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In 1506 Leonardo returned to Milan, lured there by its new French rulers, leaving the Battle unfinished, much to the fury of the Florentine town council. In Milan he continued to work on paintings designed or begun in Florence, the Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Madonna of the Yarnwinder among them, although the latter may have been partly executed by assistants. Here he and his assistants probably also finished painting the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks.
The Salvator Mundi was probably begun in this period, possibly for a client from the French court. The painting compresses into its modest format a summation of many, but not all, of the techniques, themes and passions of Leonardo’s oeuvre. His Christ is not like the bright and youthful Jesuses of Raphael, or the strong athletic ones of Michelangelo. He seems a level above such mortal and physical attributes. He floats towards the onlooker like a mystical vision. He transcends time, harking back to the images of a blessing Christ that are found in early Christian catacombs and on the mosaic ceilings of Byzantine churches, but upgraded with a Renaissance makeover that is both realist and idealising. The Salvator’s eyes, eroded as they undoubtedly are, seem to look straight through us, with a gaze as piercing as it is ethereal. Christ’s expression hovers, in that Leonardesque way, between a range of contrasting emotions: serene, placid, wise, resigned, resolute, or implacable and unmoved. On the almost imperceptibly upturned corners of Christ’s lips, damaged as they are, is the slightest trace of a smile. The facial typology of the Son of God seems eerily modern, like those of the Nazarenes or Romantic painters, evidence of the realism and originality of Leonardo’s portraiture.
Leonardo is known for the intricate and precise way he painted hair, so different from the patterned and schematic rendering of his Renaissance contemporaries. In the Salvator, Christ’s long curls glisten with highlights of varying intensity as they catch the light. Amidst the best-preserved strands on the right you will find a double helix, a shape that we find in Leonardo’s drawings of coiled ropes, machines and waterfalls. In his notebooks he wrote of the similarities between the way hair fell and water flowed. There were ‘two motions, of which one responds to the weight of the strands of hair and the other to the direction of the curls; thus the water makes turning eddies, which in part respond to the impetus of the principal current, while the other responds to the incidental motion of deflection’.
These curls may also be carnal. Leonardo’s notebooks contain sketches of curly-haired boys, which are often said to be portraits of his teenage assistant and almost certainly his lover, Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, whom Leonardo nicknamed Salai, or ‘mischievous one’. In April 1476, a week before his twenty-fourth birthday, Leonardo was arrested by the zealous Florentine vice squad, which patrolled the city streets at night. The accusation was of sodomy with a male prostitute, though the artist was acquitted.
Along the edges of Christ’s garment runs filigree embroidery in golden thread, forming a geometric pattern of knots, sparkling like his hair with reflected light. Leonardo was fascinated by knots, in which his passions for mathematics, geometry and art intersected. He copied and owned the knot patterns of artists, and he also invented his own, far more intricate, ones. Prints of his ‘Vincian knots’ were sold across Europe. Vasari remarked how Leonardo would ‘waste his time in drawing knots of cords, made according to an order, that from one end all the rest might follow till the other, so as to fill a round’. In fact, mathematicians from the University of California analysed Leonardo’s knots a few years ago and found that they were made up of several broken strands, not a single one. Where necessary illusion trumped science in Leonardo’s art.4
The hands and the orb provide further evidence of Leonardo’s keen observation, obsession with detail and willingness to replace the tiringly conventional with the marvellously real. The orb held by the Salvator Mundi was commonly depicted in European Renaissance paintings as brass or bronze, sometimes with a cross above it. Sometimes it was painted as a globe of the earth. In some northern European paintings it is transparent, and within it you may see an unforgiving biblical landscape. Leonardo, however, has painted his as a large, solid rock crystal.† Despite the severe damage this part of the Salvator Mundi has suffered, you can see tiny defects in the orb, known as ‘inclusions’, and air bubbles, each exactingly painted with a dark ring of shadow and a dab of white highlight. Leonardo has added more careful highlights around the fingertips, as if lit by ‘lustre’, as he called bounced light, here reflected off the crystal orb.
