Leonardo's Salvator Mundi: Scholarship, Science and Skulduggery

and CELTA Mundi when I suggested this is subject for a lecture it is an obvious topic because it had come out a lot of notice a lot of excitement and attracted a lot of attention what I didn't dream was that its location would be unknown and there'll be so much mystery and unresolved things Leonardo is extraordinary the attracts myths he attracts incredible events he attracts thefts youth tracks all sorts of dubious goings-on and I get besieged by the people I call learn how to Lunas it's a very very remarkable field to be in and nothing is ever simple with Leonardo and this proves to be the case with the with the Salvator Mundi obviously it became news you can say it's a world record price for a picture but I think in a way it's not a normal picture it's Leonardo so it's a world record price for a bit of Leonardo's legacy which you're buying into so I wouldn't extrapolate from that into old master prices at all in fact old masters are not selling very well and Christie's sold it as a celebrity picture along with Damien Hirst and other celebrity celebrity images the lecture I'll look I'll put the record straight I hope about the stories the press have been in been covering these things incredibly badly they've just been looking for sensation looking for stories New York Times had three stories on successive days about its ownership in the Middle East all of which were wrong there have been pronouncements by people who totally arbitrarily in the press so that the quality of the public debate has been terrible so in the first part of the lecture I will look at the try to set the record straight in terms of the story of the picture from its discovery and the second part I'll confront the picture which almost none of the press coverage know the sensational coverage has done actually looking at it and saying what have we got here and how does it relate to let alone our dough himself just a preliminary we knew that Leonardo had generated a picture of the Salvator Mundi the various bits of evidence not least a series of copies we're now up to I think about well over 20 copies or close variants of it it didn't mean to say that there Nardo actually painted a version of this but it means that he did he devised a composition which maybe was painted in the studio maybe painted by followers anyway that's what we thought on the left there is a rather nice pretty rather tight version top left which which was in the Yarbrough collection the collection of you Claudia bura are we coming back to that one top right this is was in the Tigana collection and has been mooted as loan-out as original as we will see it's certainly not the one in the bottom left shows how terrible these some of these copies can be this is the one now described as a drug-crazed hippie and the one on the right is by learn out his rascally pupil Sally and is dated 1511 which is a I think means that the Leonardo composition must have dated from before that and we also have a very splendid etching by Wenceslas Haller who worked in Britain and in Holland from Czechoslovakia originally and he he made this engraving of the Salvator Mundi which he says is from the hand of Leonardo and it's dated 1650 this is consistent with it being in the collection of Charles the first was Charles the first was beheaded in 1649 and his pictures were dispersed to his debtors so the fact Halle doesn't say who owns it is consistent with that I'm not dealing with the Charles the first the Stuart provenance we're rationing a book on the Salvator Mundi and my colleague Margaret de Laval is writing about the provenance so I'll be dealing with the picture but not it's its history other than after its media the Scott discovery a most important of all we had two drawings at Windsor for the drapery of the Salvator Mundi big drawings red on red chalk on red paper I think it's rather odd to do red chalk on red paper but Leonardo liked it for its subtlety the fact that it seemed to be softer and more pliable and simply doing drawing in dark movement materials on a on a white paper the left sleeve on on the left and working out beginning to work out the drapery with the plaque in them in the center of the in the center of the the costume there and in the bottom right hand column that might not be laying our dough but the rest of the drawings are in there entirely entirely autograph so we knew we know that some lay now though was planning this and we know that the there are lots of versions which correspond in some ways to these drawings the Yarbrough picture is interesting because all the other versions including the one I'm going to be talking about have a rather loose of structure of the cloth around the cuff around the Christ's right hand but the Yarbrough picture has picked up what he's shown in the drawing what happened with Leonardo is his incredibly slow painter in his studio often the studio assistants got and painted a composition the fourth of Arenado was settled so the preliminary stages leaked out as it were that happened with the Madonna of the arm minder and in other examples in fact the Prado copy of the Mona Lisa is like that so there's very slow process the lads obviously got impatient and thought right now we'll finish the picture and then then island changed his mind and did something different but there we are at the gallery picture is probably the most handsome of the various copies in a contest potent if a hard collection has a very