скачать книгу бесплатно
Robert Simon was on a high-risk mission. He hadn’t even been able to afford the insurance premium for the full worth of his hand luggage. The auction house Sotheby’s had helped him in the end by kindly writing a low valuation of the painting at only $50 million. His piece was fragile. He wasn’t sure it would survive the plane trip, let alone make it onto the walls of a world-class museum or into the saleroom of a famous auction house. The panel on which the painting had been executed had been pieced back together and beautifully restored, but under its freshly varnished surface lay a hidden flaw: a huge knot in the lower centre. When it was studied by technical panel specialists in Florence, they said it was the worst piece of wood they had ever seen.
CHAPTER 2
The Walnut Knot (#litres_trial_promo)
The countryside north of Milan sweeps slowly up towards the still blue lakes and then the jagged outline of the Alps. Before the land rises to alpine heights there are foothills and farmland that were once dotted with walnut trees, whose thick canopies of smooth-edged leaves shuffled in breezes and shook in winds. Their dense webs of branches broke up the hot sunlight, and farmyard cats scratched their backs on the trees’ distinctive, deeply furrowed dark bark. The trees grew quickly, developing thick trunks – up to two metres in diameter – and lived up to two hundred years. They are mentioned in medieval Italian legends about female shamans who summoned the spirit world by dancing around them. Millennia earlier, according to Roman myth, Jupiter, the most powerful of all the gods, subsisted on walnuts when he walked among men.
In his notebooks, Leonardo studied the structure of the walnut and other trees in the same way he studied so many other phenomena of the natural world. He observed how the colouring of the leaves was a product of four things: direct light, lustre (reflected light), shadow and transparency. He went on to analyse more complicated principles governing the structure of trees. He discovered one of the basic mathematical laws of their growth, that the combined size of a tree’s branches is equal to the width of its trunk, and the smaller branches that spring from larger ones follow the same proportional rule. At the heart of Leonardo’s life work was this pairing of the minutely detailed observation of nature with an understanding of the principles governing the appearance and behaviour of things, which today we call empiricism. For Leonardo, something had to be understood before it could be drawn. In a note dated April 1490 in his largest set of notes, the Codex Atlanticus, he wrote: ‘The painter who merely copies by practice and judgement of the eye, without reason, is like the mirror, which imitates within itself all the things placed before it without cognition of their existence.’ In Leonardo’s paintings, the detail can be overwhelming. Each leaf, each fold of cloth, each curl of hair can be different from the one beside it, yet each may share the same formal structure.
Leonardo’s mind was poised between the medieval and the modern eras,* which is one of the reasons he is such an iconic and mysterious character today. His notebooks give the thrilling sensation that the modern idea of knowledge is being invented on their pages. The Codex Atlanticus contains, amid the drawings of machines, aeroplanes, weaponry and human anatomy on its 1,119 pages, enigmatic prophecies that double as riddles for court entertainment, a literary genre dating back to the Middle Ages.1 (#litres_trial_promo) For example: ‘There shall appear huge figures in human shape, and the nearer to you they approach, the more will their immense size diminish’ (shadows), and ‘You shall behold the bones of the dead, which by their rapid movement direct the fortunes of their mover’ (dice). He also predicted that ‘There will be many who will be moving one against the other, holding in their hands the sharp cutting iron. These will not do each other any hurt other than that caused by fatigue, for as one leans forward, the other draws back an equal space; but woe to him who intervenes between them, for in the end he will be left cut in pieces’ (a saw). The humble walnut tree, too, receives a mention here: ‘Within walnut trees, and other trees and plants, there shall be found very great hidden treasures.’ The walnut tree from which the single plank of wood was hewn on which the Salvator Mundi was painted was not concealing treasure, but it – or at least the section used for our painting – did hold its own secret: a deformity dangerous for artists.
For many years the tree from which the Salvator Mundi sprang would have performed its duty providing nuts for culinary and medicinal purposes. Its annual harvest would have enriched Renaissance pasta dishes such as spiced walnut linguine, or fig and walnut ravioli, or would have been combined with the tops of the bitter rue plant in concoctions to ward off the plague. Then one day the decision would have been made to sell the wood of the tree. It would have been dug up with spades rather than felled with an axe, since the best wood is near the base. Some of the timber would have been used to make ornate carved tables, chairs and caskets for the homes of noblemen. Other blocks would be reverentially carved into statuettes of saints and placed on the ends of choir stalls, or in the niches of altars. The finest parts would be used for the intricate Renaissance craft of intarsia, or wood inlay: different types of wood, each a different shade, were cut into delicately shaped strips to build sepia pictures of landscapes or religious scenes, which were set into cabinets and desks. This walnut tree was cut into planks for all these purposes, and a single plank, 45cm wide and 66cm high, would become our painting.
The walnut timber of the Salvator Mundi was brought on a cart to Milan, a city with a population of between 150,000 and 300,000 people. Three times the size of Florence, Milan was evolving in concentric rings, its population spilling out beyond the city walls into new suburbs. The nobles lived in high-walled palaces, with thick rusticated façades, behind which lay inner courtyards with trees and fountains and sculptures on pedestals, cut off from the noise of the street. The city skyline was dominated by the Duomo, the cathedral, in the centre, and in the north-west by the Castello Sforzesco, the palace of Milan’s ruler, Duke Ludovico Sforza. There were shipyards, taverns, bakeries, a debtors’ prison, cloth and shoe shops. There were quarters specialising in different trades: one full of mills producing cloth and paper, or sawmills for cutting wood; another grouping artisans working with wool; another with metalworkers. There were 237 churches, thirty-six monasteries, 126 schools and over a hundred practising artists. Milan was, in Leonardo’s own sharp words, a ‘great congregation of people’ who were ‘packed like goats one behind the other, filling every place with fetid smells and sowing seeds of pestilence and death’. There were periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague, which would one day kill several of Leonardo’s assistants. Leonardo, who was (at least in his own mind) an urban planner as well as an artist and scientist, concocted plans to redesign the city, but they never left the drawing board.
Somewhere in the narrow streets of Milan was the carpenter or panel-maker who supplied the wood for the Salvator Mundi. This kind of artisan was the first of several craftsmen involved in the execution of a Renaissance work of art such as the Salvator. They were often required to construct large and intricate surfaces for paintings, building up a flat surface from planks of wood connected with animal glues and grooved joints, and combining panels of different shapes into elaborate altarpieces with wings on hinges. But the creation of the walnut panel for the Salvator Mundi was a relatively mundane task, since it was cut as a single piece of wood; it is therefore all the more strange that it was so poorly executed.
Leonardo may well have ordered a batch of panels, since two other Milanese paintings of his on walnut wood have been scientifically analysed and shown to have come from the same tree. The size was standard for devotional paintings, for which there was a large demand among wealthy Italian families. Typical subjects were the Virgin and Child, various saints including John the Baptist, and Christ, carrying the cross, crowned with thorns or as the Saviour of the World. Such pictures were hung in the owner’s bedroom or private chapel.
