundant, of the colour of his hair, not long, but divided at the chin. His aspect is simple and mature, his eyes are lively and bright. He is terrible in his reprimands, sweet and amiable in his admonitions, cheerful without loss of gravity. He was never known to laugh, but often to weep. His stature is straight, his hands and arms beautiful to behold. His conversation is grave, refined and modest. He is the most beautiful among the children of men.21
On the composite basis of the best known of the verbal and visual ‘portraits’, Christ’s appearance had become well established, albeit with regional and national variations. The disposition of the highly regular and symmetrical features in Leonardo’s portrayal—long hair with central parting, curling over his shoulders; wide brow; almond-shaped eyes; long, straight nose; and shapely mouth—are standard enough. These standard features were required if the image was to do its job properly.
A precious fifteenth-century insight into how the image of the Salvator worked for sophisticated Renaissance spectators was provided by Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus), the German cardinal and international philosopher. When he dispatched a copy of his treatise De visione Dei (On the Vision of God) to the monks of Tegernsee, the main Benedictine abbey in Bavaria, he sent with it a painted ‘Image of God’, as he explained in his preface.22 Since it was only through Christ’s appearance on earth that we could hope to gain some knowledge of the appearance of God, Cusanus’s gift would almost certainly have been a Salvator of the kind painted by Rogier van de Weyden (Fig. 3.7), whom Cusanus specifically cites in his preface as ‘the greatest painter’.
Cusanus also likely to have known the Christ by Jan van Eyck or one of its derivatives, which set the norm for the highly focused, portrait-like rendering on a small panel. The prime version by the master himself appears to be lost, but a copy or workshop version is in Berlin (Fig. 3.9). It carries a notable series of inscriptions. The Greek alpha (the beginning) and omega (the end) and the Latin I(nitium) and F(inis) flank Christ’s head. Jesus is designated as King of Kings on his neckband of his garment. The frame bears inscriptions that look as if they are carved into and painted on its gilded surface. At the top is ‘via veritas vita’ from Christ’s pronouncement in the Gospel of St John that he is ‘the way, the truth, and life’. At the bottom of the frame is ‘primus et novissim(us)’ from the first chapter of the Latin Apocalypse: ‘And when I had seen him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying: Fear not. I am the First and the Last [primus et novissimus]’.
Fig. 3.9Jan van Eyck (after), Christ (original from 1438), Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie.
In a manner consistent with Jan’s open ambition, the inner face of the frame tells us that ‘Johannes de eyck me fecit & aplevit anno 1438 31 januarii’ (Jan van Eyck made and amplified me in the year 1438 on 31 January). The term ‘aplevit’ may be understood as amplified or magnified (amplavit) in the sense that Psalm 34 invites us to ‘magnify the Lord’. To the left of his signature he unabashedly wrote in Greek characters, als [actually rendered in the copy as ‘ame’] ich kan (‘As I can’).
Jan van Eyck’s highly influential image or something like it provided the direct point of reference for Cusanus. In his subtle dissertation on the painted image, the cardinal pointed out that
Regardless from the place from which each of you looks at it, each will have the impression that he alone is being looked at by it … He will find that the icon’s gaze proceeds continually with him.
This sparked a series of mediations on terrestrial and divine seeing. Cusanus compared the unrelenting stare of the painted eyes with the ‘Absolute Sight’ of God, which knew no bounds. He told the monks that the earth-bound sense with which they view the painted face was but a lowly reflection of the ‘invisible Truth of … [God’s] Face’. He invited the recipients of the painting to compose their own meditation on the divine visage when looking at the painted version. He then formulated an analogy between our looking in a mirror and God as the mirror of eternity.23 Few if any would have viewed a Salvator Mundi with the sophistication of Cusanus, but his letter testifies that a small-scale devotional picture was designed to serve as an intense focus for personal meditation on sacred mysteries, openly inviting exegesis.
Amongst such devotional images, suitable for smaller private chapels or domestic settings, the Salvator Mundi exercised a unique impact through its directly assertive presence. It was ideally suited to function in private and domestic contexts, reminding family members on a daily basis of the incarnation of Christ, his assuming of our sins, and his invitation to follow him.
Alongside the standard image, a new kind of Christ holding an orb and blessing arose in Leonardo’s time. Christ is portrayed as a boy or youth rather than as a young man, an example of which we have noted. The younger Christ is also featured in compositions in which the upright frontality was relaxed. This is exemplified by a painting from a follower of Leonardo in the Pushkin Museum (Plate 10).24 As we will see, the reverse of the panel carries Charles I’s cipher and was therefore in the Stuart king’s collection.25 It is just possible that the more informal versions of the young Christ as Saviour (see figs. 2.9 and 6.3) might have emerged from some preliminary thinking by Leonardo in response to Isabella’s request. One of the versions is inscribed to the effect that Jesus is twelve years old.26
When Leonardo came to paint the canonical version for which he was definitely responsible, he was constrained on one hand by the standard format; on the other he was able to use it as a potent vehicle for his particular kind of innovatory communication with the spectator.