Further Thoughts II: The less and less Leonardo ex-Cook collection Salvator Mundi

Jacques Franck here concludes his three-part demolition of the once attributed but now deposed, $450m New York/Russian/Saudi Leonardo da Vinci Salvator Mundi picture’s supposed stylistic, artistic and technical credentials.

Jacques Franck writes: Many events have occurred since the publication here of my August 2020 essay on the “New York Salvator Mundi” and it seems timely to update and close the subject in the light of recently emerged technical data on the controversial painting. To grasp the present situation, a reprise of recent key events is necessary.

Above, Fig. 1: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of. G. A. Boltraffio?), Christ as Salvator Mundi (“the Cook version of Salvator Mundi“), c. 1506/1508-1513, oil on walnut, 65.5 x 45.1 cm (Private Collection), as seen in 2011-12.

The Louvre’s junked book: a contradiction that does not exist

It cannot be doubted that months before the Louvre’s major Leonardo da Vinci exhibition opened in Paris in Autumn 2019 the museum still believed that the Salvator Mundi was an autograph work of Leonardo. This is testified by the fact that the initial version of the Louvre’s Leonardo exhibition catalogue was printed with the (former New York, now Saudi) painting labelled as an indisputably true da Vinci picture. Shortly afterwards, that first version of the catalogue was suppressed and a new version was printed with a radically revised attribution. In it, the work – which itself was not included in the exhibition – was simply reproduced and listed as “Fig. 103 bis. Salvator Mundi version Cook” (meaning a “studio work” with a status analogous to that of another well-known Leonardo studio Salvator Mundi, called the “Ganay version”) (Fig. 2 below). Whatever reasons precipitated this sudden change, the new designation definitively constituted the Museum’s then – and still – estimation of the former New York and now “Saudi Salvator Mundi”. At this stage, that judgement is, of course, irreversible.

Above, Fig. 2: Left, Léonard de Vinci, exhibition catalogue, Louvre éditions, Paris, 2019, p. 305 (Cook Salvator Mundi); right, Léonard de Vinci, exhibition catalogue, Louvre éditions, Paris, 2019, p. 307 (Ganay Salvator Mundi).

The Disappeared Louvre Technical Book – aka the “would-be-decisive-scientific-examination-of-short-lived-appearance” of December 2019

Above, Fig. 3: Left, Vincent Delieuvin, Myriam Eveno, Élisabeth Ravaud, Léonard de Vinci, Salvator Mundi, Louvre éditions – Hazan, Paris 2019, (as published in The Art Newspaper); right, a page taken from Vincent Delieuvin, Élisabeth Ravaud, Léonard de Vinci. Le Salvator Mundi, Louvre éditions – Hazan, Paris, 2019.

Above, Fig. 4: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, back of the wood panel.

Quite strangely, a 46-page booklet titled “Léonard de Vinci. Le Salvator Mundi” was published jointly by the Louvre and its laboratory (C2RMF) six weeks after the exhibition’s 24 October 2019 opening at the Louvre (Fig. 3, above). On no official announcement or evident sanction, the booklet is said to have made a very brief and accidental appearance in the Museum’s bookshop in December 2019. Its authors, Vincent Delieuvin (Leonardo curator at the Louvre), Myriam Eveno and Élisabeth Ravaud (Louvre’s laboratory C2RMF scientists), had considered and contended that the New York Salvator Mundi is an authentic Leonardo. Thus, their historical and scientific essays radically opposed the picture’s studio attribution as stated in the official exhibition catalogue. Unsurprisingly, the dissenting publication was swiftly withdrawn and the museum itself neither recognized the book’s existence nor its embarrassing contents.

With the reasons for the booklet’s leak still remaining obscure, it would be risky indeed to accept a theory in circulation whereby the pro-Leonardo version of the catalogue had been printed together with the scientific booklet in the event of the Salvator Mundi being exhibited, while another entire catalogue, in which the picture was downgraded, had also been printed simultaneously on the possibility that a loan of the picture might be refused. Such a scenario does not accord with the fact that the junked booklet was printed in December 2019 – which is to say, after the exhibition had opened – while both versions of the exhibition catalogue, one of which was abandoned, had been printed two months earlier in October. Such a theory would thus suggest that Louvre Museum staffs’ scientific investigations are determined not by matters of hard material evidence and duly considered professional judgements but, rather, according to political expediencies such as whether or not a loan request might be granted. Who could believe such a tale? Science is science and it is certainly not a discipline with one rule for one political eventuality and one rule for another. Museum laboratory researchers certainly do not draft contrary and rival test results from a single investigation so that they might comply with an institution’s future stance. Moreover, while the phantom book’s existence was known to the small circle of the Leonardo specialists after its short-lived bookshop appearance, for a long time, nobody was fully apprised of its actual contents (bar rare circulating scanned pages).

The problematic ‘‘Mona Lisa‘s male alter ego’’

While the Salvator Mundi‘s standing was not intended to remain unresolved indefinitely, its intrinsic mystery deepened with certain revelations disclosed in an April 2021 French documentary film “The Saviour For Sale. The Story of Salvator Mundi” by Antoine Vitkine on the picture’s various stages of upgrading as a retrieved Leonardo masterpiece which culminated in November 2017 when sold as such at Christie’s, New York, for $450m. Besides the sensational episodes of the work’s thriller-like route to financial success, the film addressed the long-expected loan to the Louvre and the consequent stumbling negotiations between the museum and the Salvator Mundi‘s owner, the Saudi prince Mohammad bin Salman, nicknamed MBS. Thus, we first learn that in June 2018 the panel painting was sent to the Louvre to be examined at length closely in the Museum’s laboratory and that the results of this survey, confirming the Leonardo attribution, are those recorded and discussed in the withdrawn booklet (Fig. 3 above); but then, that shortly before the blockbuster’s inauguration, the Louvre invited several Leonardo specialists to examine the painting before finalizing a loan process with MBS. At that date in 2019, the scholars’ opinion was not as favourable as that of the C2RMF scientists in 2018 and the work was downgraded to being by Leonardo in part only. The film also reports that MBS (quite understandably) resisted his property’s lowered artistic status and made clear that unless the Salvator Mundi was exhibited next to the Mona Lisa (thereby underscoring its originally claimed status when promoted by Christie’s as a “Male Mona Lisa” ahead of its November 2017 sale) the loan would be refused. Misinterpreting this imbroglio, certain parties today claim that the 2019 downgrading had prompted the Prince’s exorbitant clause. In any event, the subsequent insistence that the Salvator Mundi be shown in the exhibition as the ‘‘Mona Lisa‘s male alter ego’’, side by side, was one the Louvre could not accept for security reasons quite aside from the work’s recently lowered artistic status.

The revelations of the Vitkine film precipitated an art world earthquake: the long-running suspense from the moment the Louvre requested the loan from the owner shortly after the November 2017 New York sale, until the very day of the Leonardo exhibition opening in Paris, two years later, had been the consequence of a tumultuous negotiation over the artistic status and attribution of the painting that terminated in a late and drastic 2019 reappraisal. The unexpected downgrading by the museum that holds the most important collection of Leonardo masterpieces in the world, including the legendary Mona Lisa, constituted the strongest possible reversal and disavowal to the accrued federation of parties that had fervently and assiduously promoted the work as a Leonardo for over a decade.

Needless to say, the recent leaking of the contents of the withdrawn booklet – “the book that doesn’t exist” as many have called it – by Leonardo upgrade partisans has considerably increased the saga’s fog of ambiguity and even restored hope among the True Leonardo Believers that their icon may yet be crowned as an autograph work of the master. Nevertheless, given that the Salvator Mundi picture concerned cannot be both a true Leonardo and a studio work, the staggering contradiction between the Louvre’s present (and official attribution, as advised by leading specialists) and the C2RMF’s earlier scientific investigation of 2018, has yet to be resolved. For that reason, checking the internal scientific consistency of the “no book” now seems both essential and urgent.

Like many Leonardo scholars I have been supplied a PDF of the book “for information”, so to speak. Since, with its now international circulation, the book’s contents are no longer a guarded secret and given that many of its issues are at the heart of my own researches there are no reasons for me not to make public my observations on the mystery book’s contents and postulates. The task is made easier because the C2RMF 2018 investigation has been supplemented by other earlier and institutionally separate investigations conducted over a number of years before and after the 2017 New York sale, notably in the USA.

The assorted technical analyses of the Cook version of Salvator Mundi

The phantom Louvre booklet displays two essays: Vincent Delieuvin’s historical account of the undocumented creation of a Salvator Mundi by Leonardo (hereafter referred to as Delieuvin, 2019); and a detailed technical report by Myriam Eveno and Élisabeth Ravaud, both C2RMF scientists (hereafter referred to as Eveno and Ravaud, 2019). I shall mainly review this latter essay (albeit with some forays into Delieuvin’s piece) because its material addresses the factual aspects of the picture – that is, its physical structure and the specific components used for its execution. When necessary, I shall also refer to an American scientific investigation whose last stage was published on 20 April 2020 in Heritage Science by Nica Gutman Rieppi, Beth A. Price, Ken Sutherland, Andrew P. Lins, Richard Newman, Pen Wang, Tin Wang and Thomas J. Tague Jr. (hereafter, Rieppi, Price, Sutherland et al., 2020) [1]. Some of the latter’s work was delivered by Dianne Modestini in 2014 [2].

Delieuvin’s optimistic tone contrasts with the tests themselves, which are far from conclusive, as we shall see (“The decisive contribution of the scientific examination”, Delieuvin, 2019, p. 14, my translation – unless specified, all translations are mine). My astonishment was pronounced when, having noticed the poorly significant elements actually observed by Eveno and Ravaud, I encountered the conclusion: “[In our opinion] the examination of the Salvator Mundi seems to demonstrate that Leonardo has executed the work indeed” (Eveno and Ravaud, p. 38). That latter statement was audacious: although the scientific investigation of paintings is inescapable as a rational means to understand both their structures and techniques – and as such, is of crucial assistance to art historians – it can never prove whether a painting is by one hand or another, here being that of Leonardo.

From misinterpreted observations to rushed conclusions (why the C2RMF’s 2018 scientific investigation was not to be made public)

Let us now consider a number of points which explicitly reveal why the two questionable Louvre essays, which bear conclusions extrapolated from shaky grounds, were – rightly – not meant to be published by the Louvre.

I: Panel preparation

Above, Fig. 5 [after Rieppi, Price, Sutherland, et al., 2020, Fig. 2]: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, a cross section sample from shadow in flesh, visible light, showing: (1) glue size, (2) ground, (3) imprimitura, (4) paint layers.

Above, Fig. 6: Ambrogio de’ Predis (?), Portrait of a Man aged 20 (“The Archinto Portrait”), 1494, oil on walnut, 54.4 x 38.4 cm (panel), London, National Gallery.

Unlike most Leonardos (aside from the Belle Ferronnière and Saint John the Baptist), the (NY/Saudi) Salvator Mundi was painted on a walnut panel prepared with a white ground applied over the wood, which had first been coated with an unpigmented size layer (Rieppi, Price, Sutherland et al. 2020, p. 9, fig. 2) (Figs. 4 and 5, above). The traditional calcium sulphate gesso is, however, mainly encountered in numerous Leonardos like the Adoration of the Magi, the Louvre version of The Virgin of the Rocks or the Saint Anne. With those, the white ground layer was followed by a thinner off-white priming layer called imprimitura; both layers contain a lead white pigment presumably bound in oil, while a small amount of a lead-tin yellow was found in the thinner second layer. These ground layers also contain glass particles of variable dimensions (consistent with manganese-containing soda-lime glass) of a type commonly encountered in Italian paintings (Rieppi, Price, Sutherland et al., 2020, p. 10-12).

Eveno and Ravaud admit that the panel preparation (with the ground layers laid directly over the sized wood) of the then New York picture is unusual for Leonardo. Against that, they contend that it is found also in works like the Lady with an Ermine, the Belle Ferronnière and the Mona Lisa (Eveno and Ravaud, 2019, p. 37). While this preparatory configuration is an established fact concerning the (now) Saudi Salvator Mundi, as testified by the cross-sections published under Modestini’s direction, to my knowledge no samples (except one in the Lady with an Ermine in 1960, which is yet to be re-examined in the light of modern-day scientific methods) have been taken from the above-mentioned Leonardos. As a result, this technique of preparation is simply presumed in their case despite the researches published by the same C2RMF team in 2014 [3]. Additionally, from the latter publication we learn that this same panel preparation (ground layers of lead white applied on a walnut wood board) has been identified in Leonardo’s circle’s panel paintings, notably in the Portrait of Bernardo di Salla by Giovanni Francesco Caroto (Louvre), in a Salvator Mundi privately owned (Leonardo school) and, quite interestingly, in the Archinto Portrait attributed – notably – to either Ambrogio de ‘Predis or Marco d’Oggiono (both Leonardo’s main assistants) kept in the National Gallery in London (Ravaud and Eveno, 2014, p. 135 sq.) (Fig. 6, above). In other words, no striking evidence exists that might prove that the panel preparation in the Salvator Mundi is clearly and uniquely specific to Leonardo’s own usage, or indeed confirms that, thanks to this technical feature – as stated by the two C2RMF scientists – the possibility of its being a studio work can be automatically rejected.

Furthermore, and as if in lieu of any technical confirmation, the authors hold the preparation’s peculiarity (never observed in any of Leonardo’s own works) as strong evidence per se, on the grounds that “it accords well with Leonardo’s inventive mind, who constantly experiments new recipes, as testified by the great variety of the preparatory processes [he] employed throughout his career” (Eveno and Ravaud, 2019, p. 37). And this hypothesis is offered despite the fact that the addition of grained and powdered glass particles to the two ground layers is itself another peculiarity, never encountered in Leonardo paintings either (idem) while, conversely, it has been identified in the priming layer (called imprimitura) laid over the gesso preparation in works by such artists as Lorenzo Costa, Perugino, Vincenzo Foppa, and, regularly from 1501 onwards, by Michelangelo (idem) (see infra, Fig. 12, right, backscattered electron [SEM-BSE] image).

Above, Fig. 7: top, Raphael, The Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Nicholas of Bari (“The Ansidei Madonna”), dated 1505, oil on poplar, 245 x 157 cm (painted area 216.8 x 147.6 cm), London, National Gallery; above, The Ansidei Madonna, a cross-section from the grey paint of the architecture in which particles of glass are visible in the pale yellow imprimitura.

Given that this observation is strange to Leonardo’s known practice and corresponds much more to that of other painters, including Raphael (not cited in Eveno’s and Ravaud’s 2019 essay) (Fig. 7, above) – and, presumably, to their circles – one wonders how the two C2RMF researchers came to take it as a distinctive sign of his technique. Moreover, they are further at risk when positing themselves firmly on a specific role of the glass in the ground layers: “its use, even in the preparation, appears to us as being a distinctive characteristic of Leonardo’s quest for transparency” (Eveno and Ravaud, 2019 p. 38). It is true that the use of glass in paintings may be a means to improve the translucency of the paint layer, according to specific conditions, in which the refraction index of the glass and the layers where it will be introduced. In fact, the ground layers are not the level in the paint film where Leonardo would need transparency, but are where he might want to secure the proper drying of the paint, hence the American researchers’ acknowledging statement: “Glass may alternatively have been used for aesthetic effect by enhancing the translucency of the paint, but in the case of the Salvator Mundi, the glass in the lower ground and imprimitura layers more likely functioned as a siccative since these layers are not visible in the final painting image. It is also possible that the glass was added to adjust the handling and textural properties of the panel preparation materials” (Rieppi, Price, Sutherland et al., 2020, p. 13) [4].

II: The underdrawing and the partial use of the infrared reflectograms

Infrared reflectography helps to detect underdrawings in paintings: infrared rays traverse the paint surface and reveal the underlying lines and wash techniques used to draw and sketch out the overall composition when they are constituted, in particular, of carbonaceous materials such as charcoal, bone black, or soot (lampblack) containing inks. Once again, Delieuvin expresses astounding optimistic views regarding the underdrawing found in the Cook Salvator Mundi: “Infrared reflectography has revealed a very thin and imperceptible underdrawing which much resembles that of the Mona Lisa and of the Saint John the Baptist in the Louvre” (Delieuvin, 2019, p. 14). This is not exactly what can be understood from Eveno’s and Ravaud’s report in the same book: “[Infrared examination has revealed] some rare thin lines absorbing infrared rays, therefore of an a priori carbonaceous nature. They delimit in particular the left eye’s iris. One notices the presence of a double contour line on a well-preserved fragment of the upper lip, although no spolvero dots can be distinguished. The other lines of the composition’s implementation have seemingly been executed in the course of the painting process” (Eveno and Ravaud, 2019, p. 31).

Above, Fig. 8: top, Leonardo, The Mona Lisa, oil on poplar, 77 x 53 cm, c. 1501-1517, Paris, musée du Louvre, detail of hands (infrared reflectogram hereafter referred to as IRR); below, Leonardo, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (“The Saint Anne”), 1501-1517, oil on poplar, 168.4 x 113 cm, Paris, musée du Louvre, detail of Saint Anne (IRR). In Lisa’s proper right hand, delicate contour lines have been traced to define further a now imperceptible drawing transferred from a cartoon. Thanks to tiny spolvero dots appearing on some contour lines, the use of a pricked cartoon to transfer the composition is identified in the Louvre Sainte Anne distinctly, in particular in the Saint’s proper left eyelid. The scarce and very small fragments of underdrawing in the New York Salvator Mundi are not decisive towards Leonardo’s authorship given that they don’t compare the typology of the artist’s original underdrawings. Besides, the artistic level of the painting does not match that seen in visible light in the above masterpieces.