distinguished recent history it's just that bit labored a little bit mechanical and it doesn't have that visual magic that elusive strange uncanny visual magic which learn are though has but either if we lay aside aspects like that of connoisseurship of what a cool judgment by I the infrared absolutely excludes Leonardo it's dairy mechanical very accurate very careful and Leonardo drawing on his panels is invariably rather wild and experimental so that niggling exact quality of it rules out the Ghana as being the original which it hadn't been widely accepted but one or two scholars thought that it was let least from Leonardo's workshop the story begins in April 2005 when an auction in Louisiana in New Orleans in fact had this picture in it and dealers now all these auctions are online so the chance of provincial auction I don't mean lost New Orleans is provincial but it's not a center for world auctions one time you could get bargains now they're all online and the dealers go through systematically every picture in which they think looks at all promising and two dealers saw this in the in the sale in Louisiana online Robert Simon New York and Alexander Parrish who were close friends they both said to each other this looks fairly old that was the best they thought about it and indeed it wasn't sure if Utley promising we now know the person who sent it in to auction it was a man called Warren rather a good name for collecting art if you're up on your german and this is when his house was being sold and this is the only picture we've got of it in in Warren compasses collection and it show this is a photograph of the state stairwell not of the picture but happens to show Salvator Mundi and in his collection for a long time we puzzled who Koontz was I had a theory that it was probably somebody planning the name of kunst art in German but anyway it he'd obviously attracted a certain amount of attention was it went for $10,000 which is not trivial and it was on panel and it looked pretty old which is what attracted Robert Simon and Alexander parish to it and but they didn't dream that it was going to be more than a decent early coffee and decent early coppers have low now though fetch rather a lot of money so it was was a perfectly good thing to do what they found was when they got the picture that it was a known one it had been in the cook collection in Doughty house in London and cook collection very distinguished built up round about the years either side of 1900 with the help of JC Robinson who is a great connoisseur a series of spectacularly good pictures including the Frangelico Filippo Lippi adoration of the kings and in national gallery washington it's that kind of standard of of pictures the Salvator Mundi was not well regarded it was clearly not very pre possessing at that point this is the catalogue which calls it bowls raffio not even real bowls raffio Bowl trophy as a student of Leonardo so it suggested it's some some removed from Leonardo the hour on the right hand side shows it hanging rather skyed on the wall indicating it wasn't thought to be of much consequence in the 1958 sale of the tail-end of the cook collection the big sales have been earlier it crept into the tail end of the connection as vulture fioat have been upgraded slightly sold to that that's the indication on the right for 45 pounds so it it wasn't that desperately pre pre possessing at that point and we had a collection of what it looked like in the collection and this is it this is the drug-crazed hippie we'd all seen the photograph you know those of us who go through photographs of in the wit and so and have let there now to learn our desk pictures nobody gives that's the second second glance I think you'd need much art history to see it's it's not terribly convincing as a Leonardo anyway they got it for ten thousand thinking it was an old picture and it might come up quite nicely and maybe be worth a penny or two Robert Simon took it back to New York and he knows Diane modest teeny who teaches conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York and is a world-renowned conservator he took it in by in a taxi across New York to dine modest Tina's house wrapped in a bin bag trash can liner or whatever it's called in America anyway not a very dignified way to carry it but he wasn't didn't how much expect the expectation of it Diane did a test clean and said this is obviously worth having a go at because it was clear that there's an enormous amount of over paint on it of a very crude kind unfortunately the crew to the over painters and the later it is them the better it comes off and they proceeded to clean it with their eyebrows ascending and one day she called Robert Simon said you really have to come and look at this anyway what happened was that that particular frog turned into a prince it's the picture we now have so it is the most extraordinary transformation it was heavily damaged this is the picture stripped down with all the over paint all the infilling missing it's on a walnut panel with as you can see a big curved grain which had tented that to say the the grain had probably were very bad conditions lots of humidity changes had pushed up into a tent as it were and somebody he sliced off the top of it then painted over it hideous things happened to pictures in the past you might think this looks terrible but if you saw pictures in say the National Gallery here or the mess or somewhere you saw them all stripped down you'd be surprised most of them are quite