The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece. Ben Lewis

The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece - Ben  Lewis


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among them, although the latter may have been partly executed by assistants. Here he and his assistants probably also finished painting the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks.

      Leonardo is known for the intricate and precise way he painted hair, so different from the patterned and schematic rendering of his Renaissance contemporaries. In the Salvator, Christ’s long curls glisten with highlights of varying intensity as they catch the light. Amidst the best-preserved strands on the right you will find a double helix, a shape that we find in Leonardo’s drawings of coiled ropes, machines and waterfalls. In his notebooks he wrote of the similarities between the way hair fell and water flowed. There were ‘two motions, of which one responds to the weight of the strands of hair and the other to the direction of the curls; thus the water makes turning eddies, which in part respond to the impetus of the principal current, while the other responds to the incidental motion of deflection’.

      These curls may also be carnal. Leonardo’s notebooks contain sketches of curly-haired boys, which are often said to be portraits of his teenage assistant and almost certainly his lover, Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, whom Leonardo nicknamed Salai, or ‘mischievous one’. In April 1476, a week before his twenty-fourth birthday, Leonardo was arrested by the zealous Florentine vice squad, which patrolled the city streets at night. The accusation was of sodomy with a male prostitute, though the artist was acquitted.

      All these elements cohere in the sfumato style in which the painting is executed. While Leonardo’s peers favoured bright colours and strong lines, Leonardo, a maverick within the Renaissance avant-garde, took painting in the opposite direction towards tonality, building up from dark undercoats to light highlights. Raphael, Michelangelo, Perugino, Piero della Francesca and other Renaissance masters painted scenes that were flooded with light. Their saints, temples and porticos have bright hues. They painted lighter colours on first, in general, and then modelled the figures and architecture with darker shades. But Leonardo worked the other way round. The Salvator is painted up from gloomy underlayers of dark vermilion and black paint. Areas of light are built up from this darkness in thin, transparent layers of very carefully graduated oil-based mixtures, known as glazes. Leonardo advised: ‘Paint so that a smoky finish can be seen, rather than contours and profiles that are distinct and crude.’

      While we see so many of the above Leonardesque attributes in the Salvator, other notable aspects of the painting are not very Leonardo. The composition, for one thing, is uniquely flat within the artist’s oeuvre. Christ has none of the movement and contrapposto we see in the figures in Leonardo’s other paintings, despite the fact that he had written ‘Always set your figures so that the side to which the head turns is not the side to which the breast faces.’ Rather than reinvent the composition of this traditional subject, Leonardo seems to have produced, for the first and only time in his life, a carbon copy of the static one that scores of other early Renaissance artists used. The typology of the Salvator Christ, with its long nose and sombre expression, is remote from the delicate, androgynous charm of the Christ he painted in The Last Supper and of a drawing of Christ he made around 1494. In fact, the facial features don’t resemble any of Leonardo’s drawings of other young men. The orb presents another problem. Its realism is undermined by the absence of any notable optical distortions in the drapery behind it, and of the reflections of the surroundings which would logically be visible in such a piece of crystal. Leonardo studied and wrote about optics at length in his notebooks; it is unlikely that he would paint such an object in such an unrealistic way.


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