Wood has to be prepared for painting with various undercoats, just as canvas is usually primed. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, this was sometimes done by the artist’s assistants, but often by the panel-maker’s workshop. The Salvator Mundi’s panel was prepared more or less as Leonardo said it should be in his notebooks:
The panel should be cypress, pear, service tree or walnut. You must coat it with a mixture of mastic [also known as gum Arabic, a plant resin] and turpentine which has been distilled twice and with white [lead] or, if you like, lime, and put it in a frame so that it may expand and shrink according to its moisture and dryness … Then apply boiled linseed oil in such a way as it may penetrate every part and before it is cold rub it with a dry cloth. Over this apply liquid varnish and white with a stick …
Florentine artists had their wood panels prepared with gesso, a chalky substance, but Leonardo, in common with Milanese painters, preferred a mixture of wood oil and white lead as the ground. He had his ‘sized’ with a first layer of animal glue. Then two layers of undercoat were applied, one made of a recipe of lead white pigment, with little grains of soda-lime glass and a binding agent of walnut oil; the second of more white paint, mixed with some lead tin yellow and some finer glass. The result was a surface with an off-white colouring. The addition of glass was a familiar trick used by artists at the time to lift the brightness of their pictures and accelerate the drying of the paint. Light on a painting does not reflect only off the top surface of paint. If the layers are thin enough and partly transparent it can pierce through layers of pigment and be bounced back by fine granules of glass, creating an effect of translucence. For the final process of the preparation – I confess I do not know if this was applied in the case of the Salvator Mundi – Leonardo advised ‘then wash it with urine when it is dry, and dry it again’.
But the panel-maker had done an exceptionally poor job. Deep within the prepared panel, unbeknown to the artist who was about to receive it, behind the preparatory layers of oil, gesso and urine lay a hidden problem. Unlike the walnut panels on which Leonardo painted other famous portraits such as La Belle Ferronnière and Lady with an Ermine, the Salvator’s panel contained a large knot in the lower half, right in the centre. Such knots were usually filled in with vegetable fibres, wood filings or fabric, as the Florentine artist Cennino Cennini advised in his fifteenth-century painter’s manual. But, in a second oversight, difficult to reconcile with the expertise of Renaissance woodworkers, who well knew the properties of their materials, that was not done to this piece of wood.2 (#litres_trial_promo) It seems that either the panel-maker or an assistant in Leonardo’s workshop to whom the task had been delegated was careless with the selection and preparation of the wooden panel, and the defect was then hidden under layers of primer.
Even so, Leonardo would surely have taken a look at the back of the panel and seen the knot. The likelihood of that raises a second puzzle. Leonardo is known to have been interested in the technical aspects of making a painting. It seems out of character for him to accept such a flawed surface to paint on, especially if the work was destined for an important client. In humid and dry conditions a knot like this expands and contracts at different speeds from the rest of the wood, so that if the panel, looking far ahead into its future, became dried out, or wet, it would push and pull, perhaps taking the panel to breaking point, and creating splits and cracks. Alternatively, a knot is a weak point, so that if the picture was one day to be knocked or dropped, it could split around the knot. The knot in the walnut panel on which the Salvator Mundi was painted was a gnarled, ticking time bomb.
* (#ulink_32baea56-8899-5947-9f08-1eb323b367f6) Historians see the ‘modern’ period as beginning around 1500. Often they refer to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as ‘early modern’.
CHAPTER 3
Buried Treasure (#litres_trial_promo)
Squinting at a computer screen one day in his home office, Alex Parish discovered the Salvator Mundi. It was listed for sale in an online catalogue of an obscure auction house in New Orleans, the St Charles Gallery. This was in 2005, three years and a few months before Robert Simon would board his flight to London carrying the painting under his arm. Parish thought the picture looked promising, and the price was so low that it was worth taking a small risk. He remembers: ‘I had a recollection of a similar thing that had come up with Sotheby’s a few years before. I bought the picture because I know this is just the sort of thing other people like to speculate on.’ He contacted Simon, who had himself also spotted the picture, as he subscribed to the gallery’s mailing list and received a hard-copy catalogue by post. Parish suggested they buy it together, fifty-fifty, the same way they had jointly bought many works before. Simon agreed.
Until he discovered the Salvator Mundi, Parish was a small-time Old Masters dealer whose career in the art world had been full of false starts, along with the treadmill of low-value backroom sales.
The art world has a glamorous image as a global nomadic court presided over by latterday kings and queens – the blue-chip gallerists (gallery owners), artists whose work fetches million-dollar-plus auction prices, and multi-millionaire collectors, around whom swarm smaller galleries and dealers and emerging artists. In the second half of each year the entourage moves en masse from art fair to art fair: Basel, the FIAC in Paris, TEFAF in Maastricht, Frieze London, the Armory and Frieze New York, Hong Kong, Miami, taking in auctions in London and New York on the way, in a blaze of parties and packing cases.
And yet, this is only the sparkling surface. Behind the scenes are many other people who are not born into riches, who do not have a large designer wardrobe or a taste for high society, and who are drawn into the art business not so much by a love of art, which everyone gives as their primary motivation, but by their hunger for an experience much more exciting, akin to gambling or hunting for buried treasure. For them, the attraction is the exhilaration of buying a painting from the first show of an unknown graduate artist, in the hope that five years later he or she will be part of a group show in a public institution. Or, as is the case in our story, coming across, after years of searching, an old painting ascribed to a third-rate provincial school but which, they believe, might be by an artist of great renown.
Such successes are far from guaranteed. Like any other industry to which people are drawn by the glow of fame and fortune emanating from those at the top, the art world has a very narrow peak of achievement and a wide base of footsoldiers, bottom-feeders and also-rans. One of those at the base of the hierarchy was Alex Parish. As he himself says, ‘I’ve been down to a suitcase more than once in my life.’ Born in 1954 into a lower-middle-class American family, he majored in art history at Ohio Wesleyan University and then moved to New York, where he worked in the gift shop of the Museum of Modern Art. He left after two years and tried unsuccessfully to set himself up as a dealer, but ‘through a combination of zero training, zero initiative, a certain amount of youthful lack of discipline, etc., I ground to a halt after a few years’. He went to London in the early 1980s and took a one-year course in the art market, not at a prestigious establishment like Sotheby’s Institute of Art, but at a private school, the New Academy for Art Studies, run by art historians Lucy Knox and Roger Bevan. When he returned to New York, he worked for a while in another gift shop, this time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then ‘begged to get the shittiest job at the shittiest auction house in New York City, and managed to do it. I worked there for two years and ended up writing their catalogue.’ While he was there he succeeded in identifying an interesting-looking undervalued painting that had been consigned to auction, the kind of painting known in the trade as a sleeper. The Salvator Mundi can well lay claim to being the greatest sleeper ever discovered.
