Leonardo's Masterpiece - Spring 2021

NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- French curators had worked for a decade to prepare a major exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci. When it opened, though, the most talked-about painting they had planned to show — “Salvator Mundi,” the most expensive work ever sold at auction — was nowhere to be seen.

Plucked from shabby obscurity at a New Orleans estate sale, the painting had been sold in 2017 as a rediscovered “lost” Leonardo and fetched more than $450 million from an anonymous bidder who kept it hidden from view. The chance to see it at the Louvre museum’s anniversary show two years later had created a sensation in the international art world, and its absence whipped up a storm of new questions.
Had the Louvre concluded that the painting was not actually the work of Leonardo, as a vocal handful of scholars had insisted? Had the buyer — reported to be Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, although he had never acknowledged it — declined to include it in the show for fear of public scrutiny? The tantalizing notion that the brash Saudi prince might have gambled a fortune on a fraud had already inspired a cottage industry of books, documentaries, art world gossip columns and even a proposed Broadway musical.

None of that was true.

In fact, the crown prince had secretly shipped “Salvator Mundi” to the Louvre more than a year earlier, in 2018, according to several French officials and a confidential French report on its authenticity that was obtained by The New York Times. The report also states that the painting belongs to the Saudi Culture Ministry — something the Saudis have never acknowledged.

A team of French scientists subjected the unframed canvas to a weekslong forensic examination with some of the most advanced technology available to the art world, and in their undisclosed report they had pronounced, with more authority than any previous assessment, that the painting appeared to be the work of Leonardo’s own hand.

Yet the Saudis had withheld it nonetheless, for entirely different reasons: a disagreement over a Saudi demand that their painting of Jesus should hang next to “Mona Lisa,” several French officials said last week, speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks were confidential.

Far from a dispute about art scholarship, the withdrawal of the painting appears instead to have turned on questions of power and ego.

Some art world skeptics say they suspect the Saudis were never serious about including the painting in the French show and had wanted to keep the work under wraps to increase the commercial potential of installing it later at a planned tourism site in the kingdom. Current and former French officials, though, say that the Saudis were eager for their newly acquired trophy to hang at the Louvre, as long as it was placed beside the world’s most famous painting.

Dismissing those demands as irrational and unworkable, the French, in turn, refused to make public their own positive assessment of its authenticity unless the Saudis let “Salvator Mundi” hang on the walls of the Louvre, which the French government oversees.

And the resulting diplomatic standoff between the French and the Saudis has kept the painting out of sight as the cloud of intrigue around it continues to swell.

“Frankly, I think all that taradiddle would have evaporated,” said Luke Syson, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, and a curator who oversaw a 2011 Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery in London that included “Salvator Mundi.”

If the only painting were displayed, he explained, “people could decide for themselves by experiencing the picture.”

Believed to have been painted around 1500, “Salvator Mundi” was one of two similar works listed in an inventory of the collection of King Charles I of England after his execution in 1649. But the historical record of its ownership ends in the late 18th century.

Then, around 2005, a pair of New York art dealers browsing a New Orleans estate sale spotted a badly restored and partially painted-over image that they suspected might be worth a closer look. They acquired it for less than $10,000 and brought it to a skilled specialist to remove the later paint layers and restore the original.

It changed hands few times since then and hung as a Leonardo in the 2011 exhibition at the National Gallery in London. But it was the record-setting bid in 2017 — for $450 million — that turned “Salvator Mundi” into the stuff of front-page headlines, especially after The Times reported that the anonymous buyer was a surrogate for the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

Now the controversy has made headlines again with the release of a new French documentary this past week claiming that the Louvre had concluded that Leonardo had “merely contributed” to “Salvator Mundi.” Set to air on French television on Tuesday, the documentary features two disguised figures, identified as French government officials, asserting that the crown prince would not loan the painting to the anniversary exhibition because the Louvre refused to attribute the work fully to Leonardo.

