From the Times Literary Supplement, August 13
Federico Varese on ‘Salvator Mundi’ and the unreality of the art market
On March 5, 2008, Martin Kemp, Professor of Art History at the University of Oxford, then nearing retirement, received an email. Kemp is one of the world’s leading experts on Leonardo da Vinci. Well used to being bombarded with endless communications concerning the artist, his habit would have been to reply with cool politeness, gently implying that no further messages would follow. But this email was different: it came from Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery in London and was sufficiently cryptic to be important: “Martin, I have something here you absolutely have to see …”
On May 19, Kemp duly took his place in the National Gallery’s Conservation Studio. Placed on a plain wooden easel, with the Virgin of the Rocks beside it, was a picture depicting Jesus in Renaissance dress, his right hand raised in blessing, the left holding a crystal orb – Jesus Saviour of the World and Lord of the Cosmos, according to sixteenth-century iconography. “When I saw the ‘Salvator Mundi’ I experienced an almost physical reaction, I felt a presence, just as I felt in front of the Mona Lisa”, Kemp recalled on February 4 this year, in a seminar held at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, as part of a series on the Italian Renaissance. He could hardly contain his emotions. To regain his composure, Kemp got out his magnifying glass and started to examine the crystal in Christ’s left hand. Also in the room were a number of other invitees, including the scholars Maria Teresa Fiorio and Pietro Marani, flown over from Milan. Kemp also made his first acquaintance with Robert Simon, a soft-spoken, polite New York art dealer, introduced as the current custodian of the work (it would later transpire that he was also one of its owners).
Kemp studied the picture and decided it was a genuine Leonardo. His opinion was readily accepted by at least one other expert present at the meeting and eventually by the National Gallery, and a cultural and commercial miracle got underway. A work that had been attributed in the nineteenth century to “school of Giovanni Boltraffio” – a Milanese early Renaissance painter (1467–1516) who was a pupil of Leonardo’s – upgraded to “a work by Boltraffio” when sold at auction in London for £45 in 1956, and later bought by Robert Simon for $1,175 in 2005, was admitted to the da Vinci canon and would become a few years later the world’s most expensive painting. In November 2018, a Saudi prince paid $450 million to secure the picture, announcing that it would be hung in the new Louvre Abu Dhabi. But not everybody is convinced by the attribution, and the “Salvator Mundi” has been a focus of a scholarly dispute between art historians – which continues to this day – since its rediscovery in 2005. And more than that, the whole business of this “Leonardo” has shed some light on the less-known corners of the art market, from the overlapping of commercial and major museum interests to the working of offshore jurisdictions and the Geneva Freeport, where goods in transit can be lawfully parked without attracting any kind of tax. And in the meantime, the “Salvator Mundi” itself has disappeared from view. But let’s take one thing at a time....
....MUCH MORE