The painting Parish spotted was a seventeenth-century Dutch pastoral scene, which he brought to the attention of the renowned Old Masters gallery Colnaghi. It was a gesture that displayed an appropriate combination of knowledge and ambition. Colnaghi took him on, and he worked for them in New York for two years, from 1980 to 1982, but not in a high-profile position. It was not an easy business in those days, he recalls. ‘No one was selling old Italian pictures or English pictures, or anything like that, in New York at the time.’ After a couple of years he went to work for Christie’s. It was another low-paid job, but he was becoming increasingly fluent in the lingo of art market insiders: ‘I was essentially the guy on the floor, taking the pictures into the back room, black-lighting them [putting them under an ultraviolet light to show up how much over-painting had been done], turping them down [cleaning them with turpentine], showing them to all the trade [that is, not to private collectors but to dealers and gallerists, who usually get the first look at new arrivals].’ He had one further invidious task: ‘I was the one who always got sent down to the front counter to tell people that their van Dyck was really not what they thought it was, and thank you for coming.’
At Christie’s, Parish found once again that he had a talent for spotting sleepers. ‘I was working late one night in 1985,’ he remembers. ‘I was the only person around from my department, and a picture came in. I got a call from a girl downstairs, “Please come take a look at this painting before you leave.” I went down and there was an enormous picture, four feet by six feet, with a couple of mirrors, just dropped off by some picker.’ A ‘picker’ is a dealer-middleman who buys from myriad regional auctions, from the estate sales of deceased collectors and from antique shops across the United States, and then takes the works to New York and consigns them for sale, hopefully for a higher price. ‘I looked at it, and I was like, “Oh my God, this could be by Dosso Dossi.”’ You need a thorough knowledge of sixteenth-century Italian painting to know a Dosso Dossi when you see one. He is one of those few artists, like El Greco or Gustave Moreau, who seem to exist outside history. His mysterious paintings of obscure allegories and mythological scenes, featuring magicians, pygmies and unicorns alongside the more conventional array of saints and madonnas, all bathed in the gentle, golden evening light of Venice, reach forward from the Renaissance to the Primitivism and Surrealism of the twentieth century.
‘So I told the girl, “Don’t tell anyone about this. It could be worth $100,000,”’ Parish told me. ‘And I called my boss, who was still over at the main building, and I said, “I think there’s a Dosso in the warehouse.” And he was totally dismissive. “Shut up. Get back to work.” End of story. What was I to say? I’m just a flump. He was an expert. So I totally forgot about it. About two weeks later, I’m in a meeting with someone, and I get a call from him and he says, “Oh my God, there’s a Dosso in the warehouse.” And I’m like, “Yes.”’ Parish’s deadpan indicates a life full of rejections because he didn’t come from the right social strata for the art world.
Experiences like these led Parish to an epiphany. ‘The pickers and runners would arrive at Christie’s with a truckload of paintings, and I would value each picture. I’d look at what they had and it was like, “No, that’s $4,000. That’s $2,000. We don’t want that, we don’t want that, we want this.”’ He could see that most of the runners did not know enough about art history to know what they were buying. ‘I saw a gap in this supply chain for someone who had the knowledge to go out and look in the backwaters of America.’
So he set himself up once again as an independent dealer, specialising in Italian painting. Once again, it didn’t work out. It was still difficult to find buyers for the Italian pictures he unearthed. In the meantime, his wife gave birth to triplets and he moved out of New York to a larger house. He now had a large family and a small income. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, buying old paintings and then ‘shovelling’ them through the auction houses. It was around this time that he became a born-again Christian, a highly unusual commitment for someone in the art world.
Help came around 1996 in the form of a phone call from the largest Old Master dealership in the world, founded by Richard Green. Green has galleries on Bond Street in London, but was looking for someone to find paintings for him in the United States. ‘In their heyday, they were flipping,’ says Parish – using another art market term, this time referring to fast-turnaround buying and selling – ‘something along the lines of six hundred pictures a year – two hundred at fairs, two hundred through their galleries and two hundred through auctions.’ Parish worked for Green’s son Jonathan, who told him, ‘Go and look for pictures for us.’
Jonathan Green sent Parish into the hinterlands of America to scour auction houses, estate sales and remote regional galleries for promising works of art. ‘I needed to be trained at first, because I didn’t know anything about the breadth of merchandise they bought, but it turned out to be a happy marriage because I didn’t hugely affect the bottom line there,’ Parish told me, indicating that his salary was modest. Meanwhile, his contract permitted him to buy and sell works of art for himself on the side, although a gentleman’s agreement meant his employer got first refusal. In addition to travelling, he subscribed to trade newspapers and catalogues, going through them and asking for Polaroids of any pictures that looked promising. But, he says knowingly, ‘Within a few years the digital revolution totally reinvented this business.’
At the time, the United States was awash with paintings whose value their owners did not have a clue about. From the late nineteenth into the middle of the twentieth century, American collectors had ‘vacuumed up’ European Old Master paintings, usually buying from impoverished European aristocrats whose wealth had been eroded by the recessions of the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, and by the two World Wars. ‘All the Americans were desperate for class, and all the Europeans were desperate for money,’ says Parish. This was the era in which the precursors of today’s billionaire art collectors, robber barons like J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon and John Rockefeller, amassed peerless collections which later formed the foundations of the country’s great museums. But less prominent middle-class families also collected. The paintings they bought were often unsigned and in poor condition. Over the years they had been damaged, become the victims of misguided restoration, and been passed down from generation to generation until they reached the hands of people who weren’t interested in art. ‘These pictures were finally starting to bubble up into the market.’
Thus was born a perfect storm of lightning-fast information technology, surging supply and deep demand. Parish was a like a meteorologist who tracked the new commercial climate. ‘There was this frontier in terms of Old Masters, where all these pictures were coming up and no one knew what they were being sold, and I was looking at that frontier.’
Parish acquired from a colleague a database of five thousand auction houses across America. He whittled the list down to about a thousand that sold paintings. If the auction houses didn’t upload online or send out hard-copy catalogues, Parish got on their electronic mailing lists and asked for jpegs of anything that looked interesting. ‘I was in a tiny office, surrounded by books, and I spent – I’m not kidding you – fourteen hours a day going through this thing. Hunting, hunting, hunting. I mean, literally: click, click, click, click. I was not going to let a picture sell in this country that I didn’t know about.’
Soon Parish was buying a painting a week for Green, using this database. Green requested ‘sporters and nautical’ (that is, paintings of sporting scenes and sailing ships) or ‘Victorian and silks and satins’ (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits of noblemen and ladies dressed in expensive fabrics). The art market had embraced the online database, and Parish was poised to show what a powerful tool it could be.
Parish often turned to other dealers he trusted, like Robert Simon, to share the financial risk of buying works in which Green wasn’t interested.* At his peak Parish was holding stakes in up to seventy pictures over the course of a single year, taking 50 per cent, 33 per cent, and occasionally 25 per cent shares in the purchases. It was a very hit-and-miss business. ‘If I had a picture for $1,500 and it brought $15,000 at auction, then that to me would be like, “Hallelujah!” I had a couple of years in a row where I would land one picture, be it for $500 or $5,000, and it would come back at about $100,000. It was really great. I think I did that three or four times in a row.’ But there were also times when pictures Parish bought and consigned to auction did not sell. ‘It’s difficult, particularly when you’re buying from the internet and you’re buying from small photographs, which is what the trade had evolved into. You have to “spec” from photos. And it is speculation. A certain percentage of them, when you see them in the flesh, are stinkers. They come back to punch you in the nose. I was selling those things off at whatever price I could get, 99 per cent of them at a loss, just to get some seed capital back.’