Meanwhile, the Salvator’s other hand, raised in blessing, displays a balletic grace and solid volume. It is painted with a faultless foreshortening (a kind of perspective for objects and bodies, when seen front-on) so that it seems to project itself out of the picture towards us. Leonardo has added soft trails of lead white paint along the edges of the fingers, in the creases of the palm, and a dab at the bottom of the thumb, suggesting the softest of broken light from the upper left. Equally, veils of shadow of subtly varying darkness are painted on the parts of the hand facing away from the light, like the third knuckles of the bent fingers. The thumb curves inwards – previously rare in paintings of this type – so that the entire gesture forms an elegantly elongated pyramid, a geometric form Leonardo often used for his compositions of figures.
All these elements cohere in the sfumato style in which the painting is executed. While Leonardo’s peers favoured bright colours and strong lines, Leonardo, a maverick within the Renaissance avant-garde, took painting in the opposite direction towards tonality, building up from dark undercoats to light highlights. Raphael, Michelangelo, Perugino, Piero della Francesca and other Renaissance masters painted scenes that were flooded with light. Their saints, temples and porticos have bright hues. They painted lighter colours on first, in general, and then modelled the figures and architecture with darker shades. But Leonardo worked the other way round. The Salvator is painted up from gloomy underlayers of dark vermilion and black paint. Areas of light are built up from this darkness in thin, transparent layers of very carefully graduated oil-based mixtures, known as glazes. Leonardo advised: ‘Paint so that a smoky finish can be seen, rather than contours and profiles that are distinct and crude.’
However, the sfumato which we admire in Leonardo’s paintings today is never only the work of the Renaissance master. Part of the effect derives from the decay of the art. Leonardo’s fresco paintings, The Last Supper and The Battle of Anghiari, fell apart in his own lifetime because he tried to find a way to paint with oils on plaster; the paint did not stick. In other paintings, most famously the Mona Lisa, the colours have faded and the varnishes darkened. Restorers dare not clean the painting, lest the general public not recognise the work of art which emerges from underneath. The St Jerome once had the saint’s head cut out, and it was only glued back in decades later. Of all Leonardo’s paintings, the Salvator is, relative to its size and regarding the most important areas of the work, the most damaged of them all. Leonardo’s paintings often carry the enhanced atmosphere of an ancient ruin, a work of genius placed slightly beyond reach by the ravages of time. The texture itself prompts a spiritual reflection on the transitory nature of material things, combined with an irresolvable yearning for something lost forever.
While we see so many of the above Leonardesque attributes in the Salvator, other notable aspects of the painting are not very Leonardo. The composition, for one thing, is uniquely flat within the artist’s oeuvre. Christ has none of the movement and contrapposto we see in the figures in Leonardo’s other paintings, despite the fact that he had written ‘Always set your figures so that the side to which the head turns is not the side to which the breast faces.’ Rather than reinvent the composition of this traditional subject, Leonardo seems to have produced, for the first and only time in his life, a carbon copy of the static one that scores of other early Renaissance artists used. The typology of the Salvator Christ, with its long nose and sombre expression, is remote from the delicate, androgynous charm of the Christ he painted in The Last Supper and of a drawing of Christ he made around 1494. In fact, the facial features don’t resemble any of Leonardo’s drawings of other young men. The orb presents another problem. Its realism is undermined by the absence of any notable optical distortions in the drapery behind it, and of the reflections of the surroundings which would logically be visible in such a piece of crystal. Leonardo studied and wrote about optics at length in his notebooks; it is unlikely that he would paint such an object in such an unrealistic way.