heavily restored they're five hundred years old and they were even when they were thought to be good pictures they suffered more indignities and we would now subject them to and that gives a good idea of the worst bits of damage it was taken to a panel specialist Monica Gries back and she separated out the two main bits of the panels from that central split and also the bottom had five separate bits of wood you can see it here in Monica's treatment table all clamped and being glued back together again and cradled so it's had a tough life but say it's not it's not unique what emerged during the restoration were various signs saying this is the original of Leonardo it's battered but it's the real thing there was a Pentimento in the thumb all the copies used the turned in thumb but there's a ghost emerged of a more of a straighter thumb it doesn't mean it's vile a narrow but it's useful was it suggests that it's not simply a mechanical copy and if it was a mechanical copy it'd be difficult to see why the why the copyists didn't copy the thumb in the in in the position which it is in all the other all the other paintings other pentimenti other changes of mind emerged Pentimento is the Italian word for regrets the artist says that were regretting doing something the original cross bands with this interlace pattern they're originally much more curvy though not as early not designs are all swinging curves sometimes to have angular junctions but basically this is a he starts painting this as far as we can see in a rather earlier not type design very exciting at least Samia at least is the appearance in the over Christ's left eyebrow the right as we look at it with a handprint there now those technique was very unusual and even the boys don't seem to have picked this up he would use his left handed so he would put the heel of his right hand into the paint to soften it as its drying to get these very soft tonal transitions it's a signature technique of layer now though it doesn't mean say somebody else couldn't have done it but it's a very strong pointer that there now those hands Lytton a literal senses is visible and they visible in the picture it begins to add up you know you notice all these clues and one itself isn't decisive but cumulatively they become rather important and it was after this after had been restored and after this have found that the picture ends of my life on the 5th of March 2008 Nick penny the director of the National Gallery phoned me up and said we got something I think you would want to see here you don't turn down that sort of invitation and I went into the National Gallery the the picture was in the conservation studios of the National Gallery alongside the virgin of the rocks-- which they were preparing to clean for the Leonardo show they were Rory planning I went in there was Robert Simon there who I didn't know who played a very backseat role coming BAM back from the met was there two Italian scholars Maria Teresa Fiore on pH Irma Ronnie from Italy and the National Gallery conservation staff and Luke's Iceland who was planning the exhibition you go in you immediately get a sense of you know this has got presence it's got a zing as I call it but you don't want to get carried away with that if you do you can see what you want to see you have to be very careful no so it's it's a bit unnerving with I was the last one to arrive and the other people were there and you think what do I do do I look enthusiastic do I say hello to them and try to ignore it I'd got out my magnifying glass which I'd not normally have with me and it makes me look fairly professional there it is and I looked at rather carefully and I said the I done some geology at Cambridge and I did Natural Sciences and I said that's a rock crystal sphere not a brass sphere or whatever it's a bit premature but it actually has held out quite well and it becomes as we will see a q2 again till Arenado being deeply involved in the invention of the picture it had that presence it isn't enough as I say I was trained as a scientist so you're always trying to falsify something falsification is the name of the game find out what's wrong with it if you've got cadmium yellow in it then it's a write-off it's cadmium yellow is a synthetic pigment for late 18th century etc etc anyway the National Gallery were convinced it was by then our doing decided to include this in the Leonardo show I did a big interview in the Wallace Collection in fact with Cathy Brewis of Sunday Times journalists who did a terrific write up before the exhibition opened Sunday times were the media partners very accurate I I said to Cathy Brewis afterwards you can't really be a journalist you haven't made a deliberate mistake and it appeared in the National Gallery National Gallery exhibition in in 2011 running through to 2012 there it is I think this is a posed picture but there it is nominally being hung straight between the two drawings and in the exhibition it looked at home one or two people said oh it's rather a boring subject for Leonardo but if you're painting yourself at a Monday that's what you do it's it's kind of set it set image incredibly popular exhibition they sold out all the tickets before the all the regular day tickets so so tickets and advance they sold before the exhibition opened so people queued for the day tickets and they were on sale in the in the web they were more expensive than boosting drip Springsteen concerts on the black market and the first the National Gallery issued I think