And then one day Parish was clicking away as usual when he spotted the listing for the Salvator Mundi in an online catalogue from the St Charles Gallery in New Orleans. It was Item 664. ‘After Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519)’ it began, and then, ‘Christ Salvador Mundi, oil on cradled panel, 26 inches by 18½ inches.’ Was the misspelling of the Latin ‘Salvator’ perhaps due to a Spanish-speaking typist? ‘Presented in a fine antique gilt and gesso exhibition frame.’ The estimate – an auction house always states the price it thinks the lot may achieve – was just $1,200 to $1,800. The painting was illustrated in the hard-copy catalogue that Robert Simon saw at the same time, with a very low-resolution black-and-white photograph. Christ’s clothes had become a gloomy grey, his cheekbones and forehead glimmered oddly out of the murky darkness, and the fingers of his blessing hand seemed illuminated by pale candlelight. ‘It looked kinda interesting. School of Leonardo is always interesting, and the price was very good,’ Parish told me with a grin.
Parish asked the St Charles Gallery down in New Orleans to send him a photograph. ‘When it arrived, I pulled it out, I held the picture, and in an instant I could see, like any Old Master dealer can, this part is totally repainted, this part is pretty much untouched, and this part, which included the hand, was like, “Oh my God, that’s period! That’s period.” You know what that means? Period means it’s of the era it’s trying to be. You see seventeenth-century rehashes of Renaissance pictures, nineteenth-century rehashes of Renaissance pictures. This was clearly of the era it purported to be from. And it was pretty good quality. I’m looking at the hand and I’m looking at the drapery and I can clearly see this is not simply one of numerous copies. This is an extremely good, high-quality copy.’
He and Simon decided to buy it. The rest, as they say, is art history.
Nothing in the known universe, no item, object or quantity of material, has ever appreciated in value as fast as the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. It was sold in May 2005 to Simon and Parish for $1,175 – a sum considerably less than the figure of ‘around $10,000’ the pair later quoted to the media. In 2013 they sold it for $80 million, then four years later, in 2017 – a mere twelve years and six months after it was sold for not much more than $1,000 – it was auctioned by Christie’s New York for $450 million.
* (#ulink_9deb3986-db06-5284-a0b2-c1cfe13bdbd0) Jonathan Green recounts a story of how he found himself in a taxi with Parish in London in the mid-2000s. Parish pulled out his mobile phone and showed Green a detail of a blessing hand. It was from the Salvator Mundi, but Green didn’t know that. ‘What do you think of this?’ he asked nonchalantly. Green nodded appreciatively. Green says Parish never offered him the painting, and told me, with magnanimity, ‘I don’t hold anything against him.’ Parish has a different version of the story. ‘I had bought the Salvator Mundi at least a year or two prior to leaving Green, and I’d mentioned it to them a couple of times, but they were so contemptuous of me in some respects. You know, “Just, shut up. Go get us coffee.” That kind of tone of voice. So, OK. Okie dokie …’ Parish drew out the last two words with his excellent drawl, and never finished the sentence.
CHAPTER 4
Paper, Chalk, Lapis (#litres_trial_promo)
Leonardo was the most prolific draftsman of his age, with approximately four thousand surviving drawings attributed to him, four times the number left by his most active contemporaries.1 (#litres_trial_promo) He drew diagrams, emblems, allegories, architecture, anatomy, maps, landscapes, biblical figure groups, nude studies and portraits from life. He was an expert in silverpoint, using a hard-edged metal stylus to draw lines into paper covered with a mixture of pulverised bone and mineral colours. He liked ink and quill pens plucked from the wings of domestic geese. After the turn of the sixteenth century he preferred chalks: red, black and white. He often touched up his drawings with white highlights in yet another medium, gouache. Some of Leonardo’s early paintings, St Jerome and Adoration of the Magi among them, progressed little beyond the full-size drawing stage.
As a draftsman, Leonardo was a revolutionary. To him we owe the world’s first dated landscape sketch, the world’s first ‘exploded’ diagram of machine parts, and the world’s first freeform compositional sketches, in which he plans – or perhaps rather finds – a composition out of a rapid-fire maelstrom of spontaneous, half-automatic lines, scribbled in ink and chalk. One of his most famous and most reproduced works is a diagrammatic drawing, Vitruvian Man, in which a man’s body with extended limbs forms a square and a circle. According to the sixteenth-century Italian writer Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, citing the reminiscences of his father, who had observed Leonardo first-hand, the artist rarely left his studio without a sketchbook hanging from his belt. In his notes for his treatise, Leonardo issued the first known exhortation about drawing from real life:
As you go about town, be always alert when out walking, to observe and consider the actions of men while they are talking, thinking, laughing or fighting together, what actions are within them, and what actions the onlookers are doing … and make brief notes of these forms in your small notebook, which you must always carry with you, and it should be of tinted paper, so that it cannot be erased, and must be kept diligently, because the positions and actions are many, and the memory is unable to remember them all.
The surviving studies for the Salvator Mundi, however, which are drawn in red chalk on red tinted paper, were executed in the studio, because they were sketches of clothing – or drapery, to use the art historian’s terminology – and they were almost certainly based on draped mannequins, not live models. Today these drawings can be found in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
‘Leonardo sometimes made clay models,’ wrote Giorgio Vasari, the great sixteenth-century Florentine art historian of the Renaissance, ‘draping the figures with rags dipped in plaster, and then drawing them painstakingly on fine Rheims cloth or prepared linen.’ Drapery was one of the essential components of Renaissance painting, and acted as a form of messaging in itself. The classical robes in which the saintly starring cast of Renaissance paintings were dressed elevated biblical stories to the level of the Antique, fusing the two great sources of wisdom of the age, the Bible and classical civilisation. Their sheen, dips and pleats were bravura exercises in realism, which advertised the illusionistic skill of the artist. There is a series of sixteen drapery studies drawn on linen, usually dated to the early 1470s, some attributed to Leonardo at the tender age of nineteen. The young artist shows the texture and characteristics of the fabric depicted as well as indicating the body underneath, the cloth flowing with curving arabesques and hard-edged angles, receding in pockets of shadow, and gleaming where it catches the light.
Leonardo usually planned his paintings with three stages of drawings. First, there were the studies of body parts, gestures, faces, drapery, anatomy and landscapes, drawn from life or sometimes from models or classical statues. In a second stage, he made sketches of combinations of figures or laid out the entire composition. Last came full-scale cartoons, which were traced onto the panel on which the final painting would be executed. There must have once been many preparatory drawings for the Salvator Mundi – for Christ’s face, the blessing hand and the orb, and perhaps for the entire composition – but only two pages of sketches survive. On one sheet there are two drawings – one of a man’s torso clothed with an episcopal garment known as a stole, and the other a smaller depiction of a forearm emerging from a rich crumple of sleeve, drawn in red chalk and then overdrawn in white. On the second sheet is a forearm with a sleeve finishing in a cuff, with drapery around it.
