Ben Smith Lewis

The Last Leonardo


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on pedestals, cut off from the noise of the street. The city skyline was dominated by the Duomo, the cathedral, in the centre, and in the north-west by the Castello Sforzesco, the palace of Milan’s ruler, Duke Ludovico Sforza. There were shipyards, taverns, bakeries, a debtors’ prison, cloth and shoe shops. There were quarters specialising in different trades: one full of mills producing cloth and paper, or sawmills for cutting wood; another grouping artisans working with wool; another with metalworkers. There were 237 churches, thirty-six monasteries, 126 schools and over a hundred practising artists. Milan was, in Leonardo’s own sharp words, a ‘great congregation of people’ who were ‘packed like goats one behind the other, filling every place with fetid smells and sowing seeds of pestilence and death’. There were periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague, which would one day kill several of Leonardo’s assistants. Leonardo, who was (at least in his own mind) an urban planner as well as an artist and scientist, concocted plans to redesign the city, but they never left the drawing board.

      Somewhere in the narrow streets of Milan was the carpenter or panel-maker who supplied the wood for the Salvator Mundi. This kind of artisan was the first of several craftsmen involved in the execution of a Renaissance work of art such as the Salvator. They were often required to construct large and intricate surfaces for paintings, building up a flat surface from planks of wood connected with animal glues and grooved joints, and combining panels of different shapes into elaborate altarpieces with wings on hinges. But the creation of the walnut panel for the Salvator Mundi was a relatively mundane task, since it was cut as a single piece of wood; it is therefore all the more strange that it was so poorly executed.

      Wood has to be prepared for painting with various undercoats, just as canvas is usually primed. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, this was sometimes done by the artist’s assistants, but often by the panel-maker’s workshop. The Salvator Mundi’s panel was prepared more or less as Leonardo said it should be in his notebooks:

      The panel should be cypress, pear, service tree or walnut. You must coat it with a mixture of mastic [also known as gum Arabic, a plant resin] and turpentine which has been distilled twice and with white [lead] or, if you like, lime, and put it in a frame so that it may expand and shrink according to its moisture and dryness … Then apply boiled linseed oil in such a way as it may penetrate every part and before it is cold rub it with a dry cloth. Over this apply liquid varnish and white with a stick …

      But the panel-maker had done an exceptionally poor job. Deep within the prepared panel, unbeknown to the artist who was about to receive it, behind the preparatory layers of oil, gesso and urine lay a hidden problem. Unlike the walnut panels on which Leonardo painted other famous portraits such as La Belle Ferronnière and Lady with an Ermine, the Salvator’s panel contained a large knot in the lower half, right in the centre. Such knots were usually filled in with vegetable fibres, wood filings or fabric, as the Florentine artist Cennino Cennini advised in his fifteenth-century painter’s manual. But, in a second oversight, difficult to reconcile with the expertise of Renaissance woodworkers, who well knew the properties of their materials, that was not done to this piece of wood.2 It seems that either the panel-maker or an assistant in Leonardo’s workshop to whom the task had been delegated was careless with the selection and preparation of the wooden panel, and the defect was then hidden under layers of primer.

      * Historians see the ‘modern’ period as beginning around 1500. Often they refer to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as ‘early modern’.

       Buried Treasure

      Squinting at a computer screen one day in his home office, Alex Parish discovered the Salvator Mundi. It was listed for sale in an online catalogue of an obscure auction house in New Orleans, the St Charles Gallery. This was in 2005, three years and a few months before Robert Simon would board his flight to London carrying the painting under his arm. Parish thought the picture looked promising, and the price was so low that it was worth taking a small risk. He remembers: ‘I had a recollection of a similar thing that had come up with Sotheby’s a few years before. I bought the picture because I know this is just the sort of thing other people like to speculate on.’ He contacted Simon, who had himself also spotted the picture, as he subscribed to the gallery’s mailing list and received a hard-copy catalogue by post. Parish suggested they buy it together, fifty-fifty, the same way they had jointly bought many works before. Simon agreed.

      Until he discovered the Salvator Mundi, Parish was a small-time Old Masters dealer whose career in the art world had been full of false starts, along with the treadmill of low-value backroom sales.

      And yet, this is only the sparkling surface. Behind the scenes are many other people who are not born into riches, who do not have a large designer wardrobe or a taste for high society, and who are drawn into the art business not so much by a love of art, which everyone gives as their primary motivation, but by their hunger for an experience much more exciting, akin to gambling or hunting for buried treasure. For them, the attraction is the exhilaration of buying a painting from the first show of an unknown graduate artist, in the hope that