Ben Smith Lewis

The Last Leonardo


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to the level of the Antique, fusing the two great sources of wisdom of the age, the Bible and classical civilisation. Their sheen, dips and pleats were bravura exercises in realism, which advertised the illusionistic skill of the artist. There is a series of sixteen drapery studies drawn on linen, usually dated to the early 1470s, some attributed to Leonardo at the tender age of nineteen. The young artist shows the texture and characteristics of the fabric depicted as well as indicating the body underneath, the cloth flowing with curving arabesques and hard-edged angles, receding in pockets of shadow, and gleaming where it catches the light.

      Leonardo usually planned his paintings with three stages of drawings. First, there were the studies of body parts, gestures, faces, drapery, anatomy and landscapes, drawn from life or sometimes from models or classical statues. In a second stage, he made sketches of combinations of figures or laid out the entire composition. Last came full-scale cartoons, which were traced onto the panel on which the final painting would be executed. There must have once been many preparatory drawings for the Salvator Mundi – for Christ’s face, the blessing hand and the orb, and perhaps for the entire composition – but only two pages of sketches survive. On one sheet there are two drawings – one of a man’s torso clothed with an episcopal garment known as a stole, and the other a smaller depiction of a forearm emerging from a rich crumple of sleeve, drawn in red chalk and then overdrawn in white. On the second sheet is a forearm with a sleeve finishing in a cuff, with drapery around it.

      These sketches provide a host of intriguing clues about the Salvator Mundi. The fabric covering the chest is drawn in obsessive detail, one of the characteristics of Leonardo’s style, with thin rivulets of cloth, each one differentiated, running down from the band of embroidery around the neck, which has bunched up the fabric in tiny pleats. Looking at the painting, on the left side of the chest, just above a diagonal band, the garment’s fabric has become curiously scrunched. The artist seems to take particular care in showing how untidy this part of the clothing is. The shape and position of this crumple is momentous. At exactly the spot where the Holy Spear pierced Christ’s body on the cross, the wound of the Passion, it forms the Greek letter omega, a symbol of the divine. Novelists and historians of varying academic qualifications have written numerous outlandish interpretations of hidden symbols they have discerned by carefully squinting at Leonardo’s paintings, such as the Virgin of the Rocks and the Mona Lisa, but here in the Salvator Mundi there is a real one.

      The second drawing holds a puzzle too. The sleeved limb emerges from two loose loops of fabric, which closely resemble the drapery around Christ’s arm held up in blessing in the painting. But in the drawing the forearm is sleeved with a cuff at the end; in the painting it is bare. As a preparatory study it bears a surprisingly loose relationship to the finished painting.

      Drawing is the common denominator between all of Leonardo’s diverse activities as engineer, scientist and artist. And yet Leonardo had criticisms of drawing. One of the fundamental aspects of his thinking, which set him apart from his contemporaries, was his radical attitude to line. ‘Lines are not part of any quantity of an object’s surface, nor are they part of the air which surrounds this surface,’ he wrote. ‘The line has in itself neither matter nor substance and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object … Your shadows and lights should be blended without lines or borders in the manner of smoke losing itself in the air … O painter, do not surround your bodies with lines!’ There were no lines in the real world, he said, so don’t paint them.

      In the cool and pungent backstreets of Milan, in the dark shops of the apothecaries, majolica vases lined the shelves, full of herbs, medicines, chemicals and pigments – the raw material for colouring the world. These were roughly chopped preparations of minerals, insects, animal remains and plants, waiting to be finely ground into powder, mixed with egg yolk or oils to make paint, and with water for dyes. The customers came and went – dyers, glassmakers, tailors, the manufacturers of ceramics and furniture, manuscript illuminators and painters.

      For the Salvator Mundi, the apprentice would have had only a small number of pigments on his list, because this painting was made with remarkably few colours: lead white, lapis lazuli, lead tin yellow, vermilion, red iron oxide, carbon and charcoal black, bone black and umber. Back in the studio, the assistants would then have to grind the colours to create a fine powder. However, on this occasion, as later restoration showed, they didn’t do a very thorough job: the brilliant blue grains of the lapis lazuli were rather coarse compared to those in Leonardo’s other paintings.