Rediscovering Leonardo's Salvator Mundi

The painting turned up in an auction in New Orleans, Louisiana in April of 2005. It was a picture in a minor auction house and one that I spotted in a catalog together with a colleague of mine, Alexander Parrish, and from that the story began. The moment I first saw it in person, I was struck only by the fact that it was indeed an old painting. It was a painting of the period. The idea that it was by Leonardo really did not enter into my consciousness. The hope was that this could be a record of the Leonardo lost composition and maybe by one of Leonardo's more talented students. It took a couple of years of both the conservation and research before I was able to admit the possibility that this could be the lost painting. I think the book is effectively in the first person. It's the horse's mouth story from Robert Simon who with Alex Parrish discovered the painting and so we hear the story of how he made this discovery, how he approached Diane Modestini who was the wonderful restorer who conserved the painting. We hear about the processes of consultation and how the painting was brought to public view in the National Gallery in 2011. From Martin we have the definitive story of the painting itself, how it fits within Leonardo's canon of work. The meaning of the painting is something that hasn't been discussed very much in the public discourse. The iconography of the painting is highly unusual. The painting itself I see as a disruptor. It's a disruptor of a very traditional format and that's something that over and over we see Leonardo doing. Myself I'm thinking about the provenance history but I'm thinking more widely than that. I'm thinking also about what Leonardo is, what he is to us now and who he was to someone in France in the 1630s to someone in the Royal Court in London in the 1650s and how he was thought about at the turn of the 18th century in the advent of modern science. We don't know precisely when the painting was made. There's no document saying I began it at this point, there's no contract but on grounds of style both of the drawings in Windsor for the drapery and looking at the painting it I think belongs to the same period as Mona Lisa. Now we know the portrait of Lisa Garodini was begun or was underway in 1503 and he took a long time over painting so there's no sense in saying he did it in this year. I suspect it was begun around about that time and gradually worked its way towards the finish. There's a painting by Salai, his rather rascally pupil, dated 1511 and if that's dependent as it seems upon the Leonardo image, this is just the head of Christ not the full Salvatore Mundi, then it must have been well underway and at some state of finish by 1511 but I wouldn't guarantee it was finished then. It has enormous similarities with the works particularly after 1500 but also to some extent with The Last Supper. It's a painting which is his most intense devotional painting, the Salvatore Mundi is a stock image, you have a frontal Christ so you can't avoid his gaze, you have the blessing hand, you have the orb, the orb of the earth in most normal pictures. It's the spiritual counterpart of Mona Lisa in a way, both in terms of style but there's very little in the way of edges, it's using this extreme glazing technique he was using after 1500. It adds a lot to what Leonardo did and extends our knowledge of what he did and it relates to Christ in The Last Supper, Christ in the turbulence of the announcement is a calm centre holding out his hands to the bread and wine. So of his devotional paintings it's the most personal, the most intense. It is a fairly standard subject, it's not as common as Madonna and Child paintings but it's a standard subject with fixed ingredients. It's going to be symmetrical, people have criticised it was symmetrical and frontal but if it's the Salvatore Mundi that's the job it has to do, that's the brief for a Salvatore Mundi. He looks at us, he's asserting his benign sovereignty over the world, he is blessing us with one hand and the other hand he holds the orb of the world. So these are absolutely standard components. Leonardo did remarkable things with what was actually a standard formula. You can look at a painting and you can apply connoisseurship and people do that and say oh it looks like Leonardo, it doesn't look like Leonardo, it looks like Leonardo and studio. I'm interested in criteria which go beyond that. In Leonardo's case we were very fortunate and we have all these notes about painting, about optics, about all the subjects he investigated and a painting by Leonardo is going to reflect what I call the science of art, his way of constructing a painting based upon a knowledge of how nature works and if we look at this painting we see that in various areas. First of all optically, he's immensely interested in the functioning of the eye and about the time of the painting of the picture he is developing a theory that the eyes are very flexible in certain even ambiguous instrument and he says at one point the eye does not know the edge of any body, that's to say we never precisely register an edge. If you look in the Mona Lisa, you look in the Salvatore Mundi there are no absolute edges and we put in the edges as it were and it gives the picture a kind of magic. So optically the hand, the blessing hand is more in focus as we would say, this is anachronistic but it is sharper than the face which creates depth and he's interested in the optimum viewing distance for an object, too close you can't see it, too far away it begins to get unclear and at the optimum point you see it as best you can which is what's happening there. If you look at the hair of the Salvatore Mundi which cascades down in these wonderful vortex curls, now the boys and the followers could do curls for the use of, they could do perfectly good quick curves with little brush. What Leonardo does is to see, look at the structure of the curls and he says it's like turbulent water, you've got the weight of the current as it were or the direction of the current, you've got the tendency to revolve, you've got a helix. So the hair in Leonardo, these curly heads which he much likes, the hair always has what I call the physics of hair in it, it is always reflecting that and it's not just curly hair, it has a thought behind it. So in a way in the picture he's showing Christ the saviour of the cosmos but through this technique of extreme ambiguity and softness he implies that Christ although incarnate of our flesh, he is somehow from another realm. So tracking what in effect is a piece of wood with paint on it across half a millennium and over national boundaries is really inescapably problematic. We know that Leonardo took his paintings with him and we know that in the period after his death some paintings may have come back to Italy and then after that they've spread across the continent and these paintings themselves became iconic and they were reproduced. Where they reproduced and then in inventories turn up as Luini or Botrafio or all of these names that we're very familiar with nowadays, not very often. So we have problems in pinning down these objects and we have modern expectations of evidence that really don't fit with early modern documentation. There were two paintings attributed to Leonardo of Christ in the Royal Collection in the period in the 1630s we think and the 1640s. How do we know that? Because they appear in the 1649 inventory which was drawn up by the commissioners of the sale of the royal goods at the execution of the king. That was a reasonably