These observations are, of course, far too slight to help one figure out whether or not the Salvator Mundi‘s underdrawing compares directly with those of the late Leonardos, like the one faintly discernible, and so, just partly, in the Mona Lisa, or the one in the Louvre Saint Anne, which, conversely, is far more substantial and legible (Fig. 8, above). As already mentioned, while an excessive interpretation is drawn by Delieuvin from a barely significant item of technical information, what really matters in the infrared tests of the painting – and is therefore of far greater importance – is blatantly ignored by the three authors of the “no book”. There is a clear reason to this: the C2RMF’s infrared image is that of the restored picture, in which what is of interest does not show because the infrared rays’ deep penetration through the paint layer is stopped by the modern materials used by Modestini to reconstitute the background visually (Fig. 9, below). Fortunately, another image does exist (Fig. 10, below): it was made in 2007, before what subsists of the dark background was restored, heavily in my opinion, thus masking what is so essential in the infrared tests of the Saudi painting, that is the thick emphatic black contours of Christ’s head, shoulders and face. This crucial visual document is missing in both the withdrawn Louvre/C2RMF 2019 book and in the excellent American survey of April 2020. The significance of that image had been published in my interview in Beaux-Arts Magazine in January 2018 and for that reason, it has been known to all the parties involved closely in the Salvator Mundi‘s scientific expertise. Nonetheless, this very image does not appear either, in full at least, in Dianne Modestini’s own post-cleaning essay of 2014 on the controversial work [5]. Some details, however, especially the so fascinating one of Christ’s head, are reproduced. As the reader knows from my “Further thoughts I” posted here last year, the infrared reflectogram (IRR) of the Salvator Mundi’s background free of any inpainting reveals the amazing analogy that exists between the thick black contours of Christ’s head (a sketching-out technique never practiced by Leonardo) and those observed in a signed and dated Head of Christ, painted in 1511 by the Master’s favourite pupil and collaborator, Gian Giacomo Caprotti, called Salai (see “Further Thoughts I”, Figs. 7-11) [6]. To date, my discovery has not been commented on by those it concerns most, i. e., the various adepts at the Leonardo attribution, but it will not be kept in the background for ever.

Above, Figs. 9 A, B, and C: [A] top, workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi (IIR scan with restored background concealing the sketching out contours of Christ’s head, face, neck and shoulders); [B] below left, Leonardo, Saint John the Baptist (before the last cleaning), oil on wood, c. 1510-1517, Paris, musée du Louvre; [C] below right, The Cook version of Salvator Mundi in visible light (as in Fig. 1 above). The problem with the Modestini heavily retouched background is revealed in a clear-cut fashion when the restored stage (here, that of 2011-12, when exhibited at the National Gallery, and not yet that of 2017 when sold at Christie’s, New York) is compared visually with Leonardo’s Saint John the Baptist in the Louvre. In the latter, there is no distinct separation between light and shade. No background exists, so to speak, just an invasive obscure space within which the figure of St. John is defined thanks to the lighted zones and the transitional shading, thus resulting in an impalpable image in strict accordance with Leonardo’s quest for spatial unity between the forms and their environment, a process in which that duality is subdued extensively. In technical terms, therefore, the shadows in the background and in the foreground of the Louvre picture appear to be of the same value and “mysterious” quality. That is not the case in the Saudi Salvator Mundi: Christ’s figure is far more defined than that of St. John and clearly stands against a dark background, the shapes still have boundaries and do not float within an obscure, indefinable space like in the Louvre picture: it is an unsubtle characteristic corresponding much more to the studio’s aesthetic options observed during Leonardo’s Milanese periods of 1482-1499 and 1506/08 -1513 and for a long time after his death.

Above, Fig. 10: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi (IIR scan, 2007), before restoration, showing the heavy outlines of the underlying sketching out – unlike Leonardo’s own practice – of Christ’s head, face, neck and shoulders.

Above, Fig. 11: Gian Giacomo Caprotti, called “Salai”, Head of Christ, oil on wood, signed and dated 1511, 53 x 37.5 cm, Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.

III: The blessing hand

The blessing hand is another flagrant case of extrapolated interpretation by the authors of the junked book: the elements now observed by both the C2RMF scientific team and the American one cast definitive doubt over Leonardo’s presumed contribution to the work’s execution. Still following his own line very quietly, Delieuvin seems to consider that what science reveals on that hand’s making is nothing to worry about: “Thanks to infrared reflectography, important pentimenti [autograph revisions made during the painting process] are discovered in the former Cook collection Salvator Mundi. In the proper right arm one can understand that the upper part of the blessing hand has been painted over a black background, thus proving that Leonardo had not planned it at the beginning of the execution. It seems that the artist had started working on a different composition, with no blessing arm, possibly like in Salai’s [Head of Christ] in the Ambrosiana” (Delieuvin, 2019, p. 14), (Figs. 11, 12 and 13.)

Above, Fig. 12 [after Rieppi, Price, Sutherland et al., 2020, Fig. 3]: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, cross-section sample from flesh highlight showing, left: (1) ground, (2) imprimitura, (3) black background paint layer, (4) flesh highlight paint layers. The backscattered electron (SEM-BSE) image – right – shows coarse glass particles in layers 1-4. The black background paint layer underlying the flesh highlight is clearly visible here: it does not correspond to any recorded Leonardo practice.

Above, Fig. 13: left, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, detail: IRR scan image showing the black background seen through the translucent flesh paint of Christ’s right proper hand (along green dotted line); right, the proper right hand, after restoration and in visible light.

That, of course, is not the interpretation that should be drawn from this extraordinary discovery in order to respect both technical and historical accuracy: a pentimento, a word meaning “repentance” or “regret” in Italian, is an action, while being an adjustment or correction, that is consistent with the composition as it was conceived by the artist at the outset. From this standpoint, Delieuvin is right in considering that the initial composition of the Cook Salvator Mundi was identical to that of Salai’s Head of Christ in the Ambrosiana: it is the more certain as the black background was, if not finished, largely painted around the Saviour’s head and down his proper right shoulder when the blessing hand was added (as shown on the infrared documents and the cross-section sample reproduced here (Figs. 10, 12 and 13, above). We are therefore faced with a change stricto sensu, because, in chronological terms the pentimento is executed during the painting sessions inherent of the initial creation, thus within one and the same artistic logic of forms that were born together, whereas a change – or transformation – of composition and iconography is not: it radically modifies the initial composition’s outward appearance and can occur at any time, whether early or late, after that composition was left as it first was. In many cases, it may well be an autograph move and, consequently, not necessarily the sign of a late, apocryphal addition, yet in that of the controversial Salvator Mundi, its authenticity can be doubted insofar as the blessing hand’s gesture, anatomy and perspective are so wrong that Leonardo’s authorship seems improbable. What cannot be established, however, is the moment when the change took place, despite the C2RMF’s attempt to prove (on unconvincing grounds) that it is in Leonardo’s hand and soon followed the abandoned original idea (Eveno and Ravaud, 2019, p. 32). Also, it is worth of note that, interestingly, while Christ’s tunic and proper left sleeve are drawn carefully in the Windsor studies RL 12524 and 12525 (see “Further thoughts I”, figs. 2 and 3), no hand was conceived by Leonardo, whether sketchily or not on the latter sheets, or even traced on a separate one. The hand holding the orb has not been projected either. It strengthens my feeling that those projects were meant for the studio as a guideline for the figure’s clothing alone, and so without reaching a stage including the hands, thus suggesting that the assistants were left on their own for the execution of the whole painting (hence the stiffness observed  in most parts of the drapery work and the weak, ill-depicted anatomy of the hands).

Above, Fig. 14: top, left, Leonardo, The bones, muscles and tendons of the hand, c. 1510-1511, pen and ink with wash, over black chalk, 28.8 x 20.2 cm, Windsor Castle, Royal Library, RL 19009r; top right and, above, detail, Leonardo, The muscles of the face and arm, and the nerves and veins of the hand, c. 1510-1511, pen and ink with wash, over black chalk, 28.8 x 20 cm, Windsor Castle, Royal Library, RL 19012v.

At this stage, it seems helpful to provide historical elements demonstrating Leonardo’s incredibly deep knowledge of the human hand, of its anatomy and functioning. As the reader will see, acknowledging the mass of work and the so pertinent observations contained in the artist’s research on this issue alone, is the best way to realize that the Cook Salvator Mundi’s blessing hand does not accord with Leonardo’s anatomical concepts and depictions: “The principal movements of the hand are 10; that is, forwards, backwards, to right and to left, in a circular motion, up or down, to close and to open, and to spread the fingers or to press them together” (Codex Atlanticus, folio 124v (45v-a), Richter, § 353, c. 1515- 1516). And again: “[Of the motions of the fingers] The movements of the fingers principally consist in extending and bending them. This extension and bending vary in manner; that is, sometimes, they bend altogether at the first joint; sometimes they bend, or extend, halfway, at the 2nd joint; and sometimes they bend in their whole length and in all the three joints at once. If the 2 first joints are hindered from bending, then the 3rd joint can be bent with greater ease than before; it can never bend of itself, if the other joints are free, unless all three joints are bent. Besides all these movements there are 4 other principal motions of which 2 are up and down, the two others from side to side; and each of these is effected by a single tendon. From these there follow an infinite number of other movements always effected by two tendons; one tendon ceasing to act, the other takes up the movement. The tendons are made thick inside the fingers and thin outside; and the tendons inside are attached to every joint but outside they are not” (Codex Atlanticus, folio 273a recto (99 v-a), Richter, §354, c. 1510).

As one can see, Leonardo’s disquisition on finger movements rules out anything other than bending along a plane for each finger and provides no rotary option for any of them. To perfect the Master’s own demonstration, I have reproduced here (Fig. 14, above) two magnificent drawings of the anatomy of the hand kept in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle: beyond any discussion they prove that the artist who painted Christ’s blessing hand with something like a broken raised finger (it rotates clockwise, thus suggesting such a traumatic pathology) in the Cook Salvator Mundi cannot be the one who drew the genius sheets in Windsor. But why then such a hand? Although it is difficult to answer that question, I have long suspected that its overall concept and shape does not have an origin in Leonardo’s bottega and that its pattern, more precisely that of the “broken finger”, seems to correspond to an archaic style, thus medieval, and possibly to a Northern school artist. Whether right or not, this presumption is somehow confirmed by the right proper hand of Saint John the Evangelist in Jan van Eyck’s polyptych of the Mystic Lamb (1432), a grisaille painting at the back of a shutter of the work, where appears the same anomalous raised finger as seen in the Cook Salvator Mundi and in its numerous variants (Fig. 15, below). Neither Leonardo nor any of his close collaborators ever saw the Ghent altarpiece but this hand could well be a prototype copied from model-books by travelling artists who had circulated in Europe throughout the 15th century and had brought it to Italy at some unspecified moment. At the time the Cook Salvator Mundi was painted (c. 1510?), Leonardo was far too skilled an anatomist and an innovator to have taken any notice of such a model, but it might have been imitated while modernized by a less brilliant artist like Salai, who had spent his life in the Master’s orbit and never created anything of his own. Once again, this issue cannot be considered supportive of the Leonardo attribution. Moreover, as we shall now see, other disqualifying archaisms exist in the painting.

Above, Fig. 15: left, and centre, Jan van Eyck, The Ghent Altarpiece (The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb),1432, oil on wood panels, 3.4 m x 4.6m, Ghent, St Bavo’s Cathedral, showing Saint John the Evangelist, 148. 7 x 55. 3 cm, and in detail, the blessing hand; right, the restored hand in the Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi. In truth, Van Eyck’s raised middle finger is less twisted, and hence less faulty, than that in the Saudi Salvator Mundi, but its perspective is nevertheless wrong: the nail should not show so much and be in full profile instead, if at all. Also, the lower part of the finger tip should be seen more from underneath.

IV: (A) X-ray testimony, (B) Christ’s curls

Another case in point is the typology of the X-radiograph image of the panel painting, which is also described in a tendentious manner that would leave no doubt about the work’s authenticity: “The X-radiograph of the picture displays the same ghostly image as is seen in the Saint Anne, the Mona Lisa and Saint John-the-Baptist, which is a typical feature of Leonardo’s works after 1500” (Eveno and Ravaud, 2019, p. 38).

(A) – Once again, the reader is supplied with no contextual information that would otherwise disclose its arbitrariness. To my knowledge, no systematic and critical survey has been undertaken until now on the X-ray images of the Leonardos of that period with regard to X-rays of the studio’s productions, which exercise proves highly instructive (see below). Besides, the X-ray images of Leonardo’s own paintings, whatever the period of their creation, show a great variety of aspects depending, firstly, on the nature of the preparation, and secondly, on the particular technique used in the coloured layers of the paint film, and this is most especially the case in the flesh sections. For example, from roughly 1500 onwards Leonardo uses less and less lead white in the flesh paints of his figures, which abstemiousness results in the pictures’ ghostly looking radiographs whose aspect is very different from those of earlier works like the Lady with an Ermine (c. 1490) or the Belle Ferronnière (c. 1495). In the latter, the use of lead white was substantial. However, in Leonardo’s case such matters should not be simplified according to his oeuvre’s chronology : unexpectedly, one can see a marked similarity between the blurred, practically illegible X-radiograph of the head of Leonardo’s Angel in the Baptism of Christ (1472-1475) and that of Saint Anne in the Louvre’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne painted thirty years later (c. 1501-1517), (Fig. 16, below).

Above, Fig. 16: left, Verrocchio and Leonardo, The Baptism of Christ, before 1470/ 1472 -1476 (?), tempera and oil on poplar, 177 x 151 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, X-radiograph of Leonardo’s Angel’s head (painted in oils); right, Leonardo, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, oil on poplar, 168 x 130 cm, Paris, musée du Louvre, X-radiograph of Saint Anne’s head.

Above, Fig. 17: left, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, X-radiograph; right, Leonardo and studio (including G.A. Boltraffio), The Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1493-1499 (?)/1506-1508, oil on poplar, London, National Gallery, 189.5 x 120 cm, X-radiograph of the Infant Saint John.

Above, Fig. 18: left, Leonardo, Saint John the Baptist, c. 1510-1517, oil on walnut p, 69 x 57 cm, Paris, musée du Louvre, X-radiograph; right, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, X-radiograph. In the X-radiograph of the Louvre Saint John the Baptist, one’s eye can grasp but few elements of the composition as seen in visible light (the pointing hand is illegible and the Saint’s austere garment doesn’t show at all), whereas Salvator Mundi’s X-ray image is much more consistent with the work’s aspect in visible light.

As just suggested, unless it were to be studied in the future by a cross-disciplinary team closely and rationally, this X-ray issue remains unclear and susceptible to misinterpretation. For myself, I have noticed through years of examination of the X-radiographs of Leonardo’s original paintings in the Louvre that none of them displays an image entirely consistent with that seen in direct light: when one or more details of the work can be identified on the radiograph without problem, the rest is not. In other words, the relating compositions are at best partly legible, not more. This is not the case with the Cook Salvator Mundi, whose X-ray image is misty indeed, yet reasonably consistent with what the painting looks like in day light, a legible aspect due to a very regular and even distribution of lead white over the whole composition, used for shaping and modelling in a conventional, unimaginative fashion. This resembles the use of lead white encountered in what is considered to be Boltraffio’s brush in the London National Gallery’s Virgin of the Rocks (Fig. 17, above). In contrast, in Leonardo’s X-rayed brushwork the use of lead white appears both spontaneous and random, with no lead white where one would otherwise expect it. To me this is exactly where stands the subtle, yet distinct border between the Master and his assistant(s) (Fig. 18, above).

Adding a touch of complexity to this appeal for caution with regard to the interpretation of X-ray documents close to Leonardo and his circle, the noteworthy fact stands that, in terms of typology, the X-radiographs of Salai’s Head of Christ and that of the Ganay version of Salvator Mundi are not legible at all and, in some ways, resemble the X-radiograph of the Louvre Saint Anne (Fig. 19, below).

Above, Fig. 19: left, Gian Giacomo Caprotti, called “Salai”, Head of Christ, Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, X-radiograph; centre, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, the Ganay version of Salvator Mundi, oil on walnut, 68. 2 x 48.2 cm, Private Collection, X-radiograph; right, Leonardo, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, Paris, musée du Louvre, X-radiograph.

Above, Fig. 20: details, left, Leonardo, Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, c. 1474-1475, tempera and oil on poplar, 38.8 x 36.7 cm, Washington, National Gallery of Art, detail of hair; centre, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, detail of hair; right, Verrocchio and Leonardo, The Baptism of Christ, Florence, tempera and oil on poplar, c. 1468 – 1470/ 1472 – 1475 (?), 177 x 151cm, Uffizi Gallery, detail of Leonardo’s Angel’s hair.

