Ben Smith Lewis

The Last Leonardo


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a place in the art history books. If not, he would remain respected but unexceptional. This flight also represented the apogee of something more personal. In common with most art dealers, there was a motivation behind his career which had nothing to do with money or success, and which had shaped his life for somewhat longer: an unconditional, unrelenting love for art; not modern and contemporary art with its splodges, squiggles and splats, but the great art of the past, especially the Renaissance, in which the eternal stories of the Bible and of Ancient Greece and Rome were brought to life by the melodramatic gestures of bearded men and golden-haired women, amidst thick gleaming crumples of silk and satin cloth, set against a classical backdrop of esplanades and porticos, temples and fortresses.

      When he was fifteen, Simon went on a school trip to Italy. He remembers the winding roads of the hills around Florence, the low sun flashing through the cypress trees as the bus drove towards the town of Vinci, the birthplace of Leonardo da Vinci, from Vinci. (By coincidence, my parents would take me on a similar trip in my own teenage years.) ‘Leonardo has been my deity for most of my life – and I am not alone,’ Simon told me. ‘He’s my idea of the greatest person that civilisation has produced.’ Over the decades Simon had seen every major Leonardo exhibition that had been staged, and every Leonardo painting, and ‘as many drawings as I could’. His professional life, which now revolved around Leonardo, had taken him once before into the artist’s sphere, in 1993, when he was asked to examine the Leicester Codex, one of Leonardo’s revered manuscripts, for its owners. It is now owned by Bill Gates, but then belonged to the oil magnate Armand Hammer’s foundation.

      Simon climbed the ladder of the art business slowly. He was a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He taught briefly. He tried, but never succeeded, to enter the academic side of the art world. ‘The basic truth is I could not find an academic position in a place I liked,’ he says.

      He contributed reviews and articles to the Burlington Magazine, wrote catalogue essays about Italian Renaissance artists for Sotheby’s and minor museum exhibitions from Kansas to Milan. In the 1990s he also wrote catalogues for selling exhibitions at New York’s Berry-Hill Galleries, which collapsed under multiple lawsuits in the mid-2000s.

      Appraising is a job that embodies one of the great conundrums of the art world – the source of much suspicion and conspiracy theory – which is the interwovenness of scholarship and the market. As Simon says of his work as an appraiser, ‘It’s usually about the financial component, but often enough one has to do a fair amount of research to figure out what it is exactly that one is dealing with before one gets to the value stage.’ The appraiser needs to be as familiar with the development of an artist’s style as he or she is with archives of auctions and inventories, through which a painting’s history may be traced. And the appraiser needs to understand the parabolas of the rise or fall of an artist’s prices, as collated in subscription-only databases. This work, and indeed every kind of dealing in Old Masters, requires a capacious visual and factual memory. You need to be able to recall thousands of works of art, often in their smallest details.

      Inside the elegant case was a painting depicting Salvator Mundi, Christ as Saviour of the World, which Simon now believed to be by Leonardo da Vinci. He had only heard informally who would be looking at his picture in London. A few months earlier in New York he had shown it to the director of Britain’s National Gallery, Nicholas Penny. Penny was impressed, thought it could be a Leonardo, and had sent one of his curators, Luke Syson, across the Atlantic to examine it. Syson had begun work on an ambitious Leonardo exhibition that would open several years later, and he saw potential in the painting too. Simon’s trip to London was Penny and Syson’s idea. It would be highly irregular, if not unprecedented, to include a recently discovered but unconfirmed work by such a famous artist, and one which was also currently on the market, in an exhibition at a museum of the international standing of London’s National Gallery. Syson and Penny decided to discreetly convene a panel of the greatest Leonardo scholars in the world to judge the painting behind closed doors, before taking a decision on whether to include it in their exhibition.