The painting turned up in an auction in New Orleans, Louisiana in April of
2005. It was a picture in a minor auction house and one that I spotted in the
catalogue together with a colleague of mine, Alexander Parish and from that, the
story began. The moment I saw it, I mean
first saw it in person, I was struck only by the fact that it was indeed an
old painting. It was a painting of the period. The idea that it was by Leonardo
really did not enter into my consciousness. The hope was
that this could be a record of the 'Leonardo lost composition' and maybe by
one of Leonardo's more talented students. It took a couple of years of both the
conservation and research before I was able to admit the possibility that this
could be the lost painting. I think the book is effectively in the first person.
It's the horse's mouth story from Robert Simon who, with Alex Parish, discovered
the painting. And so we hear the story of how he made this discovery. How he
approached Dianne Modestini who was the wonderful restorer who conserved the
painting. We hear about the processes of consultation and how the painting was
brought to public view in the National Gallery in 2011. From Martin we have the
definitive story of the painting itself. How it fits within
Leonardo's canon of work. The meaning of the painting is something that hasn't
been discussed very much in the public discourse. The iconography of the
painting is highly unusual. The painting itself I see as a disruptor.
It's a disruptor of a very traditional format and that's something that over
and over we see Leonardo doing. Myself, I'm thinking about the
provenance history but I'm thinking more widely than that. I'm thinking also about
what Leonardo is, what he is to us now and who he was to someone in France
in the 1630's, to someone in the Royal Court in London in the 1650's and how he
was thought about at the turn of the 18th century, in the advent of modern
science. We don't know precisely when the painting was made.
There's no document saying, you know 'I began at this point'. There's no contract.
But on grounds of style, both of the drawings in Windsor for the drapery and
looking at the painting, it, I think, belongs to the same period as Mona Lisa.
Now we know the portrait of Lisa Gherardini was begun or was underway in
1503 and he took a long time over a painting, so there's no sense in saying,
you know, he did this in this year. I suspect it was begun around about that
time and gradually worked its way towards a finish. There's a painting by
Salaì, his rather rascally pupil, dated 1511 and if that's dependent, as it seems
upon the Leonardo image (this is just a head of Christ, not the full Salvator
Mundi), then it must have been well underway and at some state of finish by
1511. But I wouldn't guarantee it was finished then. It has enormous
similarities with the works, particularly after 1500, but also to some extent with
The Last Supper. It's a painting which is his most intense devotional painting. The
Salvator Mundi is a stock image. You have a frontal Christ, so you can't avoid his
gaze. You have the blessing hand, you have the orb of the Earth in most
normal pictures. It's the spiritual counterpart of Mona Lisa in a way. Both
in terms of style, that there's very little in the way of edges. It's using
this extreme glazing technique, he was using after 1500. It adds a lot
to what Leonardo did and extends our knowledge of what he did. It relates
to Christ in The Last Supper. Christ in the turbulence of the announcement is a
calm centre, holding out his hands to the bread and wine. So of his devotional
paintings it's the most personal, the most intense. It is a fairly standard
subject. It's not as common as Madonna and Child paintings but its a
standard subject with fixed ingredients. It's going to be symmetrical. People have
criticised it as it symmetrical and frontal, but if it's the Salvator Mundi
that's the job it has to do. That's the brief for a Salvator Mundi. He
looks at us. He's asserting his benign sovereignty over the world. He is
blessing us with one hand. In the other hand he holds the orb of the world. So
these are absolutely standard components. Leonardo did remarkable things with
what was actually a standard formula. You can look at a painting and you can apply
connoisseurship and people do that and say 'oh it looks like Leonardo,
it doesn't look like Leonardo, it looks like Leonardo in studio.'
