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

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.