After Martin Kemp accepted Robert Simon’s invitation to examine and research the Salvator Mundi, the Oxford art historian embarked on years of study of the painting in all its aspects, from its style to its iconography, and from its overall effect to its smallest details. The painting merits attribution to Leonardo, Kemp has elegantly written, because of
… the soft skin over the bony joints of the fingers of Christ’s right hand, implying but not describing anatomical structure; the illuminated tips of the fingers of his left hand, the glistening filaments of vortex hair, above all on the right as we look at the picture; the teasing ambiguity of his facial features, the gaze assertively direct but removed from explicitness; the intricately secure geometry of the angular interlace in the neckline and cross-bands of his costume; the gleaming crystal ellipse on the pendant plaque below his neckline; the fine rivulets of gathered cloth on his chest.5
The painting has, in short, ‘Leonardo’s magic’. Kemp finds great significance in the contrasting ways in which the face and hand were painted, the former softly, the latter crisply. Leonardo was the first artist to write about aerial perspective – the way colours and outlines fade the further away they are.‡ Kemp notes that the way the blessing hand comes forward in sharp focus towards the onlooker, while the face hovers in a mist of sfumato, is an application by the artist of his observations on the ‘perspective of disappearance’.
Kemp views the painting as Leonardo’s spiritual manifesto. The sign of this is the replacement of the conventional brass orb plus cross (the globus cruciger), with a transparent globe. Through this adaptation Leonardo was representing the cosmology of the Graeco-Roman mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy, who believed that the earth was surrounded by a transparent ‘crystalline sphere of the heavens’, in which the stars were situated. ‘So what you’ve got in the Salvator Mundi is really a Saviour of the cosmos, and this is a very Leonardesque transformation,’ Kemp has said.6
In regard to some of the un-Leonardo-like aspects of the picture, Kemp has developed explanations. The flat composition can be understood as the influence of the Veil of Veronica, an image of Christ’s face, not dissimilar to the Turin Shroud, left when the eponymous saint wiped Jesus’s face with a piece of cloth. The subjects of the Salvator Mundi or Christ Pantocrator, which were very popular in Renaissance Europe, always showed Christ flat-on, looking straight towards the viewer. It was a serious subject, Christ as God, which demanded an austere and sombre treatment. If Leonardo’s painting had been made for a client, a conservative format might well have been insisted on. The explanation for the lack of optical distortions in the orb, Kemp suggests, is that Leonardo was making an artistic decision to break a rule in the interests of the overall impact of his painting. Distortions in the orb would be distracting. The artist was exercising the Renaissance virtue of decorum, or propriety.
But there are shortcomings in Kemp’s analysis. Regarding the significance of the orb, there is no evidence that Leonardo was a neo-Platonist, or even understood what the term meant. Certainly his paintings sometimes contain signs and symbols that refer to the name of the sitter or client, but suggestions that he referenced philosophical ideas as he did the names and coats of arms of his aristocratic patrons remain speculative. As for Leonardo’s depth of field, the alleged blurriness of Christ’s face is contradicted by the sharpness of the curls of his hair, which are in the same plane. One excerpt from Leonardo’s notebooks actually tells painters that if they are painting a figure in the distance, ‘do not single out some strands of hair, as the distance nullifies the shine of the hair’. It is a great mystery why a painting by an artist who studied optics, perspective and light with such intensity should contain two glaring optical inconsistencies. But that is not the greatest mystery of all.
For there is one feature of the Salvator Mundi about which neither Martin Kemp nor any other art historians have said anything at all. Perhaps they have dismissed it, or perhaps they haven’t noticed it. This feature is so individualistic that it can neither be associated with Leonardo’s painting nor disassociated from it; it belongs neither to the pictorial traditions of medieval Italy, nor to the symbology of early Christianity, nor to the classicising project of the Renaissance. The Salvator’s garments are of only one colour. In every other Italian Renaissance depiction of Christ he wears red and blue, almost always a red tunic and a blue robe. The Salvator wears only a blue garment, adorned with gold filigree embroidery. For the moment we have no explanation for this. Let us call it the blue clue.7
* Vasari explained why he thought Leonardo belonged to the third phase of the Renaissance: ‘In addition to the power and boldness of his drawing, not to mention the precision with which he copied the most minute details of nature exactly as they are, he displayed perfect rule, improved order, correct proportion, just design, and a most divine grace.’
† He probably saw rock crystal orbs of this transparency and size in Milan in the early sixteenth century. There is a large one in a museum in Dresden which was made in Milan in the 1570s, by which time Milan had become the centre of rock crystal carving in Italy – another reason to date the Salvator Mundi to Leonardo’s second Milanese period.