detailed inventory, it probably relied on earlier inventories that some of which have now been lost. So we know there were two paintings, it only says that they're paintings of Christ, it doesn't say this is a Salvator Mundi or this is any other topic or subject matter of Christ. We can identify where both of the paintings were at that time because of the detail in the inventories. So we know that one of them was in Greenwich and we know that one of them was in Whitehall Palace. The one that was in Greenwich we can say belonged to Queen Henrietta Maria, King Charles's wife. Because Greenwich, the entire manor of Greenwich was in her jointer. The queen had several properties across the royal estate and this was one of them. We know that the painting was in a closet because that's what the inventory says. It says a number of paintings from the closets at Greenwich. But what we have to think about is exactly where in Greenwich this closet was. That gives us a problem because there was one modern building in Greenwich which was the building we now call the Queen's House and there was another building, the old Tudor Palace of Greenwich. Both of those properties overlooked the waterfront. This is in the days before the modern buildings that we have in Greenwich. In the Queen's House in Greenwich on the upper floor, the piano nobile, there was the Queen's bedchamber and directly behind the Queen's bedchamber is a little room which had a beautiful fireplace in it which was designed by Inigo Jones, the British architect. It was made by Nicholas Stone who's an architect that we know very well in Oxford who produced the portico for St Mary's Church, the university church. This was sculpted and placed in that room in 1639. We have a date for that room being fitted out. The room was changed over time but we believe from early architectural records and reconstructions that it actually acted as a private devotional closet for the Queen. The other room that it possibly could have been is in the Royal Closet which was directly off the Royal Chapel in the old Tudor Palace which is now destroyed. In consultation with Simon Thurley, the architectural historian, and Gordon Higgett, the Stuart architectural historian, we've decided that because the Queen's House was effectively a summer residence for the Queen and there was no heating in it, that the painting probably moved between these two closets. So this is the inventory of James, Duke of York in 1674. It's an inventory of pictures. The first folio here on the verso is pictures in the office and on the recto, pictures in the green mohair closet at Whitehall. That's suggestive of a small cabinet of paintings or possibly a devotional closet. Number 32, Our Saviour in a brass gilt frame. Unfortunately, we don't have any further information about that, we don't know whether it was painted by Leonardo. None of these paintings have an attribution to an artist and this is 1674 so it shows the problem of identifying these objects. We don't have the painting in the 1639 inventories but we have two paintings by Leonardo of Christ in the 1649 inventories. We have in the inventory of the sixth dividend, we have in 1653 the painting of Christ attributed to Leonardo and then we have it returned again and it appears in this very fulsome inventory of circa 1666 but it's not here in 1674. But this is during Charles II's reign so we might not necessarily expect to see something that was belonging to Charles II in the possession of the Duke of York at this point. It's been restored at the very highest level, at the highest level according to our best knowledge of museum practices and by one of the most distinguished painting conservators in the world. So it's a picture that came to us with some damage, some structural damage, which is one reason, probably the most significant reason why it's eluded identification for so long. But over a period of more than two years of meticulous practice of both conservation of the wood panel and the paint surface has been undertaken and I think it's a remarkable triumph of professional restoration at the very highest ethical levels. Of those that are associated with the Leonardo composition, there are about 20, maybe a few more but many of these, some of these I should say are later copies. In a way they can help us track where the painting has been where it's been seen in the course of its history but there are a few that are of the 16th century and they also give some instruction about the genesis of the painting and how particularly the students of Leonardo may have seen it in the course of its painting. But there's only one real thing. I think it's the, it's one of the rarest things on the planet and whether one compares it with other works of art by much more prolific artists like Willem de Kooning, a painting sold for $300 million, or compare it to other objects such as fighter jets and bombers which can be an average of $700 million for a B-2 bomber, I think the price is quite reasonable. This is an extraordinary work of art and one that can be appreciated by a good portion of the population of the planet. Where has it been? We know it was sold and we know that it went into secure storage in Switzerland which is exactly as you would imagine. The owner would have had access to it there and we understand that it's in a private collection and the private collector is being private. As things stand we're waiting with bated breath to see whether the painting will show up in the Louvre in October this year. This is September 2019 so we'll wait and see. There was quite a lot of attention when this painting was shown at the National Gallery in London and some scholarly discourse about it but really it didn't, the huge media attention didn't begin until the painting was sold at auction for $450 million. Then it seemed to become open season on a very venerable and wonderful work of art solely because of the price that it attained. For better or for worse the painting has acquired a kind of iconic status like the Mona Lisa and just as it's very hard to look at the Mona Lisa now as a work of art both visually and practically, I think the same status has been acquired by the Salvatore Mundi. In a way this book is the first step, I hope, to rehabilitating the painting as an important work of art and one that can communicate to viewers rather than just being an object of tremendous value. It's par for the course with Leonardo. I've been involved with Leonardo for 50 years and he attracts attention. There are almost always stories. You get stories which get out of the arts pages which pleases the people who write about art and gets them into the feature pages and the colour supplements so you couldn't have anticipated what the media storm was going to be but you'd be pretty certain that there would be extraordinary coverage in the media and of course the sale of it for $450 million and its current inaccessibility have made an extraordinary story. I'm never surprised to be surprised by what happens with Leonardo but I'm always surprised by what the surprises are. It's been a very long time in the making, this book that Robert and Martin and I have written and we've all done a lot of research and it hasn't really fully got into the public domain. So a lot of the stories that I see, whether they're responsible journalistic stories or whether they're ridiculous stories online and in social media, really have come in to fill this vacuum. So I'm very much looking forward to putting the research that we've done out there and then rebooting the conversation about this painting.