Now, you may think a senior academic has a rather quiet and desirable life – sort of reading the odd book, going to the odd conference and pottering in the garden. This, because of Leonardo da Vinci, 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. Particularly in the case of the ‘Salvator Mundi’, the ‘Saviour of the World’ – a very disputed painting with masses of stories. Almost daily, there's some sort of story about where it is and what's happened to it.
Of course, I can't ignore the fact this is the most expensive painting in the world. On 15 November 2017, it sold for $450 million at Christie's, a world record price for a painting. In a way, it's the world record price for Leonardo, not for the painting – an engagement 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’. If we look at Leonardo's red chalk drawings at Windsor for the drapery, they’re basically preparatory studies for the ‘Salvator Mundi’.
It’s famous status as a prestigious da Vinci image is reflected in its copies; I think we’re now up to about 50 of them. From early on, it was regarded as something very special.
The first documented reference we have of ‘Salvator Mundi’ is in the list of the possessions of Leonardo’s rascally pupil, Salaì, who stole anything that was not tied down. Leonardo had a great affection for him. He died in 1525, six years after Leonardo, and he had a series of paintings, seemingly Leonardo’s, or maybe good copies of Leonardo’s in his possession. One of these pictures from 1525 is called ‘Uno Cristo in modo de uno Dio Padre’ – ‘a Christ in the manner of God the Father’. Rather a nice title, 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.
There are three key aspects of the ‘Salvator Mundi’ as a picture, that indicate why it's Leonardo and it's not somebody else.
Watery hair
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. He compared it with water. If you’ve got a rushing column of water, you've got the weight and 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 some of the copies, they don't really show an understanding of how hair curls, how it works. It curls for the use of curls, rather than really having a structure. Leonardo being Leonardo has to classify the spirals: a convex one, a flat one, a concave one, or muddled up ones. This is very typical of Leonardo’s work. Nobody else did that, they just didn't think it was worth that kind of level of investment.
Crystalline sphere
The second aspect is the crystalline sphere, which Christ holds in his left hand. This is recognisable as a sphere of rock crystal – it’s not glass, it’s not bubbles in glass, it's rock crystal. It's got lots of inclusions, as they call it in geology, little spaces that are created when it's formed under enormous heat. This becomes of interest, because it introduces 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.
How the eye works
The third detail is in 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, which 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 smoky or blurring effect. It’s not Leonardo’s word, and it's become rather entrenched. In the ‘Salvator Mundi’, there are very soft, elusive depictions of contours in the eye, almost idential to the eyes from the ‘Saint John the Baptist’ in the Louvre. This is optical ambiguity, but it is also spiritual in that it evokes a world we can't see: Christ and Saint John know the secrets. Leonardo 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”. There is a realm we can't know about, in this ambiguous glance that Saint John and Christ in the ‘Salvator Mundi’ share. This elusiveness is both spiritual elusiveness and optical elusiveness.
Where is ‘Salvator Mundi’ today?
Now, more recent stories – we can discuss the instance which brought the painting before Christie’s for auction. 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. One of his customers was Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch, and he sold the ‘Salvator Mundi’ to Rybolovlev for $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. The auction at Christie's was 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 it is a piece of financial theatre.
So what happened to the ‘Salvator Mundi’ following this? 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 rare small book in the Louvre bookshop and went off sale as soon as they decided they weren't going to show it. The technical examination gave full weight to it being consistent with Leonardo's work. The book claims: “the examination of the ‘Salvator Mundi’ seems to us to demonstrate the work was indeed executed by Leonardo”.
Where is it now? There are many guesses, with probably the best educated guess being that it is owned by Mohammed bin Salman. However, we can't be certain and as a historian, I want documented facts.
Martin Kemp FBA is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, University of Oxford