so you cannot change your tickets this is illegal this is terrible but they're absolutely just then what happened is these two gentlemen enter the scene in theory a National Gallery shouldn't be suddenly selling exhibiting works which are in the trade but they did what it happened shortly after that is the man on the right Eve Bouvier who they call king of the free ports these are storage facilities and places like Geneva which are full of valuable works of art and works of art that are valued highly they're not necessarily the same thing and he's king of the free ports he has them round the world now and he stored these incredibly valuable objects and he was using his knowledge rather dubiously I have to say of what was into massage sales to people he knew wanted particular kinds of pictures and he was massaging sales from his stores to the man on the Left who's Dmitri ruble off Leff Russian oligarch made his money with fertilizer chiefly owner of Monaco Football Club an absolutely archetypal oligarch and Bouvier sold the Leonardo to him what it transpired and Ribble off RIBA laughs laughs learned this as a party is that Bouvier had been selling these pictures at a massive markup not just the normal kind of twenty percent or whatever it turned out that the National Gallery the the Salvator Mundi was sold bought by Bouvier for ninety three million bought via Sutter B's transaction from the dealers and it was sold to rebel Aleph at 127 point five million which is a big markup Bouvier was disgusted by this he had river left left was disgusted by this he had Bouvier arrested in Monaco and charged with fraud needless to say the legal case and all the bails and everything are still going on as happens with the law at this level and he was so disgusted by this he decided the pictures he bought from Bouvier Dimitri rebel off left was going to sell and the Salvator Mundi was the last of the pictures - come on - come on the market and it went as we know - Christy's not Sotheby's who'd been involved in the earlier activities and sold for four hundred thousand pounds four hundred and fifty thousand pounds with the buyers premium and you can see the telephone bidding it was sold to a telephone bidders if you wanted to do a gender analysis of what the Christie's staff are doing you think it wouldn't show Christie's and the particularly good light transom you can make up your own minds on that then the rumors started it had been bought by a Saudi prince Prince bad air that had built been bought by Mohammed bin Salman who's obviously got other troubles on his crossing his death desk at the moment etc etc that had been bought by a rather dubious American and none of these are well-founded it was announced in the autumn in September or it's announced that it was going to be put on display in Louvre Abu Dhabi this outpost of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi and this wonderful building by Jean Nouvel I've been there twice and it's one of the world's great museum buildings full of treasures from the Louvre and full of things which Abu Dhabi is buying on its own behalf to replace the Louvre treasures as they systematically go back and not not on No and that seemed to be good I thought right this is good it may not be the ideal place for for it to be but it's in a public collection very high quality building and it's secure and it's available to the public in fact the only thing we know is it hasn't been bought by the Department of Tourism and culture in Abu Dhabi we don't know where it is at all unless somebody's got some news anyway that's just putting the record straight you know somewhat samory way but you'll have seen lots of things appearing in the press and socialized and in in in one or two books but that's the story outlined in a straightforward and accurate manner and the picture itself let's do some iconography first the Salvator Mundi holds the Mundus holds a globe or an orb or a sphere familiar enough with ruler portraits this is the golden bull of Charles the fourth 1356 2:7 I simply chose it was it's a absolutely terrific image the cross bands he's not blessing that comes from elsewhere but the very often the the mundis has a has bands around it and a cross on top that's the Globus crucifer as it's called and it's a it's a it's a standard image and it has to be frontal that's how this image happens to work the blessing gesture comes from the Tri spank you out or type this is cafe Liu in Sicily a very brilliant example of it in the middle Raja Vanderheiden the brach triptych which is probably the immediate source for a lot of the Italian images in various copies and one which doesn't have the blessing that was the archetypal frontal Christ this is a copy of a Jan van Eyck cues honest the great theologian philosopher gave a version of this to the monks in his home monastery in Germany and said the fact that the eyes follow you round the sort of classic trope of these pictures is an indication of the divine sight God that you cannot escape it so it's given a kind of theological gloss by Q's honest and and I think that that directness of vision even without the theological glasses is an important part that you cannot as it were escaped Christ gaze I've got a very brilliant full scale very spectacular reproduction made for the British Academy when I was talking there and I decided not to put it in any of my rooms I put it in the corridor that I have that's or indeed the Mona Lisa looking at you all day just be quite quite creepy the