(B) – The book’s authors’ espousal of Christ’s ringlets – which they compare to Leonardo’s superb hair in the Louvre Saint John the Baptist – is also disconcerting for many reasons. “The curls falling on [Christ’s] proper left shoulder are rendered lavishly (…) Their technique is reminiscent of those of Saint John-the-Baptist in the Louvre.” (Delieuvin, 2019 p. 16) “The hair is partly damaged and the best-preserved zones are the curls falling on the proper left side of Christ’s face (…) The very fine execution of these curls is remarkable and is reminiscent of [Leonardo’s] Saint John the Baptist’s magnificent curls” (Eveno and Ravaud, 2019 p. 34 -36).

The curls in question are certainly painted with extreme delicacy but are they really reminiscent of the Saint’s hair in the Louvre Saint John? Not really, in my opinion, for the style of these ringlets, not only does not resemble the hair executed by Leonardo in his late period, it is nowhere seen in any of his paintings except, perhaps, for a slight resemblance to the permed ringlets in the Portrait of Ginevra de Benci, which picture, however, dates to c. 1475 (Fig. 20). Such a period rules out the possibility that Leonardo would have gone back to his early Florentine style, as best perceived in his Angel in the Baptism of Christ, to paint the Cook Salvator Mundi’s ringlets of c. 1505-1510. The latter’s otherwise systematic and careful treatment (in the fine passages) induces my feeling that Boltraffio’s brush is not strange to their precious chiselling (Fig. 21, below), which, oddly, resembles an earlier style in the treatment of hair, such as that executed in a somehow close technique in Antonello’s Ecce Homo of 1475 in Piacenza, as at Fig. 22, below.

Above, Fig. 21: left, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, detail of hair; right, G. A. Boltraffio, Study for the heads of a Madonna and Child, silverpoint on paper, 29. 7 x 22 cm, Chatsworth, Duke of Devonshire and Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, detail of Madonna’s hair.

Above, Fig. 22: left, Antonello da Messina, Ecce Homo, 1475, oil on wood (oak?), 48.5 x 38 cm (painted area 43 x 32. 4 cm), Piacenza, Collegio Alberoni; centre, Antonello da Messina, Ecce Homo, detail of hair; right, detail of hair from the Cook version of Salvator Mundi. The painting technique employed in Salvator Mundi’s hair by Leonardo’s assistants c. 1510 is close to that of curly hairs executed by Antonello thirty-five years earlier.

Above, Fig. 23: top left and right, Herculaneum, Campania (Southern Italy), Head of a Youth (“The Benevento Head”), 50 BC, hollow-cast bronze with red copper veneer and inlaying, H. 33cm, Paris, musée du Louvre; below left, Alexander the Great as Helios, marble, Roman copy after an Hellenistic original from 300-200 BC, H. 58. 3 cm, Rome, Musei Capitolini. Below right: Leonardo, Saint John the Baptist, musée du Louvre, detail of hair.

In truth, the overall conception of Saint John the Baptist’s hair is far stronger and more masterly than that in the Salvator Mundi: its interweaving of the locks in complex snake-like waves is of a breath-taking beauty, and its originality, nowhere else then seen in Western art, testifies unquestionably to Leonardo’s close study of the Antique. Effectively, among many examples that could prove my point, The Benevento Head (c. 50 BC, Louvre) – as above at Fig. 23, top – or Alexander the Great as Helios in Rome (a marble copy apparently executed under the reign of emperor Hadrian) as above at Fig. 23, below left, both give an idea of the artist’s concerns with the Hellenistic and Roman sources determining his late style, although their perfect assimilation results in a formula entirely detached from any plagiarism. It is therefore evident that the somehow late Gothic touch that still survives in the Salvator Mundi’s well-arranged curls is symptomatic of a Leonardo imitator from his close circle.

Above, Fig. 24: top, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, detail of hair viewed under optical microscope; above, Leonardo, Saint John the Baptist, Paris, musée du Louvre, detail of hair viewed under optical microscope.

Finally, one wonders why Eveno and Ravaud have taken the trouble to compare some selected but unfortunately too small details of the paint’s crazing network viewed under an optical microscope in the curls in both pictures (Fig. 24, above), thus trying to prove that Leonardo’s brush is identically discernible in the Salvator Mundi’s hair and in that of the Louvre Saint John. Too many unsafe parameters are involved here to make one comfortable with such a demonstration, and, additionally, it can be suspected that a studio work to which contributed, as I believe, Leonardo’s closest assistants, contains many materials employed by the Master also which, in his own works and in a studio item, would have aged through time practically in the same way. The authors’ position would be of greater interest if cross-section samples taken from both paintings might have demonstrated that the compared details’ layer structures and pigment compositions were reasonably analogous, which, apparently, is not the case.

V: Flesh paint

Above, Fig. 25: left, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai?) “The Prado Mona Lisa”, c. 1501-1510, oil on walnut, 76. 3 x 57 cm, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado; right, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai?), The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (“The Hammer Saint Anne”), c. 1508-1513, oil on poplar, 178. 5 x 115. 3 cm, Los Angeles, University of California, Hammer Museum, Willits J. Hole Art Collection.

Neither essay deals as it should with the important issue of the flesh technique used in the Cook Salvator Mundi as one might especially expect. Delieuvin does not address the subject directly. He (unfavourably) likens the flesh rendering in the Ganay version of Salvator Mundi (Fig. 2, right) to that observed in two other studio paintings (The Prado Mona Lisa and the Hammer Saint Anne in Los Angeles, Fig. 25, above) so as to suggest that no match exists between the flesh paint in the latter works and in the Saudi painting: “The rosy flesh tints [in the Ganay version], made of thin red hatches, are similarly encountered in the Prado Mona Lisa and in the Saint Anne in Los Angeles (…) With regard to Leonardo’s original works, nowhere is found in them the elaborate sfumato effect and the soft transitions from light to shade giving the paint materials a vibrant looking aspect” (Delieuvin, 2019, p.18). In fact, with regard to technique, no sound comparison can be made between the flesh paint in the Hammer Saint Anne and that in the Prado Mona Lisa unless one understands, which Delieuvin regrettably does not, that it is one and the same process in different stages (Figs. 26, 27 and 29).

Above, Fig. 26: left, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, “The Hammer Saint Anne”, detail of flesh paint in Saint Anne’s face showing thin parallel hatching (initial stage of the “complex blending” technique), right, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, “The Hammer Saint Anne”, IRR of detail in Fig. 26, left, showing underlying thin parallel hatching (initial stage of the “complex blending” technique, whose full development can be observed in the Prado Mona Lisa, Fig. 27, below).

Above, Fig. 27: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, “The Prado Mona Lisa”, detail showing intermingled tiny brushstrokes of the advanced, yet unfinished, soft-focus modelling of the flesh using the “complex blending” technique. That process’ initial stage always uses hatches (see Fig. 29, below); the overall fuzzy effect is due to an impalpable coating of translucent paint laid by the artist, after each painting session, over the dried network of brushstrokes (tiny hatches and dots).

Nor is the C2RMF’s scientific investigation explicit about what is essential in the painting process of the Cook Salvator Mundi: the chronology and typology of the successive technical gestures that served for the artist’s creation. “The flesh sections have been built up in several stages. A rosy to dark beige underlayer is laid over the white ground preparation. Composed of lead white and ochres it substantially contains red [pigment] grains of vermilion as is revealed by mercury mapping and microscope examination. The superficial very thin layers strengthen the initial modelling [while] thin whitish glazes [sic] increase the clarity of the highlights [7]. Conversely, the shadows are deepened thanks to dark thin layers containing a substantial quantity of black [pigment] grains (…) but containing also a substantial quantity of [pigment] grains of vermilion. The relationship between shadow and vermilion shows in particular through mercury mapping in the well-preserved right hand. Calcium mapping shows this element’s significant concentration in the shaded flesh sections, thus suggesting that bone black was employed by the artist” (Eveno and Ravaud, 2019, p. 36).

Once more it is very astonishing that the data provided here by Eveno and Ravaud have been considered decisive enough to attribute the Cook Salvator Mundi to Leonardo: all the pigments (and their specific tone), whether mineral (natural and artificial) or organic (natural and synthetic), mentioned in the quoted paragraph have been used by artists in the flesh paints in variable ways at all times since the Renaissance to our day. Despite the real interest of their pigment identification, no novelty emerges from that survey: any academically trained painter well knows that the flesh paint results from a traditional mixture of white, with a quantity of vermilion and some ochre, with a slight touch of black, the which mixture produces a beige hue that is first laid over the ground preparation and modelled so that the basic volume is rendered.

Above, Fig. 28: Gian Giacomo Caprotti, called “Salai”, Head of Christ, Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, detail of the very subtle warm pink modelling in Christ’s face, susceptible to contain vermilion pigment as traditionally employed in flesh paints by Italian artists of the Renaissance like Leonardo and his studio (compare the flesh tints in the Prado Mona Lisa at Fig. 27 above).

When this underlayer is dry, the shading can be executed carefully using either a wide range of terras or, instead, given that the handling of these mineral pigments is somehow uneasy, a mixture of vermilion (mercury sulphide) and bone black, giving superb browns (according to the proportion of each colour): that mixture being more stable and very reliable in terms of handling, notably when highly diluted. For sure, the same or very similar pigment composition – by no means specific to Leonardo – would be detected in many paintings of his studio (to limit such an eventual research to that scope of Italian Renaissance paintings), and very probably in Salai’s Head of Christ of 1511 (Fig. 28, above), in which much of the volume is very finely modelled with vermilion red and possibly black containing warm browns. In this respect mercury or calcium mappings are not meaningful exercises unless extended to a number of studio paintings for comparison, which is not the case here. And even if it were so, the problem is less one of pigment identification (and in which proportions) in the Cook Salvator Mundi than how they have been handled during the successive stages of its creation so that the work might be ascribed to Leonardo – or not. Laboratory tests, however useful they are for dating, cannot stand in lieu of the indispensable visual assessment of the work’s intrinsic qualities as a work of art so as to support a plausible and unproblematic attribution to Leonardo

Above, Fig. 29: Theoretical cross-section showing Leonardo’s “complex blending” sfumato process. Diagram after Ségolène Bergeon Langle and Pierre Curie’s 2 vol. dictionary of art terms and techniques Peinture & Dessin, Principes d’analyse scientifique, Centre des Monuments Nationaux/ C2RMF ed., Paris, 2009, vol 1, p. 55.: 1 (bottom to top) : ground preparation, imprimitura, large hatches, medium size and thin hatches, interspersed layers of thin veils of translucent paint, micro-dots, 2 diagram of the end result: the interstices of the hatches and the micro-dots have been filled in by the paint materials of the veils (see fig. 27, above). The authors’diagram was established after my own ones published many times from 1997 onwards.

Above, Fig. 30: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, photograph in visible light (2006) before the Modestini restoration. This well-known reproduction of the Cook Salvator Mundi as it stands without the Modestini’s restoration inpainting displays a pinkish-brownish acid tone and a sfumato treatment departing from Leonardo’s paradoxical effects of simultaneous haziness and preciseness of the form.

To revert to Delieuvin’s brief analysis of the painting process: his imprecision merits further comment. The Louvre curator mentions the fine hatching observed in Saint Anne’s face in the Hammer Saint Anne in Los Angeles and in the Prado Mona Lisa as if the technique used for the flesh modelling in both paintings was fully completed in each case, thus likely to be compared. This interpretation’s inadequacy and ambiguity calls for precision (Figs. 25, 26 and 27). In those two studio works one can observe that the flesh modelling results from a process whereby the volume is built up thanks to a network of hatches; long rather thick ones first; then shorter and thinner ones; thus testifying to the very traditional construction of three-dimensional effects, whether drawn with a pen or a brush. Then comes a more complex stage in which the medium size hatches cannot be used, and so for mechanical reasons, to render with utmost accuracy the softest subtleties encountered in the flesh sections, especially in a face, for these subtleties take up very small areas, even microscopic ones, hence the use of appropriate hatches, necessarily thinner and shorter, and so on and on, up to a stage in which the tiniest hatches become practically imperceptible dots (Fig. 29). In fact, contrary to misinformed theories one cannot paint details smaller than the tip of the brush used [8].

When each working session is completed, ultra-thin unifying veils of translucent paint are laid over the dry underlayer by the artist in order to conceal the tiny strokes, still visible, and, thus, to make the flesh look smooth and even. It is the technique employed in the Mona Lisa at an unprecedented level of refinement, which I call Leonardo’s “complex blending” as opposed to his “simple blending”, that is the traditional way of obtaining soft-focus effects (see my above Prologue) (Fig. 29). Taught by Leonardo himself to his pupils and collaborators, this global process is observed in the Hammer Saint Anne, where the network of hatches, mostly visible in the underlying layers thanks to IRR imaging, has not reached the stage of tiny strokes which is otherwise observed very conspicuously in the Prado Mona Lisa (Figs. 26 and 27). In this painting, advised by Leonardo in all certainty and copied next to the original from start to finish (by Salai very likely) the full deployment of the various hatches – long, medium, very small or microscopic – is observable. The fact that all these different paint strokes are seen to coexist in the Prado Mona Lisa is a clear sign that the copy is unfinished. It is, therefore, technically and historically wrong to describe the technique used as hatching because, properly speaking, the technique present must accommodate that encountered in the more finished areas – the section around the chin and the sitter’s lower proper left cheek – where the full complex blending process is distinctly discernible. Properly appraised, the Prado copy constitutes a most precious document, because its only partial completion discloses the preceding means by which the highly polished and flawlessly transitioning flesh paint in the Louvre Mona Lisa had been obtained [9].

Above, Fig. 31: top left, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with assistance of G. A. Boltraffio?), the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, photograph in visible light (2006) before the Modestini restoration, detail of head; top right, Leonardo, The Mona Lisa, Paris, musée du Louvre, detail of head [s.]; below left (as in top left); below right, Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai?), The Prado Mona Lisa, detail of head. Bar the damage in the Cook Salvator Mundi, the neatness of the sfumato making is close to that observed in The Prado Mona Lisa. Da Vinci’s overall soft-focus effect is imitated well but not the supremely refined, yet just allusive, anatomical precision and the staggering rendering to the life which belong to Leonardo alone. One can well see that the overall drawing and the sfumato modelling are highly perfect in the Louvre Mona Lisa and that they are limp in both the Prado copy and the Cook Salvator Mundi (presumed to be by the same artist, Salai).

Above, Fig. 32: After Laurence de Viguerie, Propriétés physico-chimiques et caractérisation des matériaux du sfumato (Doctorate of Science, 2009), fig. 99 p. 241. X-fluorescence cross-section reckoning alongside The Mona Lisa’s face (my provisional translation). The modelled shadow (“glacis” = glaze) is laid over the pale, lead white containing, flesh paint underlayer, spared in the lights.

In any event, the technique used in the Cook Salvator Mundi had not given the flesh zones the vibrant aspect which Delieuvin both attributes to it and holds to be itself typical of Leonardo’s own flesh painting. To fully understand my objection, one should examine the photograph of the Cook panel painting as it stood before Modestini’s restoration inpainting, as is encountered in a document which has now been publicized world-wide (Fig. 30). When I first examined that state from a large reproduction, it was possible to read and mentally reconstruct the work’s overall image in spite of the enormous damage lying beneath the recent repaints. Then, I could see more clearly what is foreign to Leonardo’s method in the execution and, for that reason, what is much closer to his assistants. Contrary to what the Cook picture’s advocates claim, its sfumato effects are not identical to those seen in the Louvre’s autograph Leonardo paintings. Specifically, in the illuminated parts, the Cook picture’s flesh displays a pinkish-brownish acid tone and a milky/chalky texture that is never to be encountered in any Leonardo that I know. In addition, even where it is handled finely in the better-preserved sections, the soft-focus effect has too much evenness and continuity – which is to say, a formulaic simplification – to be really faithful to Leonardo’s supreme art, wherein, no detail, either anatomical or of any other kind, is “eaten up” and lost within the mistiness of the sfumato treatment. To the contrary, in Leonardo, each and every detail’s realism and veracity is respected, the more so as through the overall smoky veiling one can feel the presence – more than actually see – of, here, a faintly contracted cheek muscle, elsewhere, of the orbital and cheekbone construction, or of the elasticity of the flesh in movement in a face (Fig. 31).

To my knowledge, the difference in aspect between the Salvator Mundi and the Mona Lisa, for instance, lies in the nature of the making and this might now be explained thanks to the joint researches of Laurence de Viguerie and Philippe Walter (former C2RMF scientists) on Leonardo’s sfumato technique and materials [10]. As observed in the diagram above, taken from Viguerie’s doctorate of science (2009), it is clear that Leonardo builds up the shadow on a pre-existing lead white containing underlayer serving partly as a base for creating the illuminated flesh sections. In effect, while starting at the underlayer level, the shadow’s own layer rises as it extends toward the deepest darkness, as opposed to the exposed parts of underlayer which have been left intact to serve for the lights (Fig. 32). Thus, apart from the highlights of lead white added at more advanced stages, it can be recognised that little of this pigment will be really needed to achieve the less luminous surrounding flesh tints. Finally, and in marked contradistinction, we know from the work’s X-ray image that the use of lead white in the Cook Salvator Mundi is substantial and that this usage explains the milky-chalky aspect of the flesh (in strictly technical terms, that this is due to the pigment’s marked opacity with a refraction index running from 1, 94 to 2, 09, in modern pigments), an aspect not seen in the Mona Lisa, whose paint surface is more evanescent and transparent.