I'm interested in criteria which go beyond that. In Leonardo's case, we were
very fortunate and we have all these notes about painting, about optics, about
all the subjects he investigated. And the painting by Leonardo is going to reflect
what I call 'the science of art'. His way of constructing a painting based upon a
knowledge of how nature works. And if we look at this painting, we see that in
various areas. First of all, optically. He's immensely interested in the functioning
of the eye and about the time of the painting of the picture, he is developing
a theory that the eyes are very flexible in certain, even ambiguous instrument and
he says at one point, the eye does not know the edge of any body. That's to say
we never precisely register an edge. If you look in the Mona Lisa, you look in
the Salvator Mundi, there are no absolute edges. We put in the edges, as it were,
and it gives the picture a kind of magic. Also optically, the hand, the blessing
hand is more in focus, as we would say. This is anachronistic,
but it is sharper than the face which creates depth and he's interested in the
optimum viewing distance for an object. Too close and you can't see it, too far away
it begins to get unclear and at the optimum point you see it as best you can,
which is what's happening there. If you look at the hair of the Salvator Mundi
which cascades down in these wonderful vortex curls. Now the boys and the
followers could do curls for the use of, they could do perfectly good, quick
curves with little brush. What Leonardo does is to look at the structure of
the curls and he says 'it's like turbulent water'. You've got the weight of
the current as it were, the direction of the current. You've got the tendency to
revolve. You've got a helix. So the hair in Leonardo, these curly heads which he
much likes, the hair always has what I call the physics of hair in it. It is
always reflecting that. And it's not just curly hair, it has a thought behind
it. So in a way, in the picture he's showing Christ the saviour of the cosmos,
but through this technique of extreme ambiguity and softness he implies that
Christ although incarnate, of our flesh, he is somehow from another realm.
So tracking what in effect is a piece of wood with paint on it, across
half a millennium and over national boundaries, is really inescapably
problematic. We know that Leonardo took his paintings with him and we know that
in the period after his death some paintings may have come back to Italy
and then after that they've spread across the continent. And these paintings
themselves became iconic and they were reproduced. Where they reproduced and then in
inventories turn up as Luini, or Boltraffio, or all of these names that
we're very familiar with nowadays, not very often. So we have problems in
pinning down these objects and we have modern expectations of
evidence that really don't fit with early-modern documentation. There were
two paintings attributed to Leonardo of Christ in the Royal Collection in the
period, in the 1630's, we think and the 1640's. How do we know that? Because they
appear in the 1649 inventory which was drawn up by the commissioners of the
Sale of the Royal Goods at the execution of the King. That was a reasonably
detailed inventory. It probably relied on earlier inventories, some some of
which have now been lost. So we know there were two paintings and it only
says that they're paintings of Christ. It doesn't say this is a Salvator Mundi
or this is any other topic or subject matter of Christ. We can identify where
both of the paintings were at that time, because of the detail in the inventories.
So we know that one of them was in Greenwich and we knew that one of them
was in Whitehall Palace. The one that was in Greenwich we can say belonged to Queen
Henrietta Maria, King Charles's wife because Greenwich, the entire manor of
Greenwich, was in her jointure. The Queen had several properties across the
royal estate and this was one of them. We know that the painting was in a
closet because that's what the inventory says. It says a number of paintings from
the closets at Greenwich. But what we have to think about is exactly where in
Greenwich this closet was. Now that gives us a problem because there was one
modern building in Greenwich, which was the building we now called the Queen's
House and there was another building, the old Tudor Palace of Greenwich. Both of
those properties overlooked the waterfront. This is in the days before
the the modern buildings that we have in Greenwich. In the Queen's House in
Greenwich, on the upper floor the piano nobile, there was the Queen's
bedchamber and directly behind the Queen's bedchamber is a little room
which had a beautiful fireplace in it which was designed by Inigo Jones the
British architect and it was made by Nicholas stone, who's
an architect that we know very well in Oxford, who produced the portico for
St Mary's Church, the university church and this was sculpted and placed in that
room in 1639. So we have a date for that room being fitted out. The room was
changed over time, but we believe from early architectural records and
reconstructions that it actually acted as a private devotional closet for
the Queen. The other room that it possibly could have been is in the Royal
closet which was directly off the Royal Chapel in the old Tudor Palace, which
is now destroyed. In consultation with Simon Thurley, the architectural
historian and Gordon Higgott, the architectural
historian, we've decided that because the Queen's house was effectively a summer
residence for the Queen and there was no heating in it, that the painting probably
moved between these two closets.