‡ Leonardo wrote: ‘The nearest objects will be bounded by evident and sharp boundaries against the background, while those more distant will be highly finished but with more smoky boundaries, that is to say more blurred, or we may say less evident.’
CHAPTER 7
Vinci, Vincia, Vinsett
The word ‘provenance’, borrowed from French, describes a branch of art historical research the dictionary definition of which is ‘a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality’. It means the history of the collecting of a painting after it has been painted, as it passes from collection to collection. The study of provenance serves a practical economic purpose, since the value of a painting rises according to how important its previous owners were. Kings, queens and emperors are at the top of the scale, while middle-class factory managers are close to the bottom. The role of provenance in the economy of art was already recognised at the end of the seventeenth century. It attracted the curiosity of the Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard de Mandeville, who, referring to a series of Raphaels at an English royal palace, remarked:
The value that is set on paintings depends not only on the name of the Master and the time of his age he drew them in, but likewise in a great measure on the scarcity of his works, and what is still more unreasonable, the quality of the persons, in whose possession they are, as well as the lengths of time they have been in great families; and if the Cartoons now at Hampton Court were done by a less famous hand than that of Raphael, and had a private person for their owner, who would be forced to sell them, they would never yield the tenth part of the money which with all their gross faults they are now esteemed to be worth.1
There is also a second use for provenance studies. If the authorship of a painting is in doubt or contested, provenance can offer clues.
The inventories and archives of rich collectors often contain documents with dates and places, which allow one to trace a picture from collector to collector, in reverse chronology, to a time and place close to when and where it was made. This, in turn, can indicate who painted it. The provenance researcher may also consider whether a collector tended to buy originals or copies (sometimes difficult to tell apart connoisseurially, if the copyist is good), or if works by a particular artist were on the market in a particular place during a particular period. If the painting is genuinely a high-quality work, it is more likely to have been in the collection of a ruler or nobleman. An artist was less likely to offer a royal client a painting made by his assistants (though it did happen from time to time), and a ruler, with his team of eagle-eyed art advisers, was less likely to accept one. Often the inventories state in which room the work of art was displayed, and this detail can also become very important. If it was hung in an official hall or reception room, then it was probably an important painting; if it was placed in a corridor, on the stairs, or worse, in a storeroom, it was probably thought of as a second-rate work.
At the heart of this research are the inventories, handwritten on parchment or thick crusts of paper. These can be catalogues of collections compiled by the owner’s clerks or ‘keepers of pictures’. They may be itemised lists of works of art available for purchase from a hard-up merchant, or troves of freshly acquired art that are about to be shipped out of Italy, or the valuables that a bride took with her to her new home. In an age when money was not kept in banks, you were what you owned. You didn’t want your possessions, spread across your many-roomed mansions, to slip away. Largely ignored as a source of information until the late twentieth century, inventories have become the coalface of one of the most fashionable fields of art history today, rich seams of data from which deductions, speculations and occasionally conclusions can be extracted.
While inventories are vital to building a case for attribution for thousands of Renaissance paintings, the raw material is challenging. The fragmentary nature of the records means that most histories have gaps. The names of artists are spelt in many ways, and attributions can change from list to list. Descriptions of the paintings are, until the late nineteenth century, only textual, with scarcely a visual reference. That is an immense problem, because the range of subjects – especially biblical and classical – was limited, the titles are often similar, artists often made several paintings of the same subject, and the descriptions in the inventories are brief. Dimensions are rarely supplied, and sometimes there is only a title without a painter’s name attached. The result is that provenance histories for works of art from before the nineteenth century are frequently assembled from a range of probabilities, which reinforce each other. Such structures can be precarious, wobbling between the likely and the hypothetical. The evidence is often circumstantial, but art history is a discipline that studies the products of the imagination; a certain flexibility is permitted, while the marvellous objects themselves have been known to inspire the most rigorous of academic minds to meld fact with fantasy.