Conclusion: “studio work” is what science really says

The reader surely understands now why it was necessary and urgent to demystify the severe misinformation that has circulated in the international press in the past months in the form of claims that the Louvre actually holds the Cook Salvator Mundi to be an authentic Leonardo while refusing to declare its true position. That most paradoxical conspiracy theory must be rejected on its own absurd implications. We are asked to believe that the Museum had required the loan of a Leonardo painting, whose authenticity was confirmed by the institution’s in-house laboratory (C2RMF) but, despite this positive verdict, the curators of the 2019 Leonardo exhibition had, on no justification, not only not shown the work but had also downgraded its artistic status in the catalogue. Of necessity, the real story is more straightforward: the Louvre Museum had no objective reason to be so discourteous to the owner, otherwise respectable and prestigious, who, in addition, had most obligingly put the picture at its disposal for many months, in order that it be examined thoroughly by the C2RMF scientists and researchers.

Far more credible and likely is the explanation given in the Vitkine film. Before the growing contestation of the Leonardo authorship that had amplified from 2018 onwards universally, and reached its highest peak in April 2019 following the publication of Ben Lewis’ book of journalistic investigation The last Leonardo (in which it was revealed that, contrary to what had been stated urbi et orbi in the media coverage preceding the New York sale in November 2017, no real scholarly consensus had ever existed over the attribution of the Cook Salvator Mundi to Leonardo), the Louvre could not but feel ill at ease. Da Vinci is not just any name; the French Government had all the reasons, in the Summer of 2019, to require that the painting be further examined and tested in-depth before appearing as the guest star in the blockbuster show then in preparation at the Louvre. Much was at stake in terms of national prestige. The Louvre could not afford to declare and label a work as a restoration-retrieved Leonardo masterpiece without a scholarly unanimity strong enough to silence all dissenting voices. It cannot be doubted, therefore, that the Louvre’s own earlier scientific tests were peer checked according to a sole crucial criterion: does unquestionable evidence exist that the Cook Salvator Mundi was painted by Leonardo in person? In the light of what has previously been discussed here in many points, the answer, which would jump to any serious physicist and chemist’s eyes at first glance, is of course “NO”, because the material gathered from the tests (not to speak of the arguable methodology of approach) was of too little weight to urge the Louvre to risk anything beyond a studio attribution [11].

All else is just like Hamlet’s famous response to Polonius’ question: “Words, words, words” (Act II, scene II) and it might well continue vainly like this for some time in the media and the academic literature. The problem must be addressed serenely: no trick, no magic wand will disperse it and make the Cook Salvator Mundi become one day or another what it is not and never was. The reality is immutable.

CODA:

Above, Fig. 33: Left, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, The Madonna Litta, c. 1491-1495, tempera on wood transferred to canvas, 42 x 33 cm, St Petersburg, The State Hermitage; right, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, The Virgin and Child, c. 1495-1497, Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum.

It will be profitable to compare the Madonna Litta, to date attributed to Boltraffio rightly, and his Esterhazy Virgin and Child in Budapest, both painted in the years Giovanni Antonio spent with Leonardo. Not only has Boltraffio assimilated da Vinci’s manner in a brilliant – yet secca – fashion, as above, Fig. 33, one can well see the resemblance of the sfumato modelling, in particular in the Infant’s anatomies and also in what remains of the Cook Salvator Mundi, as above in Figs. 30 and 31. Adding mentally to the latter work Salai’s contribution, whose own style is mellow and misty in the flesh sections, as proven by his Head of Christ in the Ambrosiana (Figs. 11 and 28), the Saudi painting emerges as a hybrid item meant to simulate a “fully by Leonardo” devotional composition, much like the Madonna Litta, yet without the Master’s contribution to the actual making. If not this, then new theories will have to deal with the thick sketching-out contour lines seen identically and successively in Salai’s Head of Christ, in the Cook version of Salvator Mundi, in the Ganay version of Salvator Mundi, and bring contrary supporting scientific evidence and demonstrations [12].

I wish to thank Michael Daley warmly for welcoming this second contribution of mine on the ArtWatch UK website and for having adjusted its presentation with the utmost care and kindness.

Jacques Franck, 16th December 2021

ENDNOTES:

1 This survey has been published online before (a couple of years ago), in part at least, and had not reached then the neutrality observed to date. I might quote the previous version here if necessary in a future revision.

2 Cf. Dianne Dwyer Modestini, “The Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci rediscovered. History, technique and condition”, in Leonardo da Vinci’s Technical Practice, Paintings, Drawings and Influence, Michel Menu editor, Paris, 2014, p. 139-151.

3 Cf. Elisabeth Ravaud and Myriam Eveno, “La Belle Ferronnière: a non-invasive technical examination”, in Michel Menu, op. cit. supra, note 2, p. 126-138. Scientific tests have been carried out on the Lady with an Ermine in 2012 by scientists from the National Museum in Kracow jointly with several specialists, in particular from the Getty Conservation Institute and Yale University. In that essay, nowhere is stated that the paint sample taken in 1960 has been reexamined in 2012. While glass particles are not mentioned either, a small part of the preparatory layer has been analysed using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy: a thin layer of lead white has seemingly been laid on the whole surface of the panel, an observation needing confirmation. In effect, the latter technical method is a non-invasive one, thus far less reliable and conclusive than the analysis of cross-sections of paint materials taken from original works (see the above Prologue on that very issue regarding burnt umber in the Mona Lisa). Cf. Lukasz Bradasz, Michal Lukomski, Johanna Sobczyk et al., “Leonardo da Vinci Lady with an Ermine – The latest research into the artist’s painting technique and the state of preservation of the painting”. (Checked on 4 November 2021.)

4 For colourless powdered glass as paint additive and drying agent “much used in Italy”, see Marika Spring, “New insights into the materials of fifteenth-and sixteenth century Netherlandish paintings in the National Gallery, London”, Heritage Science 5, 40 (2017).

5 Cf. Diane Dwyer Modestini, in Michel Menu op. cit. supra, note 2.

6 In fact, the IRR of the Cook Salvator Mundi published in Beaux-Arts Magazine (Daphné Bétard, “Salvator Mundi, les dessous de la vente du siècle”, BAM 403, January 2018, p. 100-105) was the late one of the restored stage with the black illegible background. It was the only full IRR document available then. Just a detail of the full IRR scan before the inpainting process was to be seen in Modestini’s article cited supra note 2 (fig. 9, p. 147); the full document will be released on the American restorer’s website in August 2020 (see “Further thoughts I”, caption to Fig. 9).

7 No stricto sensu glazing can be made with lead white, which is an opaque pigment having a high refraction index. Glazes are made with pigments like red lakes, copper resinate (green), etc., whose refraction index is low enough to be close to that of the oil binder. The authors therefore allude to thin whitish translucent veils of paint in the highlights.

8 The publication in 1969 of Thomas Brachert’s fundamental investigation into Leonardo’s “handprint” painting technique, while being fascinating, has created much confusion about the exact context of this technique’s utilization in the Master’s works. It is true that Leonardo has used his fingers for swiping and dabbing the film paint, either in the early creating process of his works, as seen in the unfinished ones like The Adoration of the Magi and Saint Jerome, or in the more finished ones like the Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, The Lady with an Ermine or The Virgin of the Rocks in London. Yet except mine (in preparation), no critical research has been undertaken until now in order to clarify and explain technically, among a variety of handprint gestures, which specific ones served for what and how. It is clear, however, that microscopic details of modelling like those seen in The Mona Lisa’s face could never have been achieved with the palm of the hand, a thumb or the tip of the artist’s little finger. A painting instrument, whether a brush or a “digital instrument”, whose surface is 50 to 100 times larger than that of the detail to reproduce, is certainly not of any help in such making (see Prologue above). That seems sensible and obvious mechanically, but the Leonardo scholarly literature is full of misrepresentations of this kind regarding Leonardo’s “handprint” painting technique. Cf. Thomas Brachert, “A Distinctive Aspect in the painting Technique of the “Ginevra de’ Benci” and of Leonardo’s Early Works”, Report and Studies in the History of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington,1969, p. 84-104; Jacques Franck, “Fondu simple ou fondu complexe? Le geste technique dans le cas du sfumato de Léonard de Vinci: ses paramètres”, Résumés des interventions, 3e Congrès de la Société française d’histoire des sciences et des techniques, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, 4-6 septembre 2008, p. 8-10; Jacques Franck, Léonard de Vinci: la technique picturale, histoire, concept et structure du sfumato, Thesis, Diplôme de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris, IVe Section, Sciences historiques et philologiques). In preparation.

9 This particular aspect is an essential one to understand my point. Specialists who do not practice traditional art and, specifically, copy-work, produce inevitably wrong interpretations of old master painting techniques. Having no such experience, although their eye might be, at best, a good one, in their mind they visualize neither the creative making as if it were being processed before them, nor its overall technical sequencing : that is why they never describe and explain it consistently. A paint layer is like a musical score which musicians alone can decipher as it should, and so is the case with (specialized) painters examining a painting (see Prologue above).

10 Cf. Laurence de Viguerie, Propriétés physico-chimiques et caractérisation des matériaux du sfumato, thèse de doctorat de sciences de l’université Pierre et Marie Curie, C2RMF, Paris, 2009; Philippe Walter, Laurence de Viguerie, Jacques Castaing, “Appareils portables pour l’analyse des œuvres d’art aux rayons X”, Images de la physique, CNRS, 2011/2012, p. 79-85; Philippe Walter, “Peinture et chimie. Comprendre le geste du peintre dans son atelier. Approches croisées entre chimie et histoire de l’art”, Cont@cts, Bulletin de l’Association royale des ingénieurs diplômés de l’Institut Meurice, juillet-août-septembre 2015, p. 10-14, (www.ardim.be: checked 16 December 2021).

11 The art market has been constantly agitated over the Salvator Mundi saga since the 2017 Christie’s sale of the picture in New York with new developments and feverish speculations about its attribution and fate every now and again. The art journalist Ben Lewis, not specifically specialized in Leonardo scholarship, just well-known for his book, The last Leonardo (2019), now bravely treads on dangerous grounds, i. e., painting technique, yet while ignoring established facts (the scientific, artistic and contextual evidence pointing to Salai and Boltraffio), and without any critical demonstration or scientific support, attributes boldly the Cook Salvator Mundi to Cesare da Sesto (1477-1523), based on Cesare’s St Jerome of c. 1520, a painting strange to Leonardo’s style and technique produced after the Master’s death in France in 1519, which, therefore, was clearly not executed under his direct supervision or influence. Cf. Ben Lewis, “Searching for the smoking thumb: a Salvator Mundi Paragone”, in Paragone. Leonardo in Comparison (Studien zur internationalen Architektur), Johannes Gebhardt and Frank Zöllner eds., Petersberg (Germany), 2021, p. 20 – 41. The same author states p. 38 that, in my opinion, the heads in the Saudi Salvator Mundi and in Salai’s Head of Christ (Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana) are in analogous proportions but I do not think so and have never written any such consideration: if it were the case, it would not change the identical sketching-out technique showing thick, emphatic contour lines on the IRR scans of both paintings. Mr. Lewis also doubts (p. 39) that the Cook Salvator Mundi painting could have been executed by two artists jointly (as was, nevertheless, so often the case in Italian Renaissance botteghe), but the recent scientific confirmation that the blessing hand was a change – stricto sensu – and not a pentimento, is a clear sign of the work’s heterogeneous execution and further supports the pertinence of my above-mentioned theory.

12 Seemingly, however, the tide is turning. In its November, 2021 issue, The Art Newspaper disclosed: “The Salvator Mundi which sold for $450m at Christie’s as a fully authenticated Leonardo, has been downgraded by curators at the Prado (…) The downgrading comes in the catalogue exhibition Leonardo and the copy of the Mona Lisa which runs in Madrid until January 2022. Although individual specialists have questioned the status of the Gulf Salvator Mundi, the Prado decision represents the most critical response from a leading museum since the Christie’s sale (…) The opening essay of the Prado catalogue is by Vincent Delieuvin, curator of the Musée du Louvre’s important 2019 Leonardo retrospective. He discusses the various views on the Gulf Salvator Mundi without giving much of his opinion, although he does refer to ‘details of surprisingly poor quality'”. Delieuvin’s unexpected comments on the painting are certainly an astonishing novelty: let us observe that those clumsy details were from the beginning the very reason why so many objections were raised by international specialists, and, therefore, why the Saudi Salvator Mundi never was and never will be a Leonardo.
It should be pointed out that in both the withdrawn first version of the exhibition catalogue (of the 2019 Leonardo show at the Louvre) and the Louvre’s junked scientific booklet issued in December of the same year, the Cook Salvator Mundi‘s then owner was stated as: ” Ministère de la Culture, Royaume d’Arabie Saoudite” (Ministry of Culture, Saudi Arabia Kingdom). In the reprinted and final version of the catalogue of that exhibition, the owner of the reproduced Cook Salvator Mundi (as in above Fig. 2, left) had become “Collection privée” (Private Collection). [Note, 26 December 2021] Following the publication of “Further thoughts II”, some objections have been raised here and there whereby the Louvre had not downgraded the Saudi painting in the final version of the 2019 exhibition catalogue but merely changed its mode of presentation in order to conform to the rule in force in the French museums, according to which works from private owners that are not loaned – thus not exhibited – cannot be authenticated in the latter institutions’ publications, notably when they are reproduced. While I shall not discuss why the owner in the withdrawn books differs from that in the above-mentioned catalogue of the 2019 Leonardo exhibition, it must be stressed that the Louvre Museum’s intentional downgrading cannot be doubted in the least way. In effect, the Saudi painting’s artistic status (“Cook version of Salvator Mundi“) was put at the same level as that of notorious studio versions, like the “Ganay version of Salvator Mundi”, and also, quite drastically, like the “Naples version of Salvator Mundi” (Naples, San Domenico Maggiore,  exh. cat. Paris, Louvre, 2019, Fig. 103, p. 304): that very version is, of necessity a studio item, because its artistic quality is so low that Leonardo’s contribution is excluded automatically. Had the Louvre not meant to downgrade the work, why then reproduce side by side the Cook version and the Naples version in the 2019 catalogue in question with an identical status (p. 304-305)?

December 16, 2021 | Categories: news | Leave A Comment »

PROLOGUE TO FURTHER THOUGHTS II

Jacques Franck, painter/draughtsman and art historian specialist in Leonardo da Vinci’s evolved painting techniques, explores the conceptual limitations and the resulting adverse consequences (i. e. damaging restorations and mis-attributed works) of art historical studies and scientific essays that are today being made without duly informed consideration of actual historical artistic practices.

Old master technical studies. The impact of artistic-technical ignorance on the works’ attribution and restoration

I – Common confusion between connoisseurship and the knowledge of art acquired through practice

When a painter trained in the academic/classical tradition – and being, therefore, an experienced and skilled copyist – visually examines an old master painting, a mental engagement occurs which instantaneously brings to mind sequenced images representing the artistic and technical process followed by the creator, a process that can easily be identified because of a familiarity gained through years of practice. A similar phenomenon occurs when musicians read a score without playing it: they can “hear” the written sounds and melodies while visualizing the technical and musical means necessary to their own performances. However, although they usually deal with old master expertise, neither art historians nor scientists practice the arts of drawing and painting, bar in exceptional cases. For that reason, their visual appraisal of the specifically technical elements presented in a painting are formulated on no sure and practical knowledge of the various artistic and technical gestures whereby they were produced. Such experts, being so remote from the creative process, can only grasp artistic, technical and material realities through their imagination and whatever objective data might have been supplied by scientific imaging and laboratory tests. In other words, such specialists are strangers to what is at the heart of creation, to its intimacies, shall we say, and they cannot but confound their own imagined and partial perceptions with the realities of the creative process itself. That so very few art historians or museum scientists recognise the impossibility of knowing what art is really about without having engaged in making it is exclusive to the visual arts today. Such handicaps could never arise in the world of music because no sensible person thinks serious musical knowledge can be obtained without years of training and the steady practice of a specific instrument. In the visual arts this extraordinary shortcoming creates maximal risks of errors: in matters of art attribution, the vital distinctions between one creative hand and another are too subtle; in matters of conservation, the master’s art and techniques are commonly misunderstood – and nowhere more so than with that of Leonardo da Vinci. In no small measure, the modern-day visual art malaise is product of a system in which the artist – the party holding a unique expertise and insight – is granted no institutional recognition when precisely such knowledge, purely factual and not theoretical, is irreplaceable in art expertise.

That is why, as early as 1998 in my essay on artistic training published in Coré, a conservation review edited by the French section of the IIC, I recommended that students in art history should be trained in art and acquainted with the elementary notions of both traditional drawing and painting in order that their approach to the discipline lies on pragmatic specialized grounds rather than on vague, unverified concepts in matters of art making, as are exemplified below [ 1].

