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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
Hello, my name is Martin Kemp. I'm Emeritus Research Professor in the History of Art at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Trinity College.
Now, you may think a senior academic has a rather quiet and desirable life – sort of reading the odd book and going to the odd conference and pottering in the garden. This, because of Leonardo, is absolutely not what's happened to me at all.
If you're involved with him, it's a pretty turbulent passage on the whole. And what we're going to be looking at today is the ‘Salvator Mundi’, ‘the Saviour of the World’ – this very disputed painting with masses of stories and almost daily, there's some sort of story about where it is and what's happened to it.
What I'm going to begin by doing is looking at the painting itself. Of course, I can't ignore the fact this is the most expensive painting in the world. 15th November 2017, it sold for 450 million dollars at Christie's, a world record price for a painting. Or it's, in a way, not for the painting, it's the world record price for Leonardo through participating in the myth and the extraordinary presence of Leonardo as a cultural figure.
Let's ask a question initially, did Leonardo paint the ‘Salvator Mundi’? The answer is yes, almost certainly, or he certainly designed the ‘Salvator Mundi’. You’ve got two red chalk drawings at Windsor for the drapery. He's still manoeuvring the drapery a bit, but [they’re] basically preparatory studies for the ‘Salvator Mundi’. Very typical in red chalk of Leonardo.
The other one, which suggests it's a famous painting, is copies. And what you can see here, serried ranks of copies, I think we're now up to about 50 of them. And because it was a prestigious image, it was much copied and that indicated early on it was regarded as something very, very special. The first documentary reference we have of it is in the list of the possessions of his rascally pupil, Salaì, who stole anything that was not tied down. Leonardo had a great affection for him. He died in 1525, which is six years after Leonardo, and he had a series of paintings, seemingly Leonardo’s, or maybe good copies of Leonardo’s in his possession. And one of them, one of these pictures in 1525 is called ‘Uno Cristo in modo de uno Dio Padre’ – a Christ in the manner of God the Father, rather a nice title was God the Father was often shown blessing and holding a globe. So this is imagery which has migrated into the ‘Salvator Mundi’, which wasn't the title of a picture at this time.
What I'm going to do is to look at three aspects of the picture as a picture, to say, this is why it's Leonardo and it's not somebody else. This is not standard connoisseurship, it’s actually got a lot of content.
The first one is watery hair. Leonardo was a great studier of why things looked like they did, and he had a theory about ‘the physics of hair’, as I call it, and he compared it with water. If you got a rushing column of water, you've got the weight, the direction of the water. You have the weight of the hair. Water hitting water revolves in itself, and curly hair curls because of its curling propensity. In both cases, it makes a helix. Leonardo knows the physics of hair. If we look at one of the copies, the copyist, rather about the best copy of the picture, on the right doesn't really understand how hair curls, how it works. Its curls for the use of, rather than really got a structure. Leonardo being Leonardo has to classify the spirals: a convex one, a flat one, a concave one, and a rather muddled up one. And this is, this is very typical. Nobody else did that, they just didn't think it was worth that kind of level of investment.
The second aspect is the crystalline sphere, which Christ holds in his left hand, which is recognisable as a sphere of rock crystal – it’s not glass, it’s not bubbles in glasses, it's rock crystal. And it's got lots of inclusions, as they call it in geology, little spaces, when it's being formed under enormous heat. This is a little bit of rock crystal I have, which compares rather nicely with the crystalline sphere. This becomes of interest, because it introduces a new content, Salvator Mundi as the saviour of the world and previous Salvator Mundi’s hold globes, or maybe even a proper, fully formed globe of the Earth as such. This is the crystalline sphere of the heavens. It's the outermost reach of the universe. There's nothing beyond that other than heaven, which we can't really know. So this is a very characteristic move and enhancement of the subject matter of the picture.
Raffaello on the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura here, you’ve got a Urania who's looking at the crystalline sphere of the heavens with the signs of the zodiac, which Leonardo obviously doesn't do. This is definitely the sphere of the heavens and not the earth.
The third argument detail is how the eye works. Leonardo has to ask about everything. How does it work? Why does it do this? How does it look like that? His model of the eye late in life comes from Islamic science, from Ibn Al-Haytham, and it's a very complex optical instrument which refracts the light in such a way that it will form an image. He looks at the primary ray coming straight into the eye and saying that registers most clearly, but there are lots of other rays which come in, so you've got a blurred edge. “You don't have an absolutely definite knowledge”, he writes at one point, “the eye does not know the edge of any body”. That's to say, you never see anything absolutely perfectly clearly.
If you look at later images by Leonardo, these have what is often called ‘sfumato’, this smokey or blurring effect. It’s not Leonardo’s word, and it's become rather entrenched. And here you've got the ‘Salvator Mundi’, it’s very soft, elusive depiction of contours, and a detail from the Saint John the Baptist in the Louvre. Exactly the same. This is optical ambiguity, but it is also spiritual in that evoking a world we can't see. Christ and Saint John know the secrets. And he wrote “I leave the definition of the soul to the minds of the friars, father of the people, who by inspiration possess the secrets, I let be the sacred writings, for they are the supreme truths”. I don't have any irony in that, there is a realm we can't know about. I mean, it's this realm which this ambiguous glance that Saint John and Christ in the Salvator Mundi share. And so the elusiveness is spiritual elusiveness and optical elusiveness. Again, none of the boys, none of the people who follow Leonardo get that at all.
Now, recent stories. I'm not going right back to the discovery in the first sale of the work. But looking at the instant which brought it before Christie’s. And what happened was that the Salvator Mundi was in the Freeport in Geneva, owned by Yves Bouvier. This is a port in which things can change hands for money without tax. And one of his customers was Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch, and he sold the ‘Salvator Mundi’ to Rybolovlev, $127.5 million, which, given the fact that Bouvier paid $80 million, is rather a big markup.
By accident, Rybolovlev got an idea of how much Yves Bouvier was paying for these paintings, and how much he was charging him. He decided to sell the Bouvier pictures, including the ‘Salvator Mundi’, which came up at Christie's.
And here we've got a shot of the auction at Christie's. It's pure circus. The people on the telephones phoning in bids. The auctioneer posing as if it's sold. It's conducted in an incredibly theatrical manner. It's not so much a quiet auction as is a piece of financial theatre.
What happened to the ‘Salvator Mundi’? It was meant to be exhibited in the 2019 exhibition in the Louvre to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death. It was due to come, they had a space for it, and it didn't come. What happened was the Louvre undertook a scientific examination of the picture, which appeared very briefly as a small book in the Louvre Bookshop and went off sale as soon as they decided they weren't going to show it. Very rare book. I've got a PDF, electronic version of it, which is rather a rare thing, and the technical examination gave full weight to it being consistent with Leonardo. The book says “the examination of the ‘Salvator Mundi’ seems to us to demonstrate the work was indeed executed by Leonardo”.
Where is it now? There are guesses, probably the best educated guess is it's owned by Mohammed bin Salman, but we can't be certain. As a historian, I want documented facts. And as we've said: do I know where it is? The answer is, I don't, but there’s something that’s worth looking at here:
How about that? It's not, as you might imagine, actually the real thing. This was made for an earlier event at the British Academy. Anyway, it's the best we can do at this moment.