These sketches provide a host of intriguing clues about the Salvator Mundi. The fabric covering the chest is drawn in obsessive detail, one of the characteristics of Leonardo’s style, with thin rivulets of cloth, each one differentiated, running down from the band of embroidery around the neck, which has bunched up the fabric in tiny pleats. Looking at the painting, on the left side of the chest, just above a diagonal band, the garment’s fabric has become curiously scrunched. The artist seems to take particular care in showing how untidy this part of the clothing is. The shape and position of this crumple is momentous. At exactly the spot where the Holy Spear pierced Christ’s body on the cross, the wound of the Passion, it forms the Greek letter omega, a symbol of the divine. Novelists and historians of varying academic qualifications have written numerous outlandish interpretations of hidden symbols they have discerned by carefully squinting at Leonardo’s paintings, such as the Virgin of the Rocks and the Mona Lisa, but here in the Salvator Mundi there is a real one.
Other aspects of these sketches muddy the artistic waters of attribution. The forearm on this same page seems to have been drawn not by Leonardo but by another artist entirely, surely one of Leonardo’s assistants. In the 1930s, the great Leonardist Kenneth Clark catalogued the collection of Leonardo’s drawings owned by the British royal family, which included both of these sketches. He observed that the draftsmanship of the forearm is heavy-handed compared to the chest, and that, furthermore, the hatching runs left to right, while Leonardo’s always runs right to left, as one would expect of a left-handed artist.
The second drawing holds a puzzle too. The sleeved limb emerges from two loose loops of fabric, which closely resemble the drapery around Christ’s arm held up in blessing in the painting. But in the drawing the forearm is sleeved with a cuff at the end; in the painting it is bare. As a preparatory study it bears a surprisingly loose relationship to the finished painting.
We can vaguely date both drawings to the first decade of the sixteenth century, because of the evolution of Leonardo’s style and technique. He spent most of his early career sketching in pen and ink or silverpoint. In the mid-1490s he began using red chalk for studies for the apostles in The Last Supper. In the first decade of the sixteenth century, chalk became Leonardo’s primary drawing medium. The material was better suited to the style he was developing. Chalk’s softness allowed him to intensify his sfumato, the most gradual light-to-dark transitions which became the hallmark of his painting.2 (#litres_trial_promo) It is in this later drawing style that the preparatory sketches are executed.
Drawing is the common denominator between all of Leonardo’s diverse activities as engineer, scientist and artist. And yet Leonardo had criticisms of drawing. One of the fundamental aspects of his thinking, which set him apart from his contemporaries, was his radical attitude to line. ‘Lines are not part of any quantity of an object’s surface, nor are they part of the air which surrounds this surface,’ he wrote. ‘The line has in itself neither matter nor substance and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object … Your shadows and lights should be blended without lines or borders in the manner of smoke losing itself in the air … O painter, do not surround your bodies with lines!’ There were no lines in the real world, he said, so don’t paint them.
In the cool and pungent backstreets of Milan, in the dark shops of the apothecaries, majolica vases lined the shelves, full of herbs, medicines, chemicals and pigments – the raw material for colouring the world. These were roughly chopped preparations of minerals, insects, animal remains and plants, waiting to be finely ground into powder, mixed with egg yolk or oils to make paint, and with water for dyes. The customers came and went – dyers, glassmakers, tailors, the manufacturers of ceramics and furniture, manuscript illuminators and painters.
Behind every Leonardo painting lay a global network of anonymous collaborators, with professions far removed from the creative arts. The minerals for pigments came in ships from distant Central Asian cities that few Europeans had seen, often via Syrian merchants. Some were manufactured in Venetian or Florentine laboratories run by religious orders. There was ultramarine powder ground from blue-veined chunks of lapis lazuli by the Jesuits of the Florentine Convent of Santo Giusto alle Mure; the semi-precious rock was imported from what is now Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, via Damascus. A more sensibly priced version of the same colour, from the same convent, was made of azurite acquired from Austrian and Balkan mines and manufactured with copper oxide. The chromatic reputation of these priests was so high that the Florentine contract commissioning the Adoration specified that Leonardo had to buy his colours from them. A red pigment came from the dried bodies of kermes lice from the eastern Mediterranean, mixed with water, alum and soda. Another came from boiled brazilwood, which Spanish and Portuguese merchants imported from the Latin American colonies. A third red, ‘dragon’s blood’, was a resin derived from various plants, and was used both as a medicine and a varnish. Cochineal was a scarlet named after the insects from which it came, and was imported to Italy via Antwerp. Rubies, which could be ground down into an expensive colour, were available too. White, ochre, and yet another red came from different treatments of lead. A dark ‘bone black’ came from a distillation of carcasses. Verdigris, a green familiar to us as the patina on old copper, was obtained by exposing copper plates to vinegar. Gold leaf was made from old coins, the thin sheets carefully placed between sheaves of paper in books. Saffron was used to make an intense yellow colour when mixed with alum and egg yolk. Thus, science and trade formed a basis for art.
Leonardo would probably have sent one of his teenage apprentices to buy the pigments, a shopping list in his hand. The artist’s notebooks contain to-do lists, often compiled before a long journey, which give an indication of the errands his ‘boys’ had to run. One, from 1490, reminds the apprentice to get hold of ‘a book that treats of Milan and its churches, which is to be had at the stationers on the way to Cordusio [a piazza in the centre of the city]’. Another, from the years 1508 to 1510, quite possibly the time when Leonardo began to work on the Salvator Mundi, lists ‘boots, stockings, comb, towel, shoelaces, penknife, pens, gloves, wrapping paper, charcoal, spectacles with case, firestick, fork, boards, sheets of paper, chalk, wax, forceps …’ This list may refer to items he had already bought from Milan’s shopkeepers and kept in his studio, but Leonardo does add a note about one thing that he clearly didn’t have: ‘Get hold of a skull.’
For the Salvator Mundi, the apprentice would have had only a small number of pigments on his list, because this painting was made with remarkably few colours: lead white, lapis lazuli, lead tin yellow, vermilion, red iron oxide, carbon and charcoal black, bone black and umber. Back in the studio, the assistants would then have to grind the colours to create a fine powder. However, on this occasion, as later restoration showed, they didn’t do a very thorough job: the brilliant blue grains of the lapis lazuli were rather coarse compared to those in Leonardo’s other paintings.
There was probably a cartoon by Leonardo for the entire composition of the Salvator. This would have been pricked with tiny holes, or spolveri. The cartoon was laid on top of the panel, dusted with fine powder and then removed. An outline of the composition, traced by the dark dust seeping through the pinpricks, remained. Microscopic photographs of the Salvator Mundi have revealed a handful of tiny black dots, but only enough to raise the possibility, not the certainty, of a cartoon. The artist definitely used a pair of compasses to make the circle of the orb, because there is a hole where the compass point went in. Then another layer of underpainting was added in thin, semi-transparent washes of browns and blacks, some derived from charred wood, others from charred bones.