II – Disturbing ignorance

There of course exist a number of art specialists whose visual acuity and methodology of research are excellent, but they are getting fewer and fewer (for reasons not examined here). Sadly, tangible evidence exists also of the ignorance of some leading experts regarding the elementary grounds of traditional painting techniques inherited from the Renaissance, to which Leonardo’s art practice belongs. On that particular issue, for instance, in a 2019 documentary movie broadcast world-wide, an otherwise well-meaning Louvre Museum curator interviewed about Leonardo’s sfumato technique provided a staggering explanation that revealed an ignorance of the fact that, in the oil process, when it is laid on the support (canvas or wood typically), the paint material itself (pigments + binder) should first be diluted to a suitable degree with a fluxing agent – i.e. a solvent (turpentine in the case in point) [2]. The presented extravagant hypothesis in question was addressing the ravishing, subtle, flesh sections in Leonardo’s Louvre St. Anne and the Mona Lisa, on a conviction that pigments and oil alone were used. In terms of practice, it amounts to an insolvable technical problem inasmuch as the rheology of the presumed material to be handled for achieving impalpable effects like those seen in the Louvre Leonardos is a major impediment: such a sticky and oily paint is, structurally, far too unruly to be appropriate for that kind of ultra-delicate work. Thanks to my own researches – now confirmed by Philippe Walter and Laurence de Viguerie (see Further Thoughts II) – it is an established fact that Leonardo used to superimpose in the flesh sections of the above-mentioned works numerous microlayers of very liquid paint according to material principles close to the watercolour technique, except for the fact that, in this particular case, the fluxing agent was turpentine and not water. In truth, our museum curator should have known better: it is an obvious fact, noticeable by any ordinary museum visitor, that, during the Renaissance until the late 19th century, the most part of paintings was executed using diluted paint as testified by the flat, even sections still observable in them to date. The zones of the compositions, however limited in terms of surface, in which pure oil was added to the paint are the glazed ones, and the sections where non diluted, thick pasty paint, is encountered are those ones executed in impasto, a technical process which was notably employed for the treatment of highlights and for the demonstration of the spontaneity and virtuosic quality of the artist’s brush. To be more precise, it should be added that no stricto sensu glazes (transparent layers) were used then for modelling in the flesh sections, but, instead, thin veils of translucent paint [3]. Misinterpretations regarding art practice such as reported here are commonplace in the field of connoisseurship and, in themselves, have no a priori serious importance. Yet, in the case of Leonardo’s late works it has one indeed because, in the event of cleaning, their very low oil-content paint film is at far greater risk under solvent action. [4]. It certainly is not advisable, therefore, that misleading information should be in circulation in the international museum sphere about the technique used for the making of such universal masterpieces. Erroneous preconceived views should never sanction or influence restorations.

III – Scientists can be wrong

Although nobody can reasonably contest the necessity and global efficiency of laboratory tests in matter of old master expertise, it must be admitted that science cannot resolve all the problems raised by this discipline, and especially so when studying aspects in connection with the creative technical gestures. In effect, except for rare cases, the relating researches are made without any advice from an experimented painter, who, alone, can help to spot the data needing specific investigations and likely to let emerge significant observations worth in-depth examination and susceptible, also, to be ultimately interpreted correctly. For example, the highly artistic value of Leonardo’s paintings forbids any material sampling in crucial sections such as the flesh areas. If, nevertheless, some sampling is done, the paint materials can but come from sections of lesser importance: the information thus obtained will therefore testify to a local situation and should not serve, as is so often encountered in various technical essays, to describe the work’s global flesh technique (which can vary considerably from one area to another) [5].

The recent evolution of the scientific methods of investigation now allows the analysis of paint films without removing any material from the works and without any destruction of the pigments either. It is, in particular, the case with X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and the spectrophotometric approach to colour. However, the data obtained with such means are far from being 100% reliable. The Louvre’s laboratory (C2RMF) recently – albeit discretely – admitted the fact regarding the XRF analysis points checked off on the Mona Lisa in 2004-2006: the scientists had detected the presence of burnt umber in Mona Lisa’s face [6] (Figs. 1 and 2). I was very astonished by the unseemliness of this observation, for the use of burnt umber and of that pigment quite specially, is most improbable in the flesh sections of a Leonardo painting. It overruns the places where it is used, notably the modelled fresh hues making the lovely transitions between light and shade in a face; it produces as well a dirty looking greyish-bluish tone when mixed with lead white (a basic pigment in flesh painting) and cannot be suppressed easily since it still comes up visually to some extent when an opaque layer is laid over it. This pigment is definitely unusable in the very subtly depicted flesh tints and, consequently, when it is employed, it is strictly reserved for the darkest shadows close to black. Whatever the case, in 2004-2006 it was said to have been “found” by XRF analysis in areas such as the “light flesh tint, and in the left cheek”, the “strong flesh tint in the left cheek”, the “very dark flesh tint in the left cheek”, the “darkest flesh tint in the left cheek, just before the hair” [7] (Figs. 1 and 2). In the same book, while not very clear in hypothesizing the presence of burnt umber, the spectrophotometry approach to colour states that “it seems likely that [burnt umber] was the basis of the sfumato effect that Leonardo used in the Mona Lisa’s flesh tints in order to suggest the relief by softening the contours and creating subtle chromatic transitions” [8]. Such a pigment composition was formally denied thirteen years later by the same laboratory in an essay published in the catalogue of the commemorative Leonardo exhibition held at the Louvre in October 2019: “the latter pigment has been mentioned many times [by the C2RMF in 2004-2006] based on an elliptic interpretation of XRF test results. Nevertheless, no mention of burnt umber has been found in [Leonardo’s manuscripts] and no explicit identification of this pigment has been obtained [by us] until now in the analysis of the flesh zones of the [Louvre Leonardos]” [9]. It is worth noting that the book containing those wrong observations, despite the bold title of the French edition – which translates “Inside The Mona Lisa. Leonardo da Vinci decoded ” (“Au coeur de La Joconde. Léonard de Vinci décodé”) – has been spread and cited world-wide since 2006.

Above, Fig. 1: [After Paris, 2006, Fig. 146, p. 88] Areas analysed by X-ray fluorescence (see Fig. 148, p. 89 below), detail showing the areas said to contain burnt umber.

Above, Fig. 2: [After Paris, 2006, Fig. 148, p. 89] The Mona Lisa: location of areas (in red) said to contain burnt umber, analysed by X-ray fluorescence (XRF).

Burnt umber was not only said to have been “found” in the Mona Lisa in these years by XRF and by the spectrophotometry approach to colour but also by another non-destructive type of research of 2008 using a multispectral camera and a calculation system called the “radiative transfer equation” [10]. Those conclusions were so simplistic with regard to the complexity of Leonardo’s flesh technique in the legendary masterpiece that I contested their pertinence in a note to the authors and I exchanged directly with one of them (the engineer, Pascal Cotte) about the dubious claimed presence of burnt umber in those sections of the painting [11] (Fig. 3). Thus, there would be sufficient reasons to try and understand the enigma whereby burnt umber was wrongly detected through different methods of approach insofar as another, much deeper investigation on the materials used by da Vinci in the Louvre Leonardos, had been produced by the then C2RMF scientists Philippe Walter and Laurence de Viguerie (see Further Thoughts II), and had identified this pigment not only in the Mona Lisa but in the Saint Anne and the St. John the Baptist also (2009). Fortunately, their investigation, while admitting a certain percentage of error, is not strictly based on the material constituents of the paint layers exclusively, but, at the same time, on their structural layering organization and physical specificity. This otherwise very interesting survey, quite obviously, has included a sophisticated software in its calculation system in which the possible types of binders corresponding to Leonardo’s practice have been taken into account (which is not the case with the above-mentioned other surveys, apparently). As a result, we shall see soon (in Further Thoughts II), that much information can be exploited from this still novel investigation and compared satisfactorily with my own observations tested out through practice in an attempt to make “critical reconstitutions” of Leonardo’s sfumato technique.

From the latter examples, the reader should appreciate that what is presented as fact by scientists can only be taken as perfectly solid evidence if the method of investigation can itself unquestionably be taken as being beyond any shadow of doubt. In 2006, the results claimed from XRF tests and from the spectrophotometric approach to colour were held to be Gospel truth. At the time, nobody but myself would have dared to doubt them: I had reacted instantaneously as being both a Leonardo scholar and an artist, thus accordingly informed on what should be known on burnt umber after “reconstituting” through copy-work the techniques of Leonardo’s flesh paint and that of his contemporary associates. In other words, unreserved, blind adherence to the test results of the scientific analyses of old masters is a trap to the unwary and the best way to guard against it is to keep a default critical attitude while, at the same time, consulting the right art experts in matter of technique – which is to say, properly trained and knowledgeable artists. Being without such professional experience, art historians and scientist cannot reliably or objectively arbitrate on artistic-technical issues that are strangers to their own field of competence.

Above, Fig. 3: [After Mady Elias and Pascal Cotte, Applied Optics, vol. 47, n° 16, 1 June 2008, Fig. 6, p. 6] “(Color online) Colorimetric variations in the chroma C* and Lightness L* planes of the CIE-Lab space, deduced from the modelling of an umber glaze (solid line) from 1-13 layers (number in parentheses) and applied on a mixture of 1% vermilion and 99% lead white. The (coordinates of a pure dry lead white (L), a dry umber (U), and a dry mixture (M) of 1% vermilion and 99% lead white pigments have been added”.

IV – The original work is a stricto sensu document prevailing over any other one

Although the visual examination of paintings is an absolute necessity to any basic, sound, exercise of connoisseurship, it is striking that their specific importance as both essential material documents and, through their identities as works of art – to be primary subjects of study and appraisal, too often attracts the least consideration by today’s professional experts. The present trend of art historians and technical specialists seems to be one of deference to the academic community’s consensual opinion about the works – as if today’s art history constitutes a reliably and authoritatively prescriptive discipline that is unlikely to evolve and change or improve its methods and that, therefore, one that effectively precludes the possibility of ground-breaking discoveries being made elsewhere. Such a narrow-minded attitude opposes the basic research spirit whereby major finds are often of an unexpected nature. In accord with this new established hegemony, opinions are commonly placed before facts, supplanting the spiritual essence and materiality of works of art by disregarding the specific visual signs of their true identities. Depending on their author’s scholarly rank and fame, such constricted stances can attain a “sacred” status to the point that it becomes impossible – because considered ill-mannered – to express any challenge to all this learned verbosity that constricts the work of art’s potential to “speak” for itself. This is indeed symptomatic of the chronical incapacity – so frequent in the élites of our time – to accept and comment on the truth as it stands when it is disturbing. Hence Michael Daley’s sensible depiction of the situation with regard to visual analysis and expertise in art: “In the visual arts the visual should remain paramount – what you see is what the work is about. Art loving viewers and professional art experts alike might be said to have duties of appropriate response to art itself and not to its shadows and encumbrances. It is the optically perceived quality of artists’ artefacts that drives reputations and market values. Understanding art is not the same thing as poking and poring over the components parts of its fabric (…) what matters is what you see, not what might be said”. And again: “Artists paint pictures by eye to be viewed by eye. Trained eyes can detect visual differences with an acuity approaching that of the noses of dogs trained to sniff illegal substances or missing persons”. In other words, the historical and scientific truth of a painting’s image cannot stand detached from its fully embraced artistic reality, which is of a visual order [12]. Naturally, we are here in a “the-king-hasn’t-got-anything-on” logic, and few specialists accept with professional fair-play to recognize that they do not grasp the artistic-technical mechanisms of what they see in old masters fully, because they are neither creators or copyists and, naively – when these artists have long ceased to live – think themselves allowed to speak in their place on matters they do not know, or know very little, but that nobody in their close sphere will ever dare to contest, even the rare ones of a better informed level (see § VII below). The case in point is of course what matters essentially in a painting (and should be highly respected when it is attributable to a great artist or a genius the size of Leonardo), which is – or, rather, was – taught in art schools in earlier times (yet still is taught in some very specialized institutions): the basic rules of drawing, perspective, anatomy, how to balance the scale of values between light and shade, the art of composition, the complex subtleties of colour, and so on. In other words, the latter elements are the very ones which, put into practice, have given birth to that painting and, unless read correctly, leave its true identity mostly undeciphered.

It is true that not all connoisseurs are deprived of an instinctive knowledge of art, of a sharp eye and of sufficient intuition to perceive where the truth really stands – but this makes it all the more distressing to see that so accomplished a scholar as Maria Teresa Fiorio has to appeal to her colleagues of the London National Gallery’s bon sens to make them accept – which they do not – that the Archinto Portrait (National Gallery, London) and the Portrait of a young Man (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera) are of one and the same hand, as is strikingly evident when both paintings are examined closely (Figs. 4 and 5). Bravely resisting various far-fetched scholarly and technical arguments (notably about the underdrawings that differ – but is this always a decisive draw-back?) Fiorio dismisses the Gallery’s ascription of the Archinto Portrait to Marco and that of the Brera Portrait of a young Man to Boltraffio, by diplomatically giving both works to a hypothetical “Master of the Archinto Portrait”, when she thinks, apparently, that its former attribution to Ambrogio de’ Predis was right. More audacity might have been welcome given that stylistic and technical evidence was convincing enough to support the scholar’s initial position in favour of Leonardo’s collaborator to the Virgin of the Rocks. The two portraits were exhibited side by side at the Louvre in 2019, thereby conspicuously displaying their great similarity while awkwardly retaining their respective 2011 National Gallery attributions to Marco d’Oggiono and to Boltraffio [13].

Above, Fig. 4: Milanese artist of the late 15th century (Ambrogio de’ Predis?), Portrait of a Man aged 20 (The Archinto portrait), dated 1494, detail, London, National Gallery.

Above, Fig. 5: Milanese artist of the late 15th century (Ambrogio de’ Predis?), Portrait of a young man, c. 1490-1492, detail, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera. Compare the hair with that in Fig. 4 above, whose aspect and technical rendering is strikingly analogous. The present attribution of the two portraits to two different artists is an enigma.

Like the Mona Lisa, the Louvre Saint Anne (Fig. 6) exemplifies perfectly the fact that its intrinsic artistic contents make it a visual document that is as much an explicit and legible one as is an actual archival piece. I have experimented this while sitting on the international scientific committee for the masterpiece’s restoration in 2010-2012 at the Louvre. At an early stage of the obscured varnish’s thinning, it appeared that the Child’s anatomy was blanched (or supposedly so) and the typology of this adulteration immediately struck me as very unusual: there were obvious visual signs that the varnish had not been laid evenly in that section – as commonly practiced by restorers – but exactly like a glaze meant to model the forms of the torso where light and shade display impalpable transitions, notably on Christ’s proper right shoulder. For that reason, a long debate soon started in the committee as to whether the white opacified varnish was an actual chanci (blanched varnish in French) or an original discoloured brown glaze worth being accepted and preserved as such: despite the ambiguous and inconclusive test results supplied by the Louvre’s laboratory (which had seemingly identified a late conservation varnish) the controversial layer was very regrettably removed without further debate. Four years later, Ségolène Bergeon Langle, the former (legendary) head of the Louvre’s conservation studio, who had resigned from the committee in protest against the arbitrary cleaning line followed by the restoration team, charged me to read in her place a paper at an Artwatch Conference of 2015 which she could not attend physically and in which convincing technical arguments explaining how and why some glazes discolour through time, made evident that the suppressed film was very likely an original glaze [14]. To make a long story short, the visual signs that, as an experimented Leonardo copyist, I had detected on the Child’s torso, had provoked no concern in the committee about the importance of its correct identification, given that no member, except for Bergeon Langle and myself, had, based on a good knowledge of studio practice, established a link between the blanched layer’s most unusual typology and the possibility that it be a deteriorated glaze.

Above, Fig. 6: Leonardo, The Virgin and Child with St Anne, Paris, musée du Louvre.

