Ben Smith Lewis

The Last Leonardo


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only known surviving sculpture. There was even another Salvator Mundi supposedly by Leonardo, known as the Ganay, named after its last known owner, the French resistance hero Jean Louis, Marquis de Ganay. The last time a painting’s reattribution to Leonardo had been widely accepted was ninety-nine years ago: the Benois Madonna, which today hangs in St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum.

      It’s worth mentioning that the painting inside his case was a connoisseur’s worst nightmare. It had once been as damaged as any Renaissance painting could be. It had a great slash down the middle; the paint had been scraped away to the wood on parts of the most important part of any portrait, the face; it had broken into five pieces and was held together by a ramshackle combination of wooden batons on the back, known as a ‘cradle’. There was no contemporary documentation: not a contract, not an eyewitness account from the time, not a note in a margin about this painting, not one scintilla of evidence that dated from the lifetime of the artist, aside from the odd drawing of an arm or a torso, which bore only a partial resemblance to the finished picture. The painting had vanished from sight for a total of 184 of its estimated five hundred years of existence – 137 years between 1763 and 1900, and another forty-seven years between 1958 and 2005. When the great British art historian Ellis Waterhouse saw it at an auction in London in 1958, he scribbled one word in his catalogue: ‘wreck’.

      Robert Simon was on a high-risk mission. He hadn’t even been able to afford the insurance premium for the full worth of his hand luggage. The auction house Sotheby’s had helped him in the end by kindly writing a low valuation of the painting at only $50 million. His piece was fragile. He wasn’t sure it would survive the plane trip, let alone make it onto the walls of a world-class museum or into the saleroom of a famous auction house. The panel on which the painting had been executed had been pieced back together and beautifully restored, but under its freshly varnished surface lay a hidden flaw: a huge knot in the lower centre. When it was studied by technical panel specialists in Florence, they said it was the worst piece of wood they had ever seen.

       The Walnut Knot

      The countryside north of Milan sweeps slowly up towards the still blue lakes and then the jagged outline of the Alps. Before the land rises to alpine heights there are foothills and farmland that were once dotted with walnut trees, whose thick canopies of smooth-edged leaves shuffled in breezes and shook in winds. Their dense webs of branches broke up the hot sunlight, and farmyard cats scratched their backs on the trees’ distinctive, deeply furrowed dark bark. The trees grew quickly, developing thick trunks – up to two metres in diameter – and lived up to two hundred years. They are mentioned in medieval Italian legends about female shamans who summoned the spirit world by dancing around them. Millennia earlier, according to Roman myth, Jupiter, the most powerful of all the gods, subsisted on walnuts when he walked among men.

      For many years the tree from which the Salvator Mundi sprang would have performed its duty providing nuts for culinary and medicinal purposes. Its annual harvest would have enriched Renaissance pasta dishes such as spiced walnut linguine, or fig and walnut ravioli, or would have been combined with the tops of the bitter rue plant in concoctions to ward off the plague. Then one day the decision would have been made to sell the wood of the tree. It would have been dug up with spades rather than felled with an axe, since the best wood is near the base. Some of the timber would have been used to make ornate carved tables, chairs and caskets for the homes of noblemen. Other blocks would be reverentially carved into statuettes of saints and placed on the ends of choir stalls, or in the niches of altars. The finest parts would be used for the intricate Renaissance craft of intarsia, or wood inlay: different types of wood, each a different shade, were cut into delicately shaped strips to build sepia pictures of landscapes or religious scenes, which were set into cabinets and desks. This walnut tree was cut into planks for all these purposes, and a single plank, 45cm wide and 66cm high, would become our painting.