Since the author and the date of Robert Simon’s painting were unknown, he began to research its provenance within weeks of acquiring it. By his own account he spent an hour a day, every day for six years, studying the Salvator. Every Old Masters dealer has to present an account of the provenance of artworks they wish to sell. Most of them subcontract this work to specialists and academics, but Simon is a particularly scholarly dealer, who enjoys the archives and takes pride in his abilities. He had done provenance research many times before the Salvator arrived in his gallery.
The first clue was two initials and a number on the back of the painting: ‘CC 106’. Simon traced that back to the important nineteenth-century Cook Collection, belonging to a British cloth merchant. Some claim that Sir Francis Cook assembled the greatest art collection in private hands in Britain at that time, with the exception of Queen Victoria’s. A three-volume catalogue of his treasures was published in 1913. There, Simon discovered his painting, listed as ‘cat. number 106’, on page 123 of Volume I, which was entitled ‘Italian Schools’. However, it was not attributed to Leonardo but described as a poor copy, and there was no photograph of the painting in the catalogue. Simon turned to the photo archives.
It was the technology of photography that made modern art history possible. From the mid-nineteenth century specialised photo studios, most famously Alinari in Rome, methodically, accurately and beautifully photographed every notable work of art they could find, supplying an ever-growing market with perfect images, albeit in black and white. Museums and institutions built collections of thousands of photos, while art historians and connoisseurs amassed their own private stockpiles – it was a way for them to keep images of all the art they studied and loved close to them, in their homes. The previously uncontainable – a vast sea of images spread across many thousands of kilometres, too large and diverse to be committed to memory – could now be held in one’s hands, spread out on a table or stored in a cupboard.
For art historians, photography was like the spear that enabled cavemen to hunt woolly mammoths. The scholars scribbled notes on the backs of their images, with dates, authorship, and what they knew of the ownership of the painting. By laying out a selection of photographs on their desks they could study, for example, the drapery folds or facial features in a hundred anonymous Renaissance altarpieces and group them according to stylistic traits. They could then associate those stylistic traits with documented works by this or that artist, thus defining his or her oeuvre and, if they had some dates, stylistic development. They could pull out all the pictures they had on a particular subject, like the Last Supper, or the Madonna and Child, or indeed the Salvator Mundi, and, if they knew the dates, arrange them chronologically to see how the treatment of that subject evolved over time, which artists innovated, and which copied those innovations. Thus was born an art history of style and symbol. Acquired over many decades, many of these photographs have survived while the pictures they record have been destroyed or gone missing. They are not just a record of the art we have; they are also a record of the art we have lost.
Robert Simon visited the Witt Library photo archive in the basement of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. There he accessed all the folders of images marked ‘Salvator Mundi’. Soon he found a photograph of the Cook Collection’s Salvator, where once again it was listed as a copy. Simon was not surprised by that. Sleepers were almost always miscatalogued, otherwise they would not have ‘slept’ so long. On the bottom right of the photograph was a typed text reading ‘(Cook Coll. Richmond)’, and underneath, handwritten, ‘Whereabouts unknown (1963)’. So nobody had known where this picture was in 1963.
Parts of the Cook Salvator looked different from the painting Simon had bought. In the Cook photo, Christ had a moustache and facial hair that made him resemble a Mexican bandit in a 1950s B-movie. That indicated that Simon’s Salvator had been restored or repainted in some way since the date of the photo. However the blessing hand, embroidery, orb and other features of the Cook were identical with Simon’s painting. Now he could narrow down his search. Before this discovery the painting could have come from any European country, but Simon now had a focus: Britain.
The second clue led back to Britain as well. Everyone in the Old Masters business knows of an etching made by the seventeenth-century print-maker Wenceslaus Hollar which bears an inscription by the artist, ‘Leonardus da Vinci pinxit’, the word ‘pinxit’ testifying that the print was a copy of a painting by Leonardo. It is an image of Christ as saviour of the world, orb in one hand, the other raised in blessing, with flowing curly hair remarkably similar to that in the Simon and Cook painting. The original Leonardo had long been presumed lost. Simon compared his painting to this print. It looked so similar in significant clues – its drapery and its blessing hand, even if – a significant clue in the contrary direction – Hollar’s Christ had a curly beard with a central parting, and his didn’t.