So this is the inventory of James Duke of York in 1674. It's an inventory of
pictures. The first folio here on the verso is pictures in the office and on
the recto, pictures in the green mohair closet at Whitehall. That's suggestive of
a small cabinet of paintings or possibly a devotional closet. Number 32:
'Our Saviour in a brass gilt frame'. Unfortunately we
don't have any further information about that. We don't know whether it was
painted by Leonardo. None of these paintings have an attribution to an
artist and this is 1674, so it shows the problem of identifying these objects. We
don't have the painting in the 1639 inventories but we have two paintings by
Leonardo of Christ in the 1649 inventories. We have in the
inventory of the sixth dividend, we have in 1650 through '3,
the painting of Christ attributed to Leonardo and then we have it returned
again and it appears in this very fulsome inventory of circa 1666, but it's
not here in 1674. But this is during Charles II's reign, so we might
not necessarily expect to see something that was belonging to Charles II in
the possession of the Duke of York at this point.
It's been restored at the very highest level. At the highest level according to
our best knowledge of museum practices and by one of the most distinguished
painting conservators in the world. So it's a picture that came to us with some
damage, some structural damage, which is one reason, probably the most
significant reason why it's eluded identification for so long. But over a
period of two years of meticulous practice of both
conservation of the wood panel and the painting surface has been undertaken and
I think it's a remarkable triumph of professional restoration at the very
highest ethical levels. Of those that are associated with the Leonardo composition
there are about twenty, maybe a few more, but many of these, some of these I
should say, are later copies. In a way they can help us track where the painting has
been, where it's been seen in the course of its history. But there are a few that
are of the 16th century and they also give some instruction about the genesis
of the painting and how, particularly the students of Leonardo may have seen it
and in the course of its painting. But there's only one real thing. I think it's
one of the rarest things on the planet and whether one compares it with
other works of art by much more prolific artists like Willem de Kooning who's
painting sold for 300 million dollars, or compare it to other objects such as
fighter jets and bombers which can be an average of 700 million dollars for a B-2
bomber, I think the price is quite reasonable. This is an extraordinary work
of art and one that can be appreciated by a good portion of the population of
the planet. Where has it been? We know it was sold and we know that it went into
secured storage in Switzerland which is exactly as you would imagine. The owner
would have had access to it there and we understand that it's in a private
collection and the private collector is being private. As things stand, we're
waiting with bated breath to see whether the painting will show up in the Louvre
in October this year. This is September 2019, so we'll wait and see. There is quite
a lot of attention when this painting was shown at the National Gallery in
London and some some scholarly discourse about it, but really
the huge media attention didn't begin until the painting was sold at
auction for 450 million dollars and then it seemed to become open season on a
very venerable and wonderful work of art, solely because of the price that it
attained and for better or for worse, the painting has acquired a kind of iconic
status like the Mona Lisa and just as it's very hard to look at Mona Lisa now
as a work of art, both visually and practically, I think the same status
has been acquired by the Salvator Mundi. So in a way, this book is the
first step, I hope to a rehabilitating the painting as an important work of
art and one that can communicate to viewers rather than just
being an object of tremendous value. It's par for the course of Leonardo. I've been
involved with Leonardo for 50 years and he attracts attention. There are almost
always stories. You get stories which get out of the Arts pages which pleases the
people who write about art and gets them into the feature pages and the colour
supplements. So you couldn't have anticipated what the media storm was
going to be, but you'd be pretty certain that there would be extraordinary
coverage in the media and of course the sale of it for 450 million dollars and
its current inaccessibility have made an extraordinary story. I'm never surprised
to be surprised by what happens with Leonardo but I'm always surprised by
what the surprises are. It's been a very long time in the making this book that
Roberts and Martin and I have written and we've all done a lot of
research and it hasn't really fully got into the public domain. So a lot of the
stories that I see, whether they're responsible journalistic stories or
whether they're ridiculous stories online and in social media really have
come in to fill this vacuum. So I'm very much looking forward to putting the
research that we've done out there and then rebooting the conversation about
this painting.