Leonardo was a member of the Arte dei Medici, Speziali e Mercai – the Guild of Doctors, Apothecaries and Mercers. He had his own recipes for making colours, and he listed many of them in his notebooks. That was unusual for a Renaissance painter, but it fits our knowledge of Leonardo the artist-scientist. The master of light and shade was particularly interested in the variety of ways he could mix colour for shadows: ‘Take green [i.e. malachite] and mix it with bitumen, and this will make the shadows darker. And for lighter shades mix green with yellow ochre, and for even lighter green with yellow, and for the highlights pure yellow. Then take green and turmeric together and glaze everything with it … to make a beautiful red take cinnabar or red chalk or burnt ochre for the dark shadows, and for the lighter ones red chalk and vermilion, and for the highlights pure vermilion, and then glaze with fine lake.’
We don’t know how the artist of the Salvator Mundi prepared his palette, but there is a description by Vasari of the way another artist, who was taught in the same studio as Leonardo, did. Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo were both trained by the Florentine master Andrea Verrocchio, and sometimes worked on the same pictures together. Di Credi, says Vasari, ‘made on his palettes a great number of colour mixtures, so that they went gradually from the lightest tint to the darkest, with exaggerated and truly excessive regularity, so that sometimes he had twenty-five or thirty on his palette, and for each of them, he kept a separate brush’. Such preparation would also have been necessary for the delicate, painstaking and time-consuming manner in which the Salvator Mundi was painted.
Now Leonardo could pick up his brush and begin to paint – should he have had the inclination, of which we cannot be certain. Unlike every other picture Leonardo is widely recognised to have executed after his fame was established, there is no documentary evidence that his hand ever painted the Salvator. That is not in itself an unusual problem for a Renaissance painting. Thousands of artworks before 1700 were unsigned and undated, leaving art historians with thousands of picture-puzzles to solve. The tool of connoisseurship was developed two centuries ago specifically to tackle this problem. But it is a process which art dealers such as Robert Simon and Alex Parish cannot undertake on their own, since however gifted they might be as connoisseurs, they are potentially compromised by commercial motivations. Thus, it was time to call in the experts.
CHAPTER 5
Zing! (#litres_trial_promo)
Martin Kemp is a powerful academic, who positions himself a streetwise scholar, resistant to the elitism of the art world, not afraid to defend his corner. When he speaks, the sentences are elegantly formed and the insights – usually about Leonardo – are admirably precise, but the delivery is stern, as if to ward off anyone who might disagree.
Despite all his decades of scholarly study, he tells journalists modestly that he is just in ‘the Leonardo business’, although he has written an autobiographical account of his adventures in it, Living with Leonardo. He professes to be understanding of, even apologetic towards, people who have misunderstood the artist to whom he has dedicated his academic career: ‘It is worth remembering that many of those who have developed untenable Leonardo theories have invested a large amount of time and emotional commitment in their researches,’ he once wrote sympathetically. ‘I have endeavoured to respond in an understanding manner, although I fear I may have been overly abrupt on occasion.’1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Kemp first studied the sciences at Cambridge University before switching to history of art – an early change of course which some of his academic rivals have used against him, but which placed him in a well-nigh perfect position for the study of the ultimate artist-scientist. He taught at various art history departments in Britain and North America before becoming a professor at Oxford in the 1990s. In 1981 his masterwork was published, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man. It slotted seamlessly into over a century of Leonardo historiography by bringing together Leonardo’s scientific studies and his artistic career.
From Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century Florentine author of Lives of the Artists, until the nineteenth-century essayist, novelist, literary theorist and art critic Walter Pater, Leonardo scholars had focused almost entirely on the paintings. That changed in 1883, when the reclusive German Leonardist Jean Paul Richter published meticulous transcriptions of Leonardo’s papers organised according to themes, such as his writings on art, mechanics, anatomy and water, as well as his letters. Richter’s apposite choice of title was The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. In the 1930s Kenneth Clark contributed a useful catalogue of the Leonardo drawings held in the British Royal Collection and a biography, but that was a sideshow compared to the monumental post-war work of Carlo Pedretti, the Italian professor of Leonardo studies at UCLA who taught himself to read Leonardo’s handwriting as a teenager, and who at the height of his fame would arrive for lectures in a helicopter. In Leonardo: A Study in Chronology and Style, published in 1973, Pedretti arranged around seven thousand surviving pages of Leonardo’s twenty-five extant notebooks in a convincing chronological order.
Kemp picked up the baton from Pedretti. He analysed the notebooks and paintings and evolved a coherent and impressively simple model – ‘a common core’, he called it – for Leonardo’s thinking and a narrative for how it developed. For Kemp, Leonardo’s creativity combined observation, intellect, invention (fantasia) and convention (decorum). Leonardo, said Kemp, set out with the purpose of understanding the mathematical and scientific principles that underlay the natural world, anticipating that there must be a common set of laws that applied to all phenomena:
Those authors who have written that Leonardo began by studying things as an artist but increasingly investigated things for their own sakes have missed the point entirely. What should be said is that he increasingly investigated each thing for each other’s sake, for the sake of the whole and for the sake of the inner unity, which he perceived both intuitively and consciously. In moving from church architecture to anatomy, from harmonic proportions to mechanics, he was not leaping erratically from one separate branch to another, like a frenzied squirrel, but climbing up different branches of the same tree.2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Then, at the end of his life, Kemp argued, Leonardo changed his tune. He became convinced that nature was too diverse and mysterious to be grasped, and this was reflected in his stunningly dynamic series of late drawings of floods and tempests.
In the almost four decades since Marvellous Works, Kemp has published a profusion of scholarly articles and catalogue essays about the intersection of science and art in the work of Leonardo and in the broader Renaissance culture. He has also been active in the less austere world of exhibitions and television documentaries, often involving the reconstruction of a working model based on one of Leonardo’s designs. He has plans for a contemporary dance performance, an orchestral recital and a CD of music related to Leonardo, while he works on a new scholarly edition of one of Leonardo’s scientific notebooks, the Leicester Codex, owned by Bill Gates. He is Mr Leonardo. The intellectual has become in part impresario, and scholarship has merged with showmanship, a trend that can be observed across the entire art historical and museological community in recent times.
