The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece. Ben Lewis
of the Latin ‘Salvator’ perhaps due to a Spanish-speaking typist? ‘Presented in a fine antique gilt and gesso exhibition frame.’ The estimate – an auction house always states the price it thinks the lot may achieve – was just $1,200 to $1,800. The painting was illustrated in the hard-copy catalogue that Robert Simon saw at the same time, with a very low-resolution black-and-white photograph. Christ’s clothes had become a gloomy grey, his cheekbones and forehead glimmered oddly out of the murky darkness, and the fingers of his blessing hand seemed illuminated by pale candlelight. ‘It looked kinda interesting. School of Leonardo is always interesting, and the price was very good,’ Parish told me with a grin.
Parish asked the St Charles Gallery down in New Orleans to send him a photograph. ‘When it arrived, I pulled it out, I held the picture, and in an instant I could see, like any Old Master dealer can, this part is totally repainted, this part is pretty much untouched, and this part, which included the hand, was like, “Oh my God, that’s period! That’s period.” You know what that means? Period means it’s of the era it’s trying to be. You see seventeenth-century rehashes of Renaissance pictures, nineteenth-century rehashes of Renaissance pictures. This was clearly of the era it purported to be from. And it was pretty good quality. I’m looking at the hand and I’m looking at the drapery and I can clearly see this is not simply one of numerous copies. This is an extremely good, high-quality copy.’
He and Simon decided to buy it. The rest, as they say, is art history.
Nothing in the known universe, no item, object or quantity of material, has ever appreciated in value as fast as the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. It was sold in May 2005 to Simon and Parish for $1,175 – a sum considerably less than the figure of ‘around $10,000’ the pair later quoted to the media. In 2013 they sold it for $80 million, then four years later, in 2017 – a mere twelve years and six months after it was sold for not much more than $1,000 – it was auctioned by Christie’s New York for $450 million.
* Jonathan Green recounts a story of how he found himself in a taxi with Parish in London in the mid-2000s. Parish pulled out his mobile phone and showed Green a detail of a blessing hand. It was from the Salvator Mundi, but Green didn’t know that. ‘What do you think of this?’ he asked nonchalantly. Green nodded appreciatively. Green says Parish never offered him the painting, and told me, with magnanimity, ‘I don’t hold anything against him.’ Parish has a different version of the story. ‘I had bought the Salvator Mundi at least a year or two prior to leaving Green, and I’d mentioned it to them a couple of times, but they were so contemptuous of me in some respects. You know, “Just, shut up. Go get us coffee.” That kind of tone of voice. So, OK. Okie dokie …’ Parish drew out the last two words with his excellent drawl, and never finished the sentence.
CHAPTER 4
Leonardo was the most prolific draftsman of his age, with approximately four thousand surviving drawings attributed to him, four times the number left by his most active contemporaries.1 He drew diagrams, emblems, allegories, architecture, anatomy, maps, landscapes, biblical figure groups, nude studies and portraits from life. He was an expert in silverpoint, using a hard-edged metal stylus to draw lines into paper covered with a mixture of pulverised bone and mineral colours. He liked ink and quill pens plucked from the wings of domestic geese. After the turn of the sixteenth century he preferred chalks: red, black and white. He often touched up his drawings with white highlights in yet another medium, gouache. Some of Leonardo’s early paintings, St Jerome and Adoration of the Magi among them, progressed little beyond the full-size drawing stage.
As a draftsman, Leonardo was a revolutionary. To him we owe the world’s first dated landscape sketch, the world’s first ‘exploded’ diagram of machine parts, and the world’s first freeform compositional sketches, in which he plans – or perhaps rather finds – a composition out of a rapid-fire maelstrom of spontaneous, half-automatic lines, scribbled in ink and chalk. One of his most famous and most reproduced works is a diagrammatic drawing, Vitruvian Man, in which a man’s body with extended limbs forms a square and a circle. According to the sixteenth-century Italian writer Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, citing the reminiscences of his father, who had observed Leonardo first-hand, the artist rarely left his studio without a sketchbook hanging from his belt. In his notes for his treatise, Leonardo issued the first known exhortation about drawing from real life:
As you go about town, be always alert when out walking, to observe and consider the actions of men while they are talking, thinking, laughing or fighting together, what actions are within them, and what actions the onlookers are doing … and make brief notes of these forms in your small notebook, which you must always carry with you, and it should be of tinted paper, so that it cannot be erased, and must be kept diligently, because the positions and actions are many, and the memory is unable to remember them all.
The surviving studies for the Salvator Mundi, however, which are drawn in red chalk on red tinted paper, were executed in the studio, because they were sketches of clothing – or drapery, to use the art historian’s terminology – and they were almost certainly based on draped mannequins, not live models. Today these drawings can be found in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
‘Leonardo sometimes made clay models,’ wrote Giorgio Vasari, the great sixteenth-century Florentine art historian of the Renaissance, ‘draping the figures with rags dipped in plaster, and then drawing them painstakingly on fine Rheims cloth or prepared linen.’ Drapery was one of the essential components of Renaissance painting, and acted as a form of messaging in itself. The classical robes in which the saintly starring cast of Renaissance paintings were dressed elevated biblical stories 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