The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece. Ben Lewis

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Название The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece
Автор произведения Ben Lewis
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isbn 9780008313432



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Salvator Mundi there is a real one.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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