In a telephone interview, the documentary’s director, Antoine Vitkine, said he stood by its claims, saying the president of the Louvre had refused to comment on the museum’s judgment of “Salvator Mundi.” https://artdaily.cc/news/134742/A-clash-of-wills-keeps-a-Leonardo-masterpiece-hidden

New Research Suggests ‘Salvator Mundi’ Originally Looked Completely Different

Two separate studies posit that Leonardo da Vinci’s initial composition only featured Christ’s head and shoulders

Questions regarding the authenticity of Salvator Mundi, a $450 million painting of Jesus widely attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, have dogged the artwork since its record-breaking sale in November 2017. Now, reports Alison Cole for the Art Newspaper, two separate studies—including one led by the Louvre—add to the mystery surrounding the religious scene, suggesting that key portions of its composition weren’t part of Leonardo’s original design.

As seen today, Salvator Mundi depicts the curly-haired Christ gazing at the viewer as he raises his right hand in a blessing. In his left hand, Jesus cradles a crystal orb that testifies to his position as savior of the world.

The new research raises the possibility that Leonardo’s initial painting only featured Christ’s head and shoulders, theorizing that the figure’s hands and arms were added at a later time. (Some scholars have previously argued otherwise: On her website, Dianne Dwyer Modestini, the curator who restored Salvator Mundi prior to its sale, writes that Leonardo probably painted the “head and the first position of the blessing hand” at the same stage in the work’s creation.)

In their study, Louvre restorers Vincent Delieuvin, Myriam Eveno and Elisabeth Ravaud—who examined the painting in 2018 with the permission of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture—state that the upper portion of Christ’s right hand was painted directly on top of a black background, which “proves that Leonardo has not envisaged it at the beginning of the pictorial execution,” per the Art Newspaper.

Though the historians initially intended to publish their findings in a book, publication was halted when the painting’s owner declined to loan it for the Louvre’s blockbuster Leonardo exhibition. (The French museum cannot publicly comment on privately owned paintings that it has not yet exhibited.) Interestingly, the Louvre’s president, Jean-Luc Martinez, reportedly states in the unpublished text that he fully supports the work’s attribution to the Italian Old Master.

According to the Art Newspaper, the Louvre team posits that Leonardo himself modified the painting’s composition, inserting the arms and hands “after a time lapse” but still relatively early in the creative process. The second study, however, suggests that these elements are decidedly “not Leonardo,” reports Valentina Di Liscia for Hyperallergic.

In 2017, Salvator Mundi sold at auction for a record-breaking $450.3 million. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Computer scientist Steven J. Frank and art historian Andrea M. Frank are set to publish their analysis in the MIT Press’ Leonardo journal. Drawing on convolutional neural networks (CNNs)—artificial intelligence algorithms used to identify forgeries and misattributed artworks—the paper concludes that Leonardo likely created Christ’s head and shoulders, but not his right arm and hand.

“Artists who employed assistants and taught students (Rembrandt, for example) often directed those who could emulate the master’s technique to paint ‘unimportant’ elements such as hands, either for efficiency or as an exercise,” write the Franks in a preprint version of the study.

Leonardo painted Salvator Mundi­ around 1500, possibly for Louis XII of France, according to Christie’s. Charles I of England had acquired the painting by 1625, but it seemingly disappeared in the late 1600s, only reappearing in the early 20th century, when it was sold as a work by Leonardo follower Bernardino Luini. Later, modern art historians credited the work to one of Leonardo’s assistants, Antonio Boltraffio. Then, in 2011, the National Gallery in London exhibited the painting as a genuine da Vinci, igniting the debate that continues to rage today.

Salvator Mundi was scheduled to make its public debut at the Louvre Abu Dhabi in September 2018, but the museum unexpectedly canceled the unveiling, and the painting hasn’t been seen in public since. This hasn’t stopped researchers from working to uncover the artwork’s secrets: In addition to the two studies detailing its composition, scholars have offered explanations for the glass orb’s seemingly inaccurate refraction of light and arguments attributing the work not to the master, but to his studio.

“Leonardo has worked on the painting [and] I think that’s important to recognize,” Matthew Landrus, an art historian at Oxford University who asserts that Luini painted the majority of Salvator Mundi, told CNN’s Oscar Holland and Jacopo Prisco in 2018. “We tend to think in black and white—one or the other, when it comes to attribution, but that's definitely not the tradition. The tradition was to get help from the studio.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-research-suggests-portions-salvator-mundi-were-not-part-leonardo-da-vincis-original-design-180976914/