verses attached themself at a Mundi are absolutely standard and they're the ones that appeared in the later states of the Haller engraving that the one on the right is a very early state before they before they've been put in Matthew come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest I am the way the truth and the life take my yoke upon you and learn of me for I am meek and lowly in heart and ye shall find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light the cross bands I think of a representation of the yoke they're not the the floppy bands that priests we're tapped into their belts these are these are heavy-duty offerors they're heavy-duty bits of bits of needlework the quality of the picture let's go in and look at what's happening some of this is just astonishing and it's astonishing in a way that is Leonardo rather than anybody else and they now do you can see this hair is painted with absolutely fizzing brilliance enormous dexterity and rhythmic quality but more than that Leonardo was interested in what you might call the physics of hair he says in the drawing on the right and note the way that the curling of hair resembles the movement of water you've got the current you've got the tendency of waters are evolved in water and that rides a helix look at hair you've got the weight of the hair you've got the tendency of hair to curl you've got a helix and when you look at Leonardo's curls the boys could do pretty good curls for the use of you know they could do the through the curly bit that they're now those have a kind of anatomy to them a sense of structure which is his science of art and it's not simply even the best copies don't don't really pick up on that they don't copy it meticulously they just do curls that look okay the blessing hand is actually pretty well preserved and it looks rather simple at first sight but if you look at the knuckles of the two fingers there you can see there's a nice understated anatomy he stressed that young figures didn't have pronounced Anatomy and then it's entirely keeping with with how he saw things one of the most interesting parts and the most significant parts of the cross bands which have this very angular interlace I've suggested already that the angular interlace was not learn our days early mode of doing interlace patterns these not patterns in 1500 but he was in Venice would have seen things like the pattern in the ceramic pattern on the right and the central crossing point with the rock crystal the crystal sphere in the middle of it the generational geometry is a square which has been rotated twenty-five degrees very common in Islamic tiling patterns and incidentally the Jean Nouvel roof or Buddha be happens to be using that as one of the generative bits of geometry for his his pattern now that that actually does help date the work and even more this helps date the work because this is done in Venice in 1500 when he was witnessing a combat he's done from Milan to to Venice and was employed for a month or two as a hydraulic engineer this is in Venice almost certainly was the wheels on the right of the petrel motion machines and he witnessed a competition for perpetual motion in Venice about which he was understandably scathing that he's drawn these these mo machines which have hinged hammers I won't say how they work but this is therefore dated pretty securely to 1500 and you can see him experimenting with with angular ones with bits of generational geometry of the sort which which I've been suggesting so this is really really pretty secure and it means that it's um it's post 1500 it was in the national gallery exhibition which learned out at the court of Milan he left the court of Milan in 1499 so a bit of flexibility is required there and there's a drawing in Christchurch which Christchurch College in Oxford have rather unfortunately lost which shows again him thinking about these essentially Islamic geometries the one on the left is very much so and they're also on that sheet things that you know I didn't really look at carefully you just thought well maybe is testing a pen but then I went back to thinking about rock crystal and that being a rock crystal sphere and when the characteristics of rock crystal you can get completely clear big bits of rock rose to what they're very very rare you often get ones with cleavage planes in or you'll you very often get inclusions which are air gaps they're not technically bubbles in the same way in which you get with glass and it occurs to me that when he's sort of working out these interlaced patterns he's just thinking you know about these little things he does it with a little curl of impasto and highlights and little dark bit it's just done with two turns of the wrist it's almost as if he's rehearsing the inclusions on that on that drawing but I think this yeah looking at rock crystal in NASH million the Ashmolean in oxford that in heritage on traders can collection has a rather nice grip nice rock crystal sphere very difficult photograph you can see things with your eye which match up much better than the photos photography which it's quite limited in how it responds this is a little rock crystal pebble I bought myself and I think you can see how these inclusions work how they pick up the light in a particular particular kind of way once we know that this is rock crystal then it alters the subject matter of the picture the rock crystal alludes to the sphere fixed crystalline sphere of the fixed stars which is the outermost limit