Simon knew where to go next. There was a particular volume on his shelf which many dealers have, and which is often a first port of call for researching the history of potentially important unknown paintings. One day in 2006 or 2007 – he can’t remember which year exactly – Simon pulled out his copy of the Walpole Society Journal, 1972. In it, the keeper of the British royal collection, Oliver Millar, had published an inventory of King Charles I’s art collection, meticulously turning a few slightly differing seventeenth-century handwritten manuscripts into a hundred-odd pages of neat type. Simon soon came across a description of a work that might match his painting: page 63, item number 49, a ‘Peece [sic] of Christ done by Leonard’. Now he had found a record that Charles I had owned a painting of Christ most likely by Leonardo, and that painting was, in all probability, the one he had bought a 50 per cent stake in for the decidedly unprincely sum of $587.50.
At the recommendation of Martin Kemp, Simon contacted a young art history graduate, Margaret Dalivalle. She had been a student of Kemp’s at Oxford and was writing a PhD about notions of the copy and the original in seventeenth-century painting. Simon asked whether she could, as she recalls it, ‘contribute to the research into the provenance history of a newly discovered painting’.
Dalivalle was born in Ayrshire in Scotland, and showed an artistic bent from an early age, encouraged by her godmother, who worked in a gallery. She studied fine art at Glasgow School of Art, then ran her own business as an exhibition designer. After a few years she returned to study, doing a Master’s degree followed by a PhD at Oxford. She now teaches at a number of Oxford colleges as a non-tenured tutor in Renaissance and early modern art history and the history of ideas.
Searching for the Salvator in British archives, Dalivalle thumbed through reams of rarely-consulted documents on thin, yellowed paper, written in faded brownish ink. Under the vaulted sixteenth-century timber ceiling of the Duke Humfrey reading room in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where each panel is painted with an image of an open book, she pored through manuscripts. She ordered obscure volumes in the Rare Books department of the British Library, the quietest reading room of them all. She went to the archives of the Houses of Parliament, placing old bound volumes of their proceedings and reports between triangular wedges of grey foam so the books could not open flat, to protect their thick spines from damage. She examined bundles of documents in the archives of the royal family.
She hunted through inventories in which Leonardo da Vinci could be written as ‘Leonard’, ‘Leonardus’ or ‘Lionard’, and Vinci as ‘Vince’, ‘Vincia’ or ‘Vinsett’, and in which there was always the risk that his authorship had been mistaken for that of another Italian Renaissance artist like Raphael, Correggio or Zambelin – a strange spelling for Giovanni Bellini. She worked on these complex materials over several years to assemble the illustrious provenance for the Salvator Mundi, which would lead to the auctioneer at Christie’s confidently beginning his sale: ‘Lot 9b. Leonardo da Vinci. Salvator Mundi, Saviour of the World. The property of three English Kings, Charles I, Charles II and James II.’
Margaret Dalivalle declined a face-to-face meeting, but we exchanged many emails. She wore her learning a little heavily, to coin a phrase, and was defensive about what she had discovered, which, she said, would be published for the first time in a forthcoming, long-delayed peer-reviewed book. The fact is, a colleague of hers explained to me, her hopes for a permanent university post are dependent on this research, to which she has devoted the last eight years, entirely self-funded.
I learned from Dalivalle how much pride she took in the skills required for her research, and how wary she was of the layman’s ability to understand the intricacy of her subject. Individual facts, she advised me, did not matter much on their own in provenance research; one had to consider the whole construction. That was good advice, which could be applied, in ways Dalivalle did not intend, to the broader framework of the Salvator Mundi project. Dalivalle’s work on the Salvator cannot escape the over-arching context of its origin, which was one of commercial interest in a certain outcome. She was given her task over a decade ago by a dealer who wished to sell his painting as a Leonardo, and had been recommended by a professor of art history who had nailed his colours to this cause.