Another technical-artistic point reveals the potential of Leonardo’s Saint Anne standing as a historical document which bears the story of its own making. From a famous letter of April 1501, written to the then marchioness of Mantua, Isabella d’Este, by her emissary in Florence, Fra Pietro da Novellara, we know that Leonardo was executing a (lost) cartoon of St. Anne which, bar some details in the Saint’s gesture, corresponded to the composition now kept in the Louvre (see Further Thoughts I, Fig. 4). In 1929, the German Leonardo scholar Wilhelm Suida found a closer resemblance between Novellara’s description of the cartoon and a narrative on the same theme kept in Berlin (lost or destroyed during World War II), painted by a minor artist, Andrea del Brescianino: while reversed with regard to the Louvre composition, the Berlin panel seemed, in effect, better accorded to Novellara’s testimony (Fig. 7). It was then assumed that Leonardo had drawn a lost cartoon of Saint Anne, copied c. 1515-1525 by Brescianino, of which the Louvre version was the later mirrored image’s development. This scenario seemed to be confirmed when Carlo Pedretti published in 1979 a small anonymous drawing of Saint Anne (then in a private collection in Geneva) matching the Brescianino painting entirely (Fig. 8). All of which made me feel uneasy when I first examined the case in 1993: not only were both the lost Brescianino panel (its faithful replica is kept in the Prado in Madrid) and the small drawing of a very low artistic level – and the Geneva sheet particularly so – but, technically, there existed no sound reason for Leonardo to have executed two cartoons displaying a practically identical organization of the group. In truth, when, following a number of preparatory studies, an artist has retained a given composition and drawn a full cartoon of it, it is a very easy technical move to use a calco (tracing paper) to first copy the outlines from the original cartoon, then to turn up the calco and transfer the mirrored outlines onto a panel or on whatever other support for oil painting: drawing another cartoon would simply not be needed. I therefore presumed that the strange scenario deriving from Suida’s and Pedretti’s hypotheses, was a mere intellectual, imaginary elaboration of the creative process resulting from an evident misconception of studio practice. Through further investigation I finally discovered that another cartoon from Leonardo’s studio (lost during World War II but known from good photographs), once in the Esterhazy collection in Budapest, was a key element to understand the discrepancy between Novellara’s description and St. Anne’s gesture in the Louvre panel (Fig. 9). Novellara’s report states that in Leonardo’s cartoon of 1501, St. Anne tries to hold back Mary’s movement attempting to stop Jesus from getting astride the lamb (a clear symbol of His future Holy Sacrifice) but no such movement appears in the Louvre picture (Fig. 6), in which St. Anne’s proper right hand is not visible. However, one such hand is discernible in the Esterhazy cartoon, where the raised fingers of St. Anne, placed amid the upper folds in the back of Mary’s ample cloak, express Anne’s reaction of reserve, if not of anxiety, in watching her daughter’s un-resigned attitude before the symbol of Christ’s Passion (Fig. 10). That was a distinct trace of Leonardo’s initial idea, still extant when the studio had copied the Esterhazy cartoon after the lost original one of 1501, a composition that is replicated and varied in a Saint Anne of c. 1540-1550 by Bernardino Lanino (Fig. 11). The story was elucidated at last: the Esterhazy cartoon was in fact the faithful copy of Leonardo’s cartoon of 1501, in which appeared both St. Anne’s right proper hand and the first version of the Virgin’s cloak, far fuller then than that painted in the Louvre panel ultimately. Therefore, while reducing the cloak’s shape and size when the outlines of the cartoon were transferred onto the panel, Leonardo abandoned St. Anne’s hand, thus choosing to introduce a change in the theological meaning of her movement. The infrared reflectogram of the Saint Anne reveals where the Saint’s hand once was (Fig. 12). For unexplained reasons, the Louvre’s laboratory (C2RMF) had never noticed it before my discovery, but one can see on the document scribbled fingers drawn exactly where Leonardo had once intended to paint them (in a lower section alongside the cloak) but, then, finally did not, after he had removed the large folds on which the first version of St. Anne’s hand had been traced at the outset (Figs. 13 and 14). In conclusion, despite Suida’s and Pedretti’s astute hypothesis, otherwise granted quasi unanimous consideration by the Leonardo scholarship from 1929 onwards, the intermediate Saint Anne cartoon presumed to have been copied by Brescianino had never existed [15].

Above, Fig. 7: Andrea del Brescianino (?), The Virgin and Child with St Anne, c. 1515-1525, oil on wood panel formerly in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Berlin, destroyed in 1945.

Above, Fig. 8: Post-1887 anonymous artist after Leonardo (?), The Virgin and Child with St Anne, Art market.

Above, Fig. 9: Leonardo’s workshop (Cesare da Sesto?), The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, The Esterhazy Cartoon, c. 1508-1513, lost or destroyed in Budapest during World War II.

Above, Fig. 10: The Esterhazy Cartoon, detail of Virgin’s drapery with raised fingers of St. Anne’s proper right hand.

Above, Fig. 11: Bernardino Lanino (attr.), The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, c. 1540-1550 (?), Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera.

Above, Fig. 12: Leonardo, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Infrared reflectogram, detail of the modified section where St. Anne’s right proper hand, as initially conceived, has been suppressed by Leonardo when revising the fullness of the Virgin’s mantle (the ellipsoidal folds of the red dress in Mary’s back are where Anne’s fingers once were, see also Fig. 6). The whitish zone on the IRR corresponds to the former shape of the mantle (as seen in Figs. 9, 10 and 11, above), which, possibly, never reached the painting stage. Alongside that zone at bottom left are discerned sketched fingers testifying to Leonardo’s second change of mind about St. Anne’s right hand (see Figs. 11 and 13).

Above, Fig. 13: Leonardo, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Infrared reflectogram, a detail of the never-painted foreshortened fingers drawn alongside the Virgin’s mantle in the modified section. The fingers compare well those seen in an ealier preparatory sketch for the Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi (see Figs. 12 and 14).

Above, Fig. 14: Leonardo, Study of figures for The Adoration of the Magi, detail of scribbled hand, Köln, Wallraf-Richartz Museum (see Fig. 13).

A last example of the usefulness for an art historian to be familiar with art practice seems necessary here although it is one about a cleaning tragedy. When the world-wide restoration controversy concerning the cleaned Michelangelo ceiling in the Sistine Chapel started in the late 1980s, I had doubts about the full pertinence of James Beck’s position: his objection was that the retrieved fresh and acid hues underlying the dirt and the glues laid in the course of time over the masterpiece’s surface were not what Buonarroti had wanted, and so, that he had toned them down and modelled the forms’ volume a secco with added layers of black bound in animal glue (Fig. 15A and B). Whether this was the case or not, the rather brownish and dark aspect of the frescoes before the intervention, which I had first seen as it stood in 1966, could be accepted as a likely hypothesis. Nevertheless, Michelangelo’s vivid palette’s range of colours was a well-known one, firstly because the Tondo Doni (Florence, Uffizi), cleaned c. 1993 – and so, gently – shows colours in full accordance with the Sistine Chapel ceiling, secondly, because, to some extent, they are close also to those of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo’s master, a fact notably testified by Domenico’s fresco cycles in the Palazzo Vecchio (Sala dei Gigli) and in Santa Maria Novella (Tornabuoni Chapel) in Florence [Fig. 16 A and B]. Given that the debate was far too hot and complex I long stood off it, while strongly doubting the pro-cleaning camp’s theory whereby Michelangelo would never have made any a secco adjustments in the ceiling. For many reasons, that was indeed a bold and questionable argument in the light of art practice: no artist, even such an outstanding genius fresco painter like Michelangelo, could ever manage to cover a surface of 1200 square metres – the approximate size of the Sistine Chapel ceiling – with paintings without having to adjust part of his work here and there a posteriori. It definitely is an inconceivable material and human achievement and the impossibility of carrying out such a mythical feat is alone, of necessity, the strongest argument in favour of James Beck’s and Michael Daley’s position. Since the publication of both authors’ book, Art Restoration – The Culture, the Business and the Scandal, in 1993 and in 1996, and Prof. Beck’s death in 2007, Daley has step by step further developed his original reflections on the issue (as first published in The Independent on Sunday – “Michelangelo: Found or Lost?” – 25 March 1990, and the Independent – “A crime against the artist” – 22 November 1991), using visual demonstrations that leave no doubt about the unfortunate suppression of Michelangelo’s a secco retouching, whether it be, here, cast shadows, elsewhere, strengthening in the volumetric modelling of the biblical figure’s monumental anatomies and draperies (- see “Misreading visual evidence – No 2: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling”). The fact that the restoration team “discovered” later on that Michelangelo has practiced a secco painting in the Last Judgement, and strangely not in the ceiling, although the same buon fresco technique and process was followed, makes it an open and shut case of the entire cleaning project’s technical misconception and miscarriage. [16]

Above, Fig. 15: A (left), Michelangelo, The Sistine Chapel ceiling before cleaning; B (right), Michelangelo, The Sistine Chapel ceiling after cleaning.

Above, Fig. 16: A (top), Michelangelo, The Holy Family (The Tondo Doni), c. 1504, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi; B (above), Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Marriage of the Virgin, 1486, Florence, Santa Maria Novella, Cappella Maggiore.

Above, Fig. 17: A (top left), Michelangelo, detail of Jonah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (before cleaning), B (top right), Michelangelo, detail of Jonah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (after cleaning). The cast shadow of the Prophet’s left foot has been practically cleaned off during the restoration. The putti in trompe- l’oeil sculpture supporting the fictitious cornice have also lost much modeling and volume through that regrettable intervention. C (above), Giorgio Giulio Clovio (1498-1578), Copy of Michelangelo’s Prophet Jonah in the Sistine Chapel, Rugby Museum of Art, Rugby, England. This contemporary drawn record of Michelangelos frescoes, proves that the cast shadow attached to Jonah’s left foot had indeed been present from the beginning. It was also recorded in the subsequent copies of the Jonah that were made from the 16th century onwards [see The Sistine Chapel Restorations, Part III: Cutting Michelangelo Down to Size.

V – The still missing artistic-technical critical edition of Leonardo’s Trattato della Pittura

Leonardo had intended c. 1490 to write a treatise on painting which he sketched out in the Manuscript A kept in the Institut de France. This enormous book of various texts and themes of research, illustrated with original drawings, was never published in his lifetime, but his pupil and assistant Francesco Melzi (c.1491- c.1570), who had inherited all the master’s manuscripts and drawings in 1519, compiled the material c. 1530 from eighteen of the manuscripts in order to prepare the publication of Leonardo’s Trattato. This did not occur in Melzi’s lifetime either but the earliest compilation in existence, the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Lat. 1270, also called the “Codex Urbinas” or “Libro di Pittura”, is kept in the Biblioteca Vaticana in Rome since c. 1640 [Fig. 18]. Its full text was first published in Rome by Guglielmo Manzani in 1817 while the first critical edition was published by Heinrich Ludwig in Vienna in 1882. Since then, many critical and facsimile editions have been issued, one still recent being the joint work of Carlo Pedretti and Carlo Vecce (Florence, 1995). As is the case for such specialized editions, the authors have focussed on the restitution of the full text through an effort of strict paleographic/ philological/ lexical accuracy, with the necessary reference to Leonardo’s original manuscripts from which these texts were compiled, and to critical editions such as Ludwig, 1882, the facsimile McMahon edition with English translation (1956), or Pedretti’ s “Leonardo’s Lost Book (Libro A)” of 1964 [17]. When I started consulting the Codex Urbinas for my research systematically, I soon realized that another type of critical apparatus was missing, the more so as the book is a treatise on painting, that of a technical commentary of all the specific matters dealt with by Leonardo in the Trattato. I do not mean just literary, theoretical and contextualized views on those matters but ones enriched with pragmatic observations tested out in practice and checked by experimented art teachers, chemists, opticians, etc. of our day. This was no unrealistic expectation on my part: not to speak of Pedretti’s critical comment of Leonardo’s sheets of Anatomy published jointly with a physician, Dr Kenneth Keele in 1978-1980, such a type of edition exists for Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte, more precisely the Neri Pozza one (Vicenza, 1971 and 1982), which is annotated by Franco Brunello, a chemist specialized in pigments and dyes [18].

Above, Fig. 18: The Codex Urbinas lat. 1270, Rome, Biblioteca apostolica vaticana.

The necessity for this technical edition of Leonardo’s Trattato had appeared to me when I came across a well-known – yet supposedly enigmatic – case of perspective analysed by Leonardo that has been debated over many years, roughly since 1927 up to 1978 and later, with the involvement of such specialists as Irwin Panofsky, Irma. A. Richter, John White, André Chastel, Carlo Pedretti and James S. Ackerman, in particular. The case in question implies the distance of the artist’s viewpoint from the represented object, a problem that the painter must settle with care because linear perspective generates lateral distortions (should the object’s shape be a long horizontal one, for instance) when the viewpoint is too close and exceeds a visual angle of 90°. [Fig. 19] As demonstrated by both Pedretti (1963) and Ackerman (1978), Leonardo was aware of it, specifies which viewing position is the ideal one, and, consequently, has never invented a mysterious – and convenient system (“curvilinear” perspective is evoked in the debate) – specially intended for solving the case. Yet the long lasting disputa over the issue could have been avoided thanks to some basic investigation into the drawing-from-life techniques still taught in fine art schools when the debate took place: like Leonardo before them, and so from a multi-secular tradition, all the art teachers of the period knew the rule to be respected in this connection.

Above, Fig. 19: [After Didier Bessot “Léonard de Vinci et les distorsions perspectives”, Léonard de Vinci entre France et Italie ‘miroir profond et sombre’, Caen, 1999, p. 37-54, Fig. 1, p. 41]. Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi, libro 1, proposition XXX. The problem of the viewing angle (LM > L- 21 = LK and LM, image of KL > 21-F, image of 21 – B) dealt with by Piero : in order to avoid lateral distorsions, the viewing angle in a perspective construction should not exceed 90°.

Another drawback, so to speak, is the fact that the various technical topics contained in the critical editions of Leonardo’s Trattato are thought to be utterly comprehensive, their artistic sense and function included, whereas what is clarified in this particular field is at best of literary order (etymological, etc.) and not their factual role within a given creative process, thus allowing a shift in meaning that will necessarily distort the historical veracity of the literary source and the correct understanding of the evoked techniques. That is the case with sfumato, meaning “smoky” or “misty” – more precisely a vaporous looking pictorial effect having no distinct boundaries. It is a nominalized past participle of the Italian verb sfumare (to smoke) which studio vocabulary has made become a noun through the centuries; sfumato is now commonly used to describe, not only Leonardo’s soft-focus effects as observed in the Mona Lisa and his late paintings, but the relating technique also. In my essay of 2014 about technical practice in Leonardo’s workshop, I have signalled that sfumare, utilized many times by Leonardo to describe this otherwise ageless technique (that of blending the tones to achieve impalpable, blurred, gradations between light and shade), was employed already in the late 14th century Italy, by Cennino Cennini [19]. Picking up the concerned passage in my above-mentioned peer checked essay, yet with no mention of my name although I had sent him a copy of the academic review in which it was published, Martin Kemp now attempts to demonstrate that sfumato is not a suitable term, historically, to evoke the various concepts underlying Leonardo’s blurred effects and the relating technique of execution [20]. I naturally disagree, because what prevails in such a case is usage – and particularly so when a very ancient one. In old master tradition and workshops the terms used referred to precise artistic-technical data (here a painting process), whose specific meaning is grasped correctly by artists alone, like a musical code or of any other sort, for it is a specialized lexis. Searching a ready-made academic sense within traditional workshop usages and terminology – as if for some catch-all mathematical formula – is therefore pointless and a mix of genres. In this arena, unspecialized parties, inevitably, cannot but misinterpret the highly technical data inherent of studio practice recorded in ancient literature, which, naturally, need instead the methodical examination/interpretation and eventual testing out in practice by truly experimented practitioners – which Kemp is not – to be explained properly (hence the scholar’s missing crucial information borne in the texts quoted either in his own essay on sfumato, or from Leonardo on technique, as we shall see below). Whatever the case, given its long existence, the ancient usage of sfumare and of its derived terms (including sfumato) in art is nothing to be rejected: we can well see that that verb’s technical sense, a generic one when it applies to the art of painting, is the same when it is used by Cennini, by Leonardo and by Filippo Baldinucci (c. 1624-1696) indifferently over a period of four centuries. And since Leonardo, writing about technique in the Trattato della Pittura, describes a method of melting the tones to make them look smoky, one can hardly imagine that the words employed do not mean both the rendered effect and its technical process, as is evident in this eloquent – and most famous – passage of the Codex Urbinas (Pedretti/Vecce edition, op. cit. supra note 17, § 514): “and when the flesh paint is wet, [using soft brushes] you will make the shadow smoky as you please (…) When your sfumato is made, let it dry” [21].

This well-known text clearly shows that we are faced here with a sfumato process which I call “the simple blending of tones” or “the simple fusion of colours” [22]. In effect, Melzi’s transcript of Leonardo’s recipe informs that the paint material to be made look fumoso (misty, blurred, etc.) is “wet” and that it is handled with “soft brushes”. It is precisely the state in which the paint material should be so that such a process can be performed while a soft brush will allow its adequate achievement. Called blaireautage in French, it is, as we now know, an ageless technique in which the paint film is gently “blended in” in the sections to be unified visually, in particular where the impalpable transitions between light and shade must be depicted [23]. The simple blending, however, is not by far Leonardo’s most subtle sfumato technique, because the specific technical gestures involved cannot produce microscopic transitions on very short distances, measurable in tenths of millimeters, like those seen in the Mona Lisa, for example [24]. In that particular case, the soft brushes used for the blaireautage (simple blending of tones) are far too large and inadequately shaped: painters necessarily employ brushes and paint strokes whose dimensions and shapes conform to the scale of the details to be reproduced. Consequently, the technical problem examined here is a clear-cut one: while soft, rather large and flat brushes are used to achieve the blaireautage (type 1 sfumato effect), very fine brushes with a sharp tip alone are required to achieve the “complex blending” (type 2 sfumato effect). In other words, neither of those distinctly sized and shaped brushes can replace the one meant for its specific technical purpose, whether it be for the sfumato effects type 1 or type 2. One can now understand why art historians strange to practice, unless properly informed, should not speculate on painting techniques as complex as that of Leonardo, given their deep ignorance of how artistic craftsmanship functions in the real. Except specialized artists, not many people can discern visually the important difference of refinement, hence of technique, regarding those micro-distances when examining the Leonardo works, notably the Mona Lisa, in which either type of sfumato process was followed: to some eyes, obviously untrained, all blurred effects seem to correspond to one and a same one, apparently.

Above, Fig. 20: Leonardo, The Lady with an Ermine, c. 1489- 1490, Cracow, National Museum.

