Ben Lewis

The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece


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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 five years later he or she will be part of a group show in a public institution. Or, as is the case in our story, coming across, after years of searching, an old painting ascribed to a third-rate provincial school but which, they believe, might be by an artist of great renown.

      The painting Parish spotted was a seventeenth-century Dutch pastoral scene, which he brought to the attention of the renowned Old Masters gallery Colnaghi. It was a gesture that displayed an appropriate combination of knowledge and ambition. Colnaghi took him on, and he worked for them in New York for two years, from 1980 to 1982, but not in a high-profile position. It was not an easy business in those days, he recalls. ‘No one was selling old Italian pictures or English pictures, or anything like that, in New York at the time.’ After a couple of years he went to work for Christie’s. It was another low-paid job, but he was becoming increasingly fluent in the lingo of art market insiders: ‘I was