of the universe as conceived at that time the Ptolemaic universe outside is infinity as God is the Prima mobile a-all that miraculous metaphysical machinery of of Christian belief that the rock crystal sphere is representing that outside one the two examples on comparing we're here both Rafael Rafael Dan the School of Athens Ptolemy here and holding the globe and unknown astronomer holding a celestial sphere this is on the ceiling of the stanza della signora and is Urania or astronomy looking at her handiwork from outside with the earth at the center and the zodiacal ones in the around there now there has done it much more metaphorically by painting something which we can recognize though it wasn't generally recognized as rock crystal this means that Christ is no longer just savior of the world the mundus he's savior of the cosmos this is a very typical layer now they move it's a very rigid subject if somebody said I want to sell Verta Mundi is not much in do with it but Leonardo has he's found a way of extending the reach of the iconography interestingly the Arbour a picture which is the one which has got the early version of the sleeve does rather interesting things and that copy is certainly new what they own our dough was about and in this case you've got a little illuminated world at the center this is the center of this one which is a it's a hole as you put a compass in for drawing the drawing the sphere this is heavily abraded these are remains of highlights but they're not coherent it may be there was a little earth there and there may be that there was a little glimmer of that sort anywhere for the arbor picture appeared it'd be interesting to see it and do a proper technical analysis to come to terms with with what's going on there now there was much interested in the semi precious minerals in these minerals with interesting optical effects he was asked by his Abella death state the great collector in Ferrara in the Mantua who he had personally met when he was there about crystal vases and the Medici collection and there now the reports back on them praising the ones that were flawless etc and he's he's much interested in these this is an eyeglass of crystal which he's making it's an Okie LED crystal low on a stand and he tells you in the notes exactly how thin it should be at the edges and how fat in the center to do the necessary magnification he says you can use it as outdoors not sure why it's good for outdoors rather than indoors but it's an indication that he's involved with rock crystal as an optical as an optical substance or something that has particular qualities and can be used for magnification much interested in optical effects of light at this time this is the Codex Leicester owned by Bill Gates which I'm doing an edition of the show with Domenico Lorenza and he's looking here at the corpuscle re the the Sun the moon and the earth and he's thinking about how do you get the crescent moon and he notes that in the crescent moon there's a ashen light neumann chen REM as it was called by Galileo in the moon it's not just dark and he argues correctly that this is earth light on the moon reflected up by the moon sees the earth sees onto the moon and furthermore he says it's darker at this point the human Schiller a.m. so this is it is here here it's against the blackness of the void and it looks brighter here it's against the light of the crescent moon it looks darker and this is the first time I know any body in the science area think taking site and it's Vegas into account a very very novel move to say we don't just need to look at something to understand it we need to know our act of looking and what is actually going on and at this time and this is mid middle of the first decade of the sixteenth century he's looking at the eye and intense detail as a young man he assumed the eye was simple it sent out kind of measuring rays and you then got measurements he as he became more acquainted with optical science and the Middle Ages particularly from Islamic sources eben al-haytham or our housing is called in the West and this eye which is experimenting with here in these two sheets here and suggesting he might make a model gain here he might make a model of the eye this is not a very good slide and he's contriving a double inversion it goes like a camera obscura it goes in inverts and the crystalline humor more crystal and then puts it the right way up for the optic nerve and he couldn't accept as most people didn't until caps know that the image in the iris upside down but it's clearly a complex system without going into it in in great detail he decides that the eye and the sense of sight is very slippery he says at one point in manuscript D which this is from which is from about 15 7 he says the eye does not know the edge of any body that's to say you never absolutely perfectly know an edge if you're too close its blurred further away you get the more indefinite is he knew there was an optimum point he didn't know about focus didn't know the lens was focusing nobody didn't there's time and but he he decides that sights which he had revered as this eye saluté conveyer information early in his career was now a very slippery very subjective thing we saw subjective effects in the lumen generally the darker and the lighter effects in that when we begin to look at the picture we can realize that there is a kind of what we call focus or depth of field that's anachronistic but you can it's a handy ways to describe it that the most