Leonardo has practiced the simple blending in works like the Lady with an Ermine (Fig. 20) or the London Virgin of the Rocks, a process that X-radiographs reveal distinctly due to the amount of lead white (an X-ray proof pigment located very distinctly on them) needed for the lights in this technique (see Further Thoughts I, Fig. 27a and b). Despite this telling example, Kemp insists: “we should be aware that the term [sfumato] is an artefact of art history not a quotation from Leonardo [25]. Furthermore, quoting Baldinucci’s Vocabolario (1681) to make his point, he seemingly is unaware of the fact that this author contradicts it. In effect, Baldinucci’s text describes the standard sfumato technique, or blaireautage, used in his time, not the very complex and spectacular one handled by Leonardo in the Mona Lisa and the Sainte Anne (see Further Thoughts II), which, as we know, is an entirely different one in terms of making process. The 17th century Florentine biographer of artists actually says: “[sfumare, To unify colours] (…) after having put the colour in its place on the canvas or panel, in order to remove all crudeness of the touches, sweetly mingling the light tint with the middle tint or the middle tint with the dark, so that the passage from one to the other is made with such gradation that even from close the painting appears without brushstrokes” [26]. The choice of Baldinucci’s text is therefore of little pertinence here with regard to that of Leonardo’s extant ones on technique, or compiled by Melzi: it was published in the late 17th century, 162 years after Leonardo’s death and does not describe his technique as such in the least way, but, rather, the generic artistic gesture of sfumare as executed then (thus implying slight variations from the early 16th century practice of that technique) in order to unify visually the raw effect first obtained in the execution, and to smooth down the paint surface at the same time. Although Kemp asserts authoritatively that “Baldinucci sets the right tone” [27], his credibility is nonetheless at risk when hypothesizing without any evidence or reliable experience of practice that it was the technique used in the Mona Lisa. For Baldinucci’s description also informs that fresh paint is handled, which necessarily implies the practice of blaireautage or “simple blending”, in which the fresh paint strokes are mingled and smoothed down in a sort of delicate back and forth sweeping movement done with a soft brush. All of which is far too simple, technically, to explain anything as prodigiously complex as what is seen in the Louvre’s iconic picture: as now proven by X-ray fluorescence and visual observation (see Further Thoughts II), what is typical of Leonardo’s flesh technique in the Mona Lisa (the “complex blending of tones”) is that it needs a dry underpaint and not a wet one to be proceeded with: it is therefore, basically, a dual operation and not a single one. The visual abolition of the touches (hatches, strokes, etc.) is far more gradual in the complex blending: thin veils of liquid translucent paint are laid over each painting session when it is dry until the paint surface appears perfectly smooth and even. About twenty of such veils have been detected in the Mona Lisa thanks to X-ray fluorescence tests, thus revealing an extremely elaborate and subtle making that justifies my description of two distinct procedures in Leonardo’s sfumato technique (see Further Thoughts II). While the term sfumare is fully appropriate to the first one, the second one’s complexity results from the systematic superimposition of veils (whose nature and typology vary greatly): velare (to veil or glaze/soften the rawness of tones in Italian) has therefore all the reasons to be employed in that case instead of sfumare. A century before Baldinucci, or nearly so, it is presumably why Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1592), who had met Francesco Melzi (Leonardo’s closest pupil) and gathered then precious information about Leonardo, described in 1590 the master’s sfumato technique as “veli sopra veli” (superimposed veils), a better designation than sfumare with regard to the overall line of making observed in the Mona Lisa [28]. Additionally, the complex blending observed in the Mona Lisa corresponds without contest to Vasari’s report on the portrait (who never saw it but its description was obviously borrowed from Melzi): “Leonardo undertook to execute, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Monna Lisa, his wife, and after toiling over it for four years, he left it unfinished (…) in it were counterfeited all the minutenesses that with subtlety are able to be painted” [29]. Should Leonardo have employed the blaireautage process, an easy and quick one, the end result would be far less subtle and, for that reason, the work would have been finished within four to six months at the very most: applied to the Mona Lisa, that technical interpretation has therefore, I am afraid, no historical likelihood.

Reverting to the arbitration of practice, which is the best means for checking the pertinence of theories in matter of painting techniques, the reader must know that no copy resembling the Mona Lisa very closely (which would be evidence of the appropriateness of the technique used), could ever be produced employing Baldinucci’s recipe, and, knowing the subject extremely well from decades of experimentation, I defy any skilled artist to perform such a challenge [30]. Finally, the fact that Leonardo’s sfumato lies on optical concepts more particularly than that of other artists is no evidence of the term’s historical inaccuracy with regard to the Master’s blurred effects and correlated technique. And unless the texts compiled in the Codex Urbinas were proven in future not to come from Leonardo – a very unlikely eventuality – it can reasonably be admitted that sfumato was indeed a term used by him and his studio, whether occasionally or not.

VI – Interdisciplinary work: a salutary concept

Given the transverse (multidisciplinary) character of old master expertise, nobody would expect that one and a same specialist be simultaneously familiar with archival research, well versed in academic art practice, in restoration techniques, and that the physics and chemistry of paints hold no secrets for him. Yet, the entire knowledge contained in those distinct disciplines is necessary to approach adequately the works’ full facets, whether historical, artistic or material. As explained in the first chapter of this essay, specialized artists, unless they are conservators, have no recognition as art experts, and, although it is unjustified, since illogical, aesthetic-technical matters are assessed nowadays by parties (art historians and scientists) who are no specific experts in this field. In the past, about eighty years ago, conservators were most of the time academic artists who could not make a living out of their activity and had taken up restoration to secure themselves an income. This was notably the case with Jean-Gabriel Goulinat (1883-1972), seriously trained in the Paris national Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and Jacques Maroger (1884-1962), who made careers in 1930-1960 at the Louvre (Maroger in part only): it was a blessed period during which, the then head curator of Paintings, René Huyghe (1906-1997), had, jointly with Cesare Brandi (1906-1988) – the world reputed Italian theorist of conservation – defined a highly tactful conservation policy for the restoration of France’s and Italy’s old master heritage [31]. At that time, the restorers were fully trained artists who were able to advise on the Louvre’s restoration committees and, eventually, point out to aesthetic-technical data that would contribute decisively towards the successful outcome of conservation projects. Significantly, the Louvre Leonardos had hardly been touched up, with the exception in the late forties-early fifties of the Sainte Anne, whose conservation report is very telling on the discreet cleanings undertaken in those days. Progressively, this way of proceeding was thought outdated and, worse, by the late seventies, in university and museum circles in France and elsewhere, it came to be considered that artistic advice on restorations was subjective, inadequate, and that scientific analysis and art historians alone could determine safely where the authenticity of paintings lies. In these times the work of art ceased to be the pre-eminent, intrinsic per se source of information on significant artistic and technical data about itself, in the way that musical scores were – and still are – regarded by musicians. Thus works of art became objects of unclear identity and quite divorced from the traditional artistic criteria that had remained in force from the Renaissance until our own times. In consequence, anarchic views prevail to date on the authentication and destiny of works of art.

In 1983, I was hired by a private conservation institute in Paris (Institut d’Art Conservation et Couleur) which was run by both the then leading Louvre conservator Sylvaine Brans and Prof. François Parra, an international State authority on Optics and the physics of colour [32]: the institute was training student restorers and my role was to instruct them on old master techniques because, while their technical capacity to preserve and repair paintings materially was satisfactory, practically none of them had ever learnt to draw and paint and, therefore, knew much, to say the least, about the aesthetic-technical side of art. In 1986, I pursued a similar teaching job to student restorers for fifteen years within another professional framework: many of them intended to access international schools of restoration (IRPA in Brussels, IFROA in Paris, ICR in Rome, etc.). From this experience I am ipso facto closely acquainted with the ins and outs of painting conservation (artistic aspects) and, more specially, with the fact that – bar exceptional cases – the majority of today’s restorers cannot face the complexities inherent of this discipline where properly speaking artistic matters bringing up any difficulty are concerned. Although I ignore whether it was and has been the case with leading museums in the world at all times, the Louvre was certainly aware of this problem in the mid-eighties when my research first got some marked support from René Huyghe, then still chairing the Museum’s national committee for restoration and from Alain Erlande-Brandenbourg, the then main assistant to the Head of the French museums (DMF).The team in charge of the Louvre’s conservation studio was a brilliant one in those years, notably under the heading of Gilberte Emile-Mâle and that of her successor, Curator Ségolène Bergeon, a disciple of Prof. Paul Philippot (1925-2016), who, himself, was a reputed theorist of conservation, a university professor in Brussels and the head of the Rome ICCROM. Both an art historian, a scientist and an IIC Fellow, Bergeon had long understood that painting restoration is a transverse discipline calling for a combined, qualified and joint expertise drawn from art history and academic artistry applied to conservation, and, of course, science, the ideal objective hereupon being to limit as much as possible the subjectivity of such an action in order to better preserve the work’s material and spiritual integrity. Hence Bergeon’s early commitment in favour of interdisciplinary (or crossdisciplinarity) work in conservation, an early 19th century concept revived by both Brandi and Philippot – and later theorized by Madeleine Grawitz definitively – [33], advocating that the “threefold” expertise (history + art + science) needed to restore a work of art be practiced as a constant and mutual collaboration between the different professional parties dealing with the work’s conservation treatment. And this, unlike pluridisciplinarity, in which the concerned experts advise the restoration project separately, thus risking eventual conflicts between each individual position, no profitable dialogue over the problems raised in the course of the intervention and, as a consequence, that less or no attention is given to what the work really needs [34] (Fig. 21). Such a practice as interdisciplinary collaboration is demanding in terms of self-discipline, for it implies a humble attitude and the eventual renunciation to one’s feeling of professional superiority towards a given essential partner in the team as well as a sincere open-minded disposition to exchange with others for the sake of the work’s preservation. Unfortunately, such a disinterested and humanistic conception of a group’s working program is far from being an ideal shared in the museum world broadly. I once attended a Bergeon lecture on interdisciplinary work in 2003 at the Association des Historiens de l’Art Italien (AHAI) in Paris and was sitting next to a specialist of scientific imaging in the Louvre’s laboratory (C2RMF), an otherwise urbane and pleasant person who has left this institution long ago. When Bergeon’s intervention ended, Mr. X whispered in my ear this irritated comment: “For sure it’s not a line we shall ever bother to follow in our lab!”

Above, Fig. 21: [After Ségolène Bergeon Langle and Georges Brunel, La restauration des oeuvres d’art, Vadem-mecum en quelques mots, Paris, p. 205, Interdisciplinarity and pluridisciplinarity].
Diagrams showing each discipline with a specific colour (1 blue = physics, 2 yellow = artistic/technical-craft, 3 red = human sciences). In the case of interdisciplinarity (in the context of a conservation project), the three disciplines are in constant mutual dialogue and the end result is a fully informed product. In the case of pluridisciplinarity, the juxtaposition of partial actions from distinct specialists (physics, artistic/technical-craft, human sciences) does not deliver a unique and fully integrated product.

VII – By way of conclusion

Although what precedes remains schematic and incomplete, it is obvious that the artist’s place and of everything that is intrinsic to the artistic, creative phenomenon, is not at the heart of art expertise and conservation any longer, a situation which has been lasting for several decades now to the point of having become a de facto tradition. The causes of this are many: one of them is the decline, if not outright abandonment, of teaching the multi-secular academic rules of drawing and painting in the European fine art schools as from the sixties onwards; another being the nonsensical, demagogic belief that has developed in parallel worldwide under the influence of the various trends of modern and contemporary art whereby anybody can be an artist – an idea open to discussion, perhaps, with regard to today’s creative concepts, but one which cannot sensibly be backdated so as to apply to classic art, whether historically, conceptually or technically. Such a global cultural development has necessarily lowered art’s spiritual level down to criteria that oppose its fundamental identity which cannot be dissociated from its traditional, long-prevalent art practices in an attempt to convert it into what it is not and has never been. In such a confused cultural context, the situation has, in the mind of some scholars, so evolved in the last twenty years as to dissolve any distinction between art history as a discipline, which is a branch of history, nothing else, and art practice itself. A number of art critics occasionally seem to believe (see Further Thoughts II ), that their own self-contained (i. e. divorced from artistic practice) visual appraisals of a painting visually are sufficient to understand it thoroughly – including the various processes of its making – as if they themselves had painted it. I have come across a number of such cases in the museum world recently, in three of whom the self-delusion, if not pathological, had reached such a paroxysm that no evidence of any sort, either visual or scientific, proving the inconsistency of their position, could bring them back to reality. They just could not accept it. The origin of this alarming emerging syndrome of “virtual” or “imaginary scholar-painters” lies in the dogmatic conviction that a given qualification in art history sanctioned by some power, either scholarly or curatorial, confers both infallibility and an automatic access to the full knowledge of art and to what its creative methods consist in. There is here an abusive appropriation of the authority traditionally and rightfully conferred to artists through their demonstrable mastery of the creative process, a field strange to both art history and science. In other words, to some extent and more than symbolically, art is not in the hands of art any more but in those of institutional parties having no direct experience of it, who cannot but transliterate it in a language of their own presented as the truth, whether rightfully or not according to circumstances (see § V above).

Sense and reason help to grasp the point in case clearly: the best way to know anything sound and factual about art is to draw, paint or sculpt. And the best way to penetrate into the aesthetic-technical creative intimacy of an old master painting is to make a faithful copy of it, and eventually one whose appearance is practically analogous to that of the original. In so doing it is possible that the making process will not be the very one followed by the creator himself, whether it be Rembrandt or Rubens, etc., but it might well be the case indeed, as I have succeeded to prove with Leonardo’s sfumato technique through decades of painstaking research and thanks to critical copy-work in particular (see Further Thoughts II). In addition, when a copy resembles the original closely, the copyist has at least demonstrated his (her) direct, tangible – and not imaginary – experience of the essential aesthetic-technical data constituting the original work’s appearance: nobody can in good faith deny that this is a priceless knowledge, a reality that no virtually informed speculation on technique will ever match or challenge. Because what decides between opinions here, i. e., one strictly conceptual and immaterial, and another one tangibly visual and material, is, in the latter case, evidence of art as opposed to theoretical verbiage about it [35].

Above, Fig. 22: A, left and right – Jacques Franck, critical reconstruction in four stages of the Mona Lisa’s left proper eye; B – Jacques Franck, free copy in oils after the St. Anne in the Burlington House Cartoon (London, National Gallery).

This very point explains why my research on Leonardo’s painting technique has been so reluctantly accepted, if at all, in those circles: notwithstanding the providential support from specialists of an unsurpassed competence such as René Huyghe, Carlo Pedretti, Federico Zeri, Ségolène Bergeon Langle or Jacques Roire (physicist and chemist), the issue of Leonardo, effectively, is considered their exclusive property, so to speak, and therefore one “forbidden” to an independent scholar’s artistic research like mine, regardless of the deployed skills and of the related visual demonstrations of scientifically proven pertinence (Fig. 22 A and B). By the same token are explained also the attacks that have suddenly flourished in my back from the very moment I opposed the attribution of questionable graphic compositions to Leonardo and the serial restorations of the Louvre Leonardos and, in particular, campaigned against the participation of the originally New York, then Russian, now Saudi Salvator Mundi in the Louvre Museum’s 2019 blockbuster exhibition as an authentic da Vinci painting [36] (Figs. 23 and 24).
To sum up, the Establishment’s disregarding of and opposition to any, properly-speaking, artistic and pragmatic means of research concerning the technical issues requiring elucidation in the art of painting is a clear sign of our society’s weakened understanding and loss of respect of the meaning of art, whether or not it is the remote consequence of Dada, “art brut”, relativist theories, art negativism, the postulate whereby anybody is a potential artist or, worse, of the sophist claim that “science can explain art”. Assessing the innumerable PhDs produced by the history of art scholarship each year, one can easily notice that, more often than not, it is becoming a strictly speaking literary activity in which the art work serves to support questionable theories, intellectual elaborations substituting their virtual reality for its own, factual one. Statistically, little archival research is made, which explains why so few documents about Leonardo have emerged in the past century. Concerning Leonardo studies, beside the “classics” (including Frank Zöllner’s catalogue raisonné), what remains and catches attention are of course the comprehensive publications on different topics from scholars like Carmen Bambach, Alessandro Ballarin, Carlo Vecce, Edoardo Villata, or more specialized ones, notably in matter of Leonardian bibliography (I cannot but mention the brilliant Silvia Fabrizio-Costa in this respect) [37], which are references constantly used for working on a subject like technique, an issue needing solid historical documentation. Yet, in some of those works, when the pictorial techniques are evoked, the painter’s viewpoint is skimmed over, while nobody, to my knowledge, manages to achieve any appropriate art critical distance from the end results of restorations like that of the disappointing Last Supper in Milan, for example. [38] (Figs. 25, 26 A, 26 B and 27). Naturally, given the hot nature of the polemics over questionable restorations, were they brought back to serene, scholarly debates and exchanges, these projects being mostly under State control, no museum curator or university official – or very seldom – will accept to speak out in the open to express objections. But then, who will want to save and rescue the Art Planet, if these powerful VIPs won’t point out to what they know should be contested in order to help salvage the world’s Heritage?