Martin Kemp had long been an outspoken critic of the methodology of connoisseurship and attributions in art history. In a lecture in The Hague he said, ‘The state of methods and protocols used in attribution is a professional disgrace. Different kinds of evidence, documentation, provenance, surrounding circumstances of contexts of varied kinds, scientific analysis, and judgement by eye are used and ignored opportunistically in ways that suit each advocate (who too frequently has undeclared interests).’13 (#litres_trial_promo) He has warned that commercial incentives and professional networks often trump scholarly reserve: ‘In extreme cases, curators of exhibitions might fix catalogue entries in the service of loans; museum directors and boards might bend their own rules.’4 (#litres_trial_promo) To his credit, Kemp has long refused to accept a fee, or even expenses, if he inspects a work of art (although some might point out that there are many other incentives, besides direct financial gain, to discover a long-lost work by the world’s most famous artist). ‘As soon as you get entangled with any financial interest or advantage, there is a taint, like a tobacco company paying an expert to say cigarettes are not dangerous,’ he told the New Yorker magazine.5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Like many other Leonardists, Martin Kemp has been receiving scores of emails for years, ‘sometimes more than one a week’,6 (#litres_trial_promo) he says, from individuals who think they own an unrecognised Leonardo. Some of these works are by Leonardo’s pupils, others are incompetent copies, and many have nothing to do with the artist. Most of the time he rejects the invitations to view the works; sometimes he can see from the images he is sent that the work is not a Leonardo. He knows that attributions are a murky business, and he has kept his distance. He says that he does not attribute works of art – he researches them. Back in Marvellous Works he wrote that ‘The speculative attribution of unknown or relatively unknown works to major masters is a graveyard for historians’ reputations.’7 (#litres_trial_promo)
But, as often as Professor Kemp has warned of the dangers of attribution, he is as human as any other Leonardist. For all his caveats about connoisseurship, he still finds it useful to deploy the mysterious and instantaneous power of the eye of the art historian: ‘The actual physical presence of a work of art is always very different from even the best photographic images … The first moments are always edgy. If a certain zing does not occur, the encounter is going to be hard going.’ Sooner or later, all the great Leonardo experts have been lured into the vortexes of authentication. That may be because no mortal, whether scholar or not, can hold out forever against the allure of beauty, money and fame. Or it may be because, over a long and distinguished career, it is impossible to avoid every patch of academic quicksand.
In March 2008, Kemp received an email with a jpeg file of a small drawing on parchment, 23 x 33cm. It was of a pretty young woman in profile, with piercing green-brown eyes and a delicate upturned nose. Her hair was swept back into an elaborate hairpiece, and there was a knotwork pattern on the sleeve of her garment, which was curiously plain and cheap. The picture had been bought at auction in 1998 for under $20,000 as a nineteenth-century work by a German artist, one of a circle which had been reviving and imitating Italian Renaissance painters.
Kemp thought it ‘zinged decisively’. He authenticated it as a Leonardo and named it La Bella Principessa, although there was no evidence that it was of a princess. Eventually he published a book about the painting, which he said depicted a bride, Bianca Sforza from the ruling family of Milan, for whom Leonardo worked, and that it came from a late-fifteenth-century bound vellum book in a Warsaw library which commemorated the wedding. He observed Leonardo’s hand in the left-handed cross-hatching, the glassy pupils and traces of fingerprints. ‘Leonardo has evoked the sitter’s living presence with an uncanny sense of vitality,’ he said.8 (#litres_trial_promo) However, Leonardo had never done any other drawing on vellum; nor is there any document naming the sitter. The only scrap of supporting evidence Kemp could find for the choice of medium was a note Leonardo had once written asking a French court painter about this technique:
Get from Jean de Paris the method of dry colouring and the method of white salt, and how to make coated sheets; single and many doubles; and his box of colours.
Kemp observed that there were tiny holes in the side of the drawing which showed that it had once been bound into the Warsaw book. But the holes were in the wrong places, there weren’t enough of them, and the type of vellum was not the same as that in the book. In addition to that, the Bella Principessa was wearing a costume that was too dowdy for a wedding, and a strange slit in her sleeve was inexplicable.* To add to the case against, the drawing’s owner claimed to the Sunday Times that he had found the picture in a drawer at a friend’s house in Switzerland.9 (#litres_trial_promo) The Italian art historian Mina Gregori agreed with Kemp about the attribution, but most other Renaissance art historians reacted with doubt, or worse, derision. Kemp and the painting’s private owner, Peter Silverman, wanted it to be exhibited in a major public institution, and allowed the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to examine the painting in its labs, with a view to showing it, but the museum director reported back that he didn’t think the work was genuine.
Despite his isolation, Kemp stuck to his guns, and became, like many connoisseurs in such a position, increasingly vociferous in his opinion and increasingly defensive towards his critics. Such is the way of these things that Kemp ended up working with a collaborator who soon became controversial. He invited a Canadian forensic art expert called Peter Paul Biro to look at the picture. Biro had made a name for himself authenticating works of art by discovering the hidden fingerprints of artists on them, deploying a multi-spectral-imaging camera with impressive powers of magnification which he had designed himself. He claimed to have authenticated pictures by Turner, Picasso and Jackson Pollock with his fingerprint cameras. Kemp invited Biro to examine the Bella Principessa and Biro found a fingerprint on the picture which, he said, was ‘highly comparable’ to another on Leonardo’s St Jerome. But in 2010 an article in the New Yorker by David Grann alleged that Biro had found Pollock’s fingerprints on paintings supposedly by Pollock but which, experts said, contained acrylic paint that had not been previously documented in his drip paintings.10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Kemp blamed the failure of La Bella Principessa on its over-hasty exposure to the media by Silverman. ‘I call it premature ejaculation,’ he told The Art Newspaper. ‘There were things that came out before they were thought through. I would have much preferred to produce all the evidence when we had it, in one go.’11 (#litres_trial_promo) Kemp said he had learned from the Bella Principessa debacle: ‘Above all, the public debut of a major item should be accompanied or preceded by the full historical and technical evidence being made available in the way scholars regard as proper.’12 (#litres_trial_promo)
And yet, when Robert Simon invited Martin Kemp to see the Salvator Mundi, the Oxford art historian seemingly forgot all his own advice.
* (#ulink_416a1378-8a3f-5915-8296-d75845a72d17) The Polish art historian Katarzyna KrzyŻagórska-Pisarek wrote an analysis of the drawing: ‘There is no real evidence that La Bella Principessa shows Bianca Giovanna Sforza, or that the vellum leaf comes from the Warsaw Sforziad … The vellum of the Warsaw Sforziad is of different quality/texture (white and smooth) than the support of La Bella Principessa (yellow and rough, with follicles) and its size is different too (by 0.8 cm). The drawing was also made on the inferior, hairside of the vellum, unlike Birago’s illuminations [contained in the Warsaw volume] … the “archaic”, formal and highly finished style of La Bella Principessa combined with the complex mixed media technique are unusual for Leonardo, and there is no evidence that he ever drew a full female profile (face and body), especially in coloured chalks on vellum …’
CHAPTER 6
The Blue Clue (#litres_trial_promo)
Mystery is the defining quality of Leonardo’s art. A seductive glance is thrown, we know not to whom. The Virgin and child take shelter with saints and angels in a twilight grotto, which has no address in the Bible. A smile, whose cause can only be imagined, begins to cross a woman’s face, if indeed it is a woman’s face, if indeed it is a smile. Around these strange incidents and encounters hover a few ambiguous facts open to a multitude of interpretations. Our understanding of Leonardo’s life and work rarely becomes more than a pool of theories, surrounded by a tangle of conjecture, suspended from a geometry of clues. Amidst this network of possibilities, the Salvator presents the most fundamental mystery of them all. In some respects, it appears to be the most compressed embodiment of the essence of Leonardo’s art; in other ways it is a stark anomaly. While other of Leonardo’s paintings ask questions like, Am I smiling? or What am I feeling? or even Who is winning?, the Salvator asks Am I a Leonardo?
Leonardo’s paintings have left a trail of documents behind them – contracts for commissions, legal filings from irate clients, eyewitness statements from admirers, oral histories recorded by the children of men who knew him, and even notes in the margins of books on completely different subjects. Such documents are a mine of information.