the sharpest characterization of this rather waxy hand and the face less so so in a very shallow pictorial space with no depth behind just a neutral black void he's getting space by dint of the sharpness of the image of the form and again that's Leonardo none of the copyist understand that at all none of the boys were up to that kind of thing you needed to have thought profoundly about the sense of sight about what we call depth of field about what we would call focus and this softness this indefiniteness is what I call the optics of uncertainty is absolutely vital for the psychology of the picture it worked relates to the Mona Lisa in a way Mona Lisa there are no edges I've got high-resolution images among leaves you blow the map there are no lines no edges there's an the the eye does not know the edge of any body it's a scientific idea but it's also a psychological one that the beloved leaders in Renaissance poetry are always out of reach they're always elusive they're daya fide they exist in a realm different from ours with with our ragged desires so there she is removed psychologically emotionally from us Christ is removed psyche spiritually from us he's incarnate he's come down to earth in his body but he remains a mysterious he remains ineffable he remains ultimately unknowable so these pictures are in a way or a pendant the one showing the elusiveness of the the divine ladies being loved the visual elusiveness the romantic psychological elusiveness and the Salvator Mundi indicates the elusiveness of the ineffable christ even though we can see him we can't understand him this corresponds absolutely to learn out his theological stance those who read Dan Brown may be convinced that Leonardo has just heretical theological stances but he's absolutely Orthodox he thinks that in the world the beauty of the world its system of mathematical governance of physics of all the effects of the world proportion perspective etc these are signs of God's design God is absolutely the designer of this miraculous world that we inhabit with its physical laws it's mathematics outside that and this is a perfectly respectable philosophical theological stance taken by some in the Middle Ages is unknowable the nature of the glory of God the nature of heaven the nature of this infinite realm is not accessible to us this is what he writes and I'm showing you there the Virgin child in sedan from the National Gallery cartoon and the loose in John the Baptist he writes leave the definition of the soul to the minds of friars father of fathers of the people who by inspiration possess the secrets I let be the sacred writings for they are the supreme truth no sense of irony on that and there are other similar pronouncements he's basically saying I will show God in nature but I can't show God as God in his own realm so it's a perfectly respectable theological stance the notion of double truth he does it in an extreme way that that's the Arenado he that is how he thinks and how how he works I think if we look at lone are those later religious images we can see exactly this going on since John the Baptist there who you saw briefly now the detail no edges uncertain the optics of uncertainty used for theological and paretic ends and for me one of the miracles with Leonardo you can go from the physics of the eye the optics of the eye to psychology even into theology which comes first I think you learn Aldo neither comes first they're a kind of simultaneous production of of how he works and it is just awesome I think to to find that science and imagination into Leto Fantasia poesia and she NTS got science for him a unified fields of operation for us they're separate for him they represent a single field of Endeavour and there is a Salvator Mundi I should say as a brief aside anniversary in this lecture I'm doing a series of concerts with e fagioli nee the the beans very very very brilliant early music and contemporary music group we are at the Barbican Don just around the corner here on Saturday we're doing Bristol on Sunday we're touring round but there is a CD which you can all buy look up ephod Giulini fa g i oli and I look up there Nardo e fagioli nee you'll get clips you'll get the whole the whole thing it's a it's absolutely wonderful to work with great musicians on a subject like Leonardo anyway I finish with a plea where is it thank you very much you [Applause] you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 165,208

Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, Leonardo Da Vinci, leonardo, salvator mundi, Science, art, science of art, University of Oxford, martin kemp

Id: KIUP8l7HUWI

Length: 46min 9sec (2769 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2019

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This lecture looks at the discovery, conservation and scientific examination of Leonardo's Salvator Mundi, the world's most costly picture.

A lecture by Martin Kemp, University of Oxford 1 May 2019

The newly discovered Salvator by Leonardo, the world’s most costly picture, is one of his most notable creations, in which he used his ‘science of art’ to transform a stock subject into a profound expression of the ineffability of the divine.

We will look at the remarkable story of its discovery, its conservation and scientific examination, the research into how it works as an image and its provenance. We will also look at the scandalous events of its ownership and how it came to be where it is now.

It was sold at auction for $450.3 million.