There are legal agreements for many of Leonardo’s commissions, each of which contains its own set of illuminating details about Leonardo’s profession and character. The one for his first major work, the Adoration of the Magi, offered him a piece of land as payment, which he couldn’t sell for three years, while he had to pay for all the paints and gold leaf himself. He was soon behind schedule, and the monks wrote to him telling him to hurry up. Within a year they had given up, writing off the small sum they had already advanced Leonardo so he could buy wheat and wine. Leonardo was a genius, but also temperamental and, by turns, a self-critical perfectionist: he worked slowly and left many works unfinished, much to the exasperation of his clients. A trail of lawsuits followed him wherever he went.
In 1500 another set of angry monks, this time Milanese, from the Confraternity of Immaculate Conception, refused to pay for the Virgin of the Rocks, now in the National Gallery in London, saying it hadn’t been finished. Leonardo countersued, arguing that the previously agreed fee was too low for the quality of work he was providing. The dispute lasted years. In 1506 a judge ruled in favour of the monks, arguing that there was not enough of Leonardo’s hand in the picture, and that he had to return to Florence and finish it. He went back reluctantly, but it is not known what additional work he carried out on the painting.
Another important client, the Council of Florence, was disappointed the same year, when the artist left for Milan leaving behind him the unfinished Battle of Anghiari, now lost. Leonardo had ‘taken a goodly sum of money and provided a small beginning of a great work, which he should have made’, complained the Gonfaloniere, one of the city’s leaders.
Where there are no surviving contracts, we often read of Leonardo’s paintings in the letters and memoirs of awestruck fans, who recorded for posterity the moment they met the great artist. Secretaries and agents of cardinals and countesses left entries in their diaries marvelling at the paintings and notebooks they had seen when they visited his studio, such as Antonio de Beatis who saw the St John, the Mona Lisa and the Virgin and Child with St Anne in Leonardo’s studio in 1517. Leonardo’s unusual working practices were often a talking point. The Italian author Matteo Bandello recorded watching him working on The Last Supper in 1497:
He would arrive early, climb up on to the scaffolding, and set to work. Sometimes he stayed there from dawn to sunset, never once laying down his brush, forgetting to eat and drink, painting without pause. At other times he would go for two, three or four days without touching his brush, but spending several hours a day in front of the work, his arms folded, examining and criticising the figures to himself. I also saw him, driven by some sudden urge, at midday, when the sun was at its height, leaving the Corte Vecchia, where he was working on his marvellous clay horse, to come straight to Santa Maria delle Grazie, without seeking shade, and clamber up on to the scaffolding, pick up a brush, put in one or two strokes, and then go away again.
Proof of Leonardo’s authorship of paintings can come from the most obscure and unpredictable sources. The identity of the Mona Lisa and the date when Leonardo started painting it were both subject to dispute until 2005, when a German scholar came across a note in the margin of a Renaissance volume of letters by the Roman orator Cicero. The marginalia came from Agostino Vespucci, a Florentine civil servant who worked for Machiavelli. A line from Cicero, about how the fabled Roman painter Apelles left parts of his paintings unfinished, reminded Vespucci of Leonardo. Cicero commented, ‘Apelles perfected the head and bust of his Venus with the most elaborate art, but left the rest of her body roughly rendered …’ Vespucci jotted next to the text:
… This is how Leonardo da Vinci does all his paintings, for example the head of Lisa del Giocondo and of Anne, the mother of the Virgin. We will see what he is going to do in the hall of the Great Council, for which he has just reached an agreement with the Gonfaloniere. October 1503
From such a recent, chance discovery, art historians could confirm that Leonardo was painting a version of the Mona Lisa by 1503, earlier than many had previously thought, and that her identity was definitely the Florentine noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo.
Leonardo’s works were the subject of public spectacle as well as private reflection. By 1500 he was a celebrity, whose every move was watched and gossiped about. It was a major event when a new Leonardo was finished and unveiled to the general public, akin to the opening weekend of a blockbuster film today. Vasari wrote that when a new cartoon of St Anne was put on display in Florence for two days in 1501 (incidentally the first show of a single drawing in the history of Western art), ‘it attracted to the room where it was exhibited a crowd of men and women, young and old, who flocked there as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created’.
There are only two Leonardos that were undocumented in his lifetime: the Portrait of a Musician in the Ambrosiana in Milan, which art historians tend to think is by Leonardo’s assistant Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, and the St Jerome, whose authenticity has never been questioned and for which certain probable references can be found. Both of these paintings were made relatively early in Leonardo’s career. There is no Leonardo painting executed after 1496 which is not remarked in contemporary sources – except, perhaps, one now.
No records from the artist’s lifetime, or for a further hundred years after it, mention Leonardo painting a Salvator Mundi. This is all the more surprising because of the significance of the subject matter. The Christ which Leonardo painted in his Last Supper is the subject of a long anecdote in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. He relates how Leonardo went to see his client, the Duke of Milan, and provided a progress report on The Last Supper, explaining that he had still not yet painted Christ’s head because ‘he was unwilling to seek a model on earth and unable to presume that his imagination could conceive of the beauty and celestial grace required of divinity incarnate’.
If the greatest artist of his times was painting the greatest subject in Christian art, a Salvator Mundi, one would expect to find it recorded in a note in a monk’s chronicle or a secretary’s letters, at the very least. The absence of such documentation is the first great mystery of the Salvator Mundi. It compels art historians to rely on their ‘superpower’, ‘the eye’, alone. The name of the artist and the date of execution of this painting can only be determined by analysis of the style, technique and motifs of the work, but the result of such a process will always lack the certainty of proof.
Leonardo never dated any of his paintings, but on stylistic and technical grounds, the Salvator Mundi can be placed in the second half of his career, beginning after 1500 and ending with his death in 1519. The preparatory drawings must have been made in the early years of the sixteenth century because they are executed in Leonardo’s softer red chalk style. They are usually dated 1502–10. The painting itself has the intense sfumato shading of the second phase of Leonardo’s work, beginning in the sixteenth century. The walnut wood used for the panel points to a date after 1506, when Leonardo returned to Milan. Walnut was a relatively unusual choice in Renaissance Florence, but was widely used by Milanese painters. It is difficult to be more precise, because Leonardo worked on many of his pictures for a long time, painting them slowly, sometimes on and off over a decade or more, occasionally returning to them after an intermission, often never finishing them. The scientific means of dating a panel painting by analysing the rings in the wood, dendrochronology, cannot be used with walnut, because the rings are too widely spaced to give more than the vaguest indication of epoch.
Whatever the day was when the first brushstrokes were applied to the Salvator Mundi, Leonardo had by then become one of the most celebrated living artists of the Italian Renaissance, alongside Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna and a dozen others. He had progressed from artistic child prodigy to gifted studio assistant, then a master painter with his own practice in Florence, and later official court artist, the grandest position a Renaissance artist could rise to in Milan, where he also worked as a sculptor, engineer, set designer and architect. But his career had also had challenging periods when work and money were in short supply.