Many years ago James Beck and Michael Daley, in Art Restoration – The Culture, the Business and the Scandal (1993, 1996), denounced the progressive disintegration of the ethical standards and morals in the art world whereby the artistic treasures of the universal Heritage are commercially exploited against their basic spiritual and physical interests through vicious cycles of money making exhibitions and/or needlessly risky restoration projects that have become a self-perpetuating world-wide industry. Such attacks on the most essential icons of our civilization’s very soul run in strict parallel with and proceed from the same logic of the frames of mind that cause the attacks on Environment which, inexorably, are destroying the planet. More recently, Ben Lewis’s book The Last Leonardo, and two documentary films about the shattering saga of the Saudi Salvator Mundi have sadly proven that Beck’s and Daley’s voices of 1993 have been little heeded. Arguably, the toxicity of the art world has worsened in the last twenty years as an escalating abundance of unjustifiably upgraded works, whether paintings, drawings or sculptures, are presented as lost or misattributed Botticellis, Raphaels, Leonardos or Michelangelos, etc. when, in truth they are at best studio works or late school items – and sometimes outright fakes, as was the case with a notoriously freshly imitated “Frans Hals” lately [39]. The curatorial obsessions of museums regarding the “cleanness” of the privately loaned works exhibited in the international shows provoke severe – yet too rare – admonitions from museum figures who have retained an inflexible sense of ethics. In the documentary The Lost Leonardo, reporting on the London National Gallery’s role in the tangled story of how the (New York to Saudi) Salvator Mundi emerged from obscurity before being sold for $450m, Professor Bernd Lindmann, the then director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, tells Andreas Koefoed (the co-film maker): “I was surprised to see the painting in the [2011 Leonardo] exhibition at the National Gallery. It is a problematic painting and I think it’s not the role of serious museums to present a painting which is so heavily discussed”.

Above, Fig. 23: [After Achademia Leonardi Vinci, Vol. X, 1997, p. 269]. Nomination of Jacques Franck as Consulting expert to the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA by Carlo Pedretti (see note 36 below ).

Above, Fig. 24: Email from Carlo Pedretti of 16 January 2016 expressing his will that Jacques Franck be Permanent consultant of his newly established Foundation. A printed version of which (here) was confirmed again by Pedretti’s signed and annotated approval of 27 November 2017, six weeks before the great Leonardo scholar’s decease on 5 January 2018 (see note 36 below).

Above, Fig. 25: Leonardo, The Last Supper, 1497, Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie.

Above, Fig. 26 A: Leonardo, The Last Supper, detail of St. Philip. All that remains of the original work are small scales of colour appearing the more saturated ones on this image of St. Philip – which is possibly the best preserved figure in the mural. Surrounding the surviving shards of paint, whether red, flesh pink, blue, brown, or black, the paler tones constitute the considerable retouching (called “inpainting”and compensating for the lacunae), that was necessary to make the composition both visually consistent and fit to be seen by the public of visitors. The missing original paint can therefore be assessed around 60 to 80% in Leonardo’s Last Supper.

Above, Fig. 26B: Leonardo, The Last Supper, detail of St. Philip. This close-up on the apostle’s head shows distinctly the huge areas where the original paint is missing. Compare with Fig. 27 below.

Above, Fig. 27: Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, called Giampietrino, copy of The Last Supper, c. 1520, The Royal Academy of Arts, London.

It is in this context of the Art Planet, clouded by the constant emergence of disputable, opaque, interests, that I publish my recent investigation of the “no book” titled Léonard de Vinci. Le Salvator Mundi, published by the Louvre in December 2019, while withdrawn immediately from the Museum’s bookshop without any explanation, but of which photocopies have circulated in the Leonardo scholarly “microcosm” and in the international press earlier this year. An essay presenting the Saudi Salvator Mundi as a work fully painted by Leonardo based on scientific arguments which, in my opinion, are anything but acceptable; I therefore have thought it my duty for the truth’s sake to discuss them in-depth and openly below, so that the reader can understand why the French government has considered it essential not to publish them and, as a consequence, not to support the work’s attribution to Leonardo either.

Jacques Franck, November 2021.

ENDNOTES:

Note 1: Cf. Jacques Franck, “De la formation artistique en conservation-restauration des peintures anciennes: évoluer, pourquoi, comment”, Coré, n° 4, avril 1998, p. 53-59.

Note 2: Cf. Léonard de Vinci, le chef-d’œuvre redécouvert, documentary movie broadcast on the French/German TV channel Arte on 13 November 2019. The title of this movie is interesting inasmuch as the rediscovered “chef-d’œuvre” in question (“masterpiece” in English) is in fact the American version of The Madonna of the yarnwinder of c. 1501-1510 (New York, private collection), a well-known Leonardesque painting, here ambiguously upgraded as by Leonardo himself following its recent cleaning, yet still deserving the traditional attribution to a Milanese pupil since it doesn’t comply with the artistic standards usually encountered in original Leonardos.

Note 3: Stricto sensu glazes are perfectly transparent layers of tinted paint, mostly used to brighten or deepen the tone of the underlying layer or to modify it: a bright transparent blue glaze laid over a yellow underlayer will thus create a green visually. Given that the flesh tones cover a range of pale, opalescent pinks, some white and added touches of relatively opaque pigments must be employed instead of transparent ones – while much diluted – in the meticulous oil techniques encountered in the late 15th century Italian schools, the result of which is a translucent, thin veil-like paint film, hence the term of velatura (veil) in Italian. For the physics of glazes, see Ségolène Bergeon and Pierre Curie, Peinture & dessin, vocabulaire typologique et technique, 2 vols., Paris, 2009, vol. 2, p. 738.

Note 4: Cf., successively, my following articles addressing this particular issue: “The Unrestorable Sfumato“, Achademia Leonardi Vinci, vol. VI, 1993, p. 238-241; “L’analyse esthético-technique des peintures de chevalet anciennes”, Science et Technologie de la Conservation et de la restauration des oeuvres d’art et du patrimoine, n° 3, septembre 1993, p. 5-50, p. 33-41; “Vinci au Louvre. Restauration de la Sainte Anne: suspension du chantier”, Double Liaison, physique, chimie et économie des peintures et adhésifs, t. XLII, n° 467-468, 1995, p. 29-33; “The Mona Lisa: Should a Myth be Restored?”, Achademia Leonardi Vinci, vol. VIII, 1995, p. 232-236; “Pourquoi il ne faut pas restaurer La Joconde“, L’Estampille-L’Objet d’art, n° 328, octobre 1998, p. 26-33; “Why the Mona Lisa Might Not Survive Modern Day Conservation Treatment”, The Proceedings of the Art, Law and Crises of Connoisseurship Conference, held at the Society of Antiquaries of London, 1 December, 2015, ArtWatch UK Journal, n° 31, 2017, p. 18-31 (hereafter ArtWatch Conference, 2015).

Note 5: This is notably the case in the Louvre’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (the Saint Anne), in which St. Anne’s face, displaying subtle transitions between light and shade comparing the impalpable effects in the Mona Lisa, betrays the presence of Leonardo’s “complex blending”, thus explaining the very thin, flat and translucent paint layer in that section where very poor quantities of lead white were used (unless in very small quantity, the latter pigment is inappropriate to this type of technique). Conversely, the Child’s face contains lead white in the lights substantially, and so in accordance with the far less complex, traditional blending of tones (see below chapter V, the passage about Leonardo’s sfumato technique).

Note 6: Cf. respectively, Léonard de Vinci, Paris, musée du Louvre, 24 October 2019 – 24 February 2020, catalogue by Vincent Delieuvin and Louis Frank (hereafter Paris, 2019-2020); Jean-Pierre Mohen, Michel Menu, Bruno Mottin et al., Mona Lisa. Inside the painting, English. ed., Paris, 2006 (hereafter Paris, 2006).

Note 7: Cf. Paris, 2006, p. 88-89, figs. 146 and 148.

Note 8: Cf. Paris, 2006, p. 90.

Note 9: Cf. Paris, 2019-2020, p. 368.

Note 10: Cf. Mady Elias and Pascal Cotte, “Multispectral camera and radiative transfer equation used to depict Leonardo’s sfumato in Mona Lisa”, Applied Optics, vol. 47, n° 16, June 2008, p. 1-8. The conclusion of the essay states that “The diffuse reflectance spectra recorded by a multispectral camera after a virtual varnish removal prove that the sfumato of Mona Lisa is made of a single pigment with a small volume concentration, an umber, very common in Italy in the 16th century” (p. 8).

Note 11: Besides the note sent to the authors in June 2008, much dialogue occurred on the subject with Engineer Pascal Cotte when the latter was co-heading the French scientific laboratory Lumière Technology and, more recently, in emails exchanged with him on November 1st and December 1st, 2020.

Note 12: Cf. Michael Daley, “Art’s Toxic Assets and a Crisis of Connoisseurship”, ArtWatch online, 30 September 2014; Michael Daley, “Bertram Nicholls: Doing and Saying”, Jackdaw, March-April 2021, p. 16-19 (p. 18).

Note 13: Cf. Maria Teresa Fiorio, “Leonardo’s Portrait of a Musician and some reflections on his Milanese Workshop”, Leonardo da Vinci’s Technical Practice, Michel Menu editor, Paris, 2015, p. 153-161 (hereafter Menu et al., 2014).

Note 14: Cf. Ségolène Bergeon Langle, “L’appel à la science peut-il décevoir ?”/ “Can Science Deliver Its Promises To Art ?”, ArtWatch Conference, 2015, p. 38-47 (p. 42-43 and p. 46-47).

Note 15: Cf. Jacques Franck, “Léonard de Vinci. De la Sainte Anne de Londres à la Sainte Anne du Louvre: le véritable déroulement d’une création”, ArtItalies, revue de l’Association des Historiens de l’Art Italien, n° 25, 2019, p. 122-138, Introduction by Ségolène Bergeon Langle. Available on https:/www.academia.edu

Note 16: Cf. James Beck with Michael Daley, Art Restoration. The Culture, the Business, and the Scandal, 1st ed., London, 1993, 2nd ed. New York and London, 1996.

Note 17: Cf. Carlo Pedretti and Carlo Vecce, Leonardo da Vinci. Libro di Pittura. Codice Urbinate lat. 1270 nella Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2 vol., Florence, 1995; Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo da Vinci on Painting. A Lost Book (Libro A) reassembled from the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas 1270 and from the Codex Leicester, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964 (hereafter Pedretti and Vecce, 1995).

Note 18: Cf. Franco Brunello: Cennino Cennini, il libro dell’arte, annotato e commentato da Franco Brunello…, Vicenza, Neri Pozza publisher, 1971, reed., 1982.The problem raised here is a crucial one. Many essays dealing with Leonardo on painting (perspective as applied to art, colour theory, etc.) have been published in the course of years, a leading one being John Shearman’s “Leonardo’s colour and chiaroscuro” (Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 25, 1962, p. 13-47). While of great interest, these researches cannot but stand as strictly theoretical for want of methodical comparison with pragmatic data relating to traditional practice, to the secure interpretation of ancient texts on technique (see below the passage on Leonardo’s sfumato technique in the light of Baldinucci’s Vocabolario and Lomazzo’s Tempio), or to significant scientific – and indisputable – evidence.

Note 19: About sfumato, sfumare, fumosa, fummo ben sfumate, etc., see Jacques Franck, “La pratique du “micro-divisionnisme” dans l’atelier de Léonard de Vinci”, ArtItalies, revue de l’Association des Historiens de l’Art Italien, n° 20, 2014, p. 4-16, Introduction by Ségolène Bergeon Langle, p. 5-6, notes 6-8 included (hereafter Franck, 2014). Available on https:/www.academia.edu

Note 20: Cf. Martin Kemp, “Leonardo and Sfumare. More than Meets the Eye”, Paragone. Leonardo in Comparison, Johannes Gebbhardt/Frank Zöllner (Eds.), Petersberg (Germany), 2021, p. 155 -161(hereafter Kemp, 2021).

Note 21: “[Modo di colorire in tela] e dà l’incarnazioni con penelli di setole, e cosi fresche farai l’ombra sfumata a tuo modo (…) Sfumato che tu hai, lascia seccare”; C. U., fol. 161v, after a lost original c. 1490-1495; my translation.

Note 22: Cf. Jacques Franck, “The invention of ‘sfumato'” in exh. catalogue The Mind of Leonardo. The Universal Genius at work, ed. Paolo Galluzzi, Uffizi Gallery, Florence 2006-2007, p. 338-357 (p. 346 on “the simple fusion of colours”) (hereafter, Franck, 2006-2007); Franck, 2014, p. 6.

Note 23: cf. Franck, 2014, p. 5, note 8 included (blaireautage).

Note 24: cf. Franck, 2006-2007, p. 347 (“the complex fusion of colours”).

Note 25: Cf. Kemp, 2021, p. 161.

Note 26: Cf. Filippo Baldinucci, Vocabolario toscano dell’arte del disegno, nel quale si esplicano i propri termini e voci, non solo della Pittura, Scultura & Architettura; ma ancora di altre Arti a quelle subordinate, e che abbiano per fondamento il Disegno, Florence, 1681, p. 151 (facsimile ed. S.P.E.S., Florence, July 1985). For the English translation of Baldinucci’s full text on sfumare, see Kemp, 2021, p. 160.

Note 27: Cf. Kemp, 2021, p. 159.

Note 28: “Colorare di Lionardo] [dipingeva la forma umana] con una nobil furia di colorito (…) dandogli le ombre, & i lumi variatamente, con veli sopra veli” (“he painted [in the human form] the shades and lights in diverse ways with noble and impetuous colours, placing veils over veils”), my translation. Cf. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Idea del Tempio della Pittura di Gio. Paolo Lomazzo pittore. Nella quale egli discorre dell’origine, e fondamento delle cose contenute nel suo trattato dell’arte della pittura, Milan, 1590, p. 49-50. Strangely enough, in the same essay (Kemp 2021) the author says (p. 160, note 24) that all the necessary analyses of Leonardo’s glazing (hence sfumato) techniques are presented in Leonardo da Vinci’s Technical Practice: Paintings, Drawings and Influence/ La pratique technique de Léonard de Vinci : Peintures, Dessins et Influence, ed. by Michel Menu, Paris, 2014, but despite excellent papers from serious specialists, among whom Elizabeth Walmsley (on the Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci), Carmen Bambach (on scientific evidence in the study of Leonardo’s drawings), or Alan Donnithorne and Joanna Russel (on the “faded” metal point drawings in the Royal Collection), nowhere is found any such study in that publication.

Note 29: Cf. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Translated by Gaston Du C. de Vere, Introduction by Kenneth Clark, 3 vol., New York, 1979, vol. 2, p. 789.

Note 30: What precedes reveals the persistent conflict in art history between critical observation and, notably, the questionable belief that, in factual matters like technique, information from ancient treatises or documents can be deciphered effortlessly, theorized thanks to improvised rationales (i. e., strange to studio traditional practices) and then delivered to the academic world as sound, reliable truths without any experimental testing out – thus proving both whimsical and the obvious negation of methodical research.

Note 31: Cf. René Huyghe, “Le nettoyage des peintures”, Museum, vol. 3, 1950; René Huyghe, “le nettoyage et la restauration des peintures anciennes: position du problème”, Alumni, vol. XIX, 1950; René Huyghe, “Le problème du dévernissage des peintures anciennes et le Musée du Louvre”, Musées et Monuments, Unesco, Paris, tome II, 1951; Cesare Brandi, “Il Ristabilimento dell’ unità potenziale dell’ opera dell’ arte”, Bolletino dell ‘Istituto Centrale del Restauro, n° 2, 1950; Cesare Brandi, “Il restauro dell’opera d’arte secondo l’istanzia estetica o dell’ artisticità”, Bolletino dell’ Istituto Centrale di Restauro, 13, 1953; Cesare Brandi, Teoria del restauro, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome, 1963.

Note 32: More specifically Prof. Parra specialized in the differential vision of colour.

Note 33: Cf. Madeleine Grawitz, Méthode des sciences sociales, Paris, 1975, 9th ed. 1993, p. 290-293.

Note 34: Cf. Ségolène Bergeon Langle et Georges Brunel, La restauration des oeuvres d’Art. Vade-mecum en quelques mots, Paris, 2014, p. 204-206 (Interdisciplinarité).

Note 35: On the matter of experience prevailing over whimsical theory, see Leonardo’s severe admonition to his contemporaries in the Codex Atlanticus, fol. 327 v (119 v-a), which roughly states that his works are “the issue of pure and simple experience, who is the one true mistress [whose rules] are sufficient to enable you to know the true from the false”, thus blaming “the authority of certain men held in the highest reverence by their inexperienced judgements”. Cf. Jean Paul Richter, The Literary works of Leonardo da Vinci. Compiled & Edited from the Original Manuscripts by Jean Paul Richter, 1st ed. London, 1883, revised ed. Oxford, 1939, paperback ed. New York, 1970, § 12.

Note 36: A noxious rumour circulated from 2012 onwards concerning my title and standing as a permanent consulting expert to the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA (which title Carlo Pedretti conferred in 1997 and published in Achademia Leonardi Vinci, vol. X – see Fig. 23). The objections carried a baseless insinuation that I had purported to be a member of staff at the University of California, Los Angeles at a time when Pedretti still lived in California but had become a professor emeritus. In truth, the Armand Hammer Center’s postal address remained at UCLA until Pedretti moved back to Italy and our Center transferred to the University of Urbino, at which point, I received precise written guidance from him for the appropriate change and designation of my title. Although the Center had been associated to UCLA, neither Pedretti nor I ever contended that my expertise had been hired by the University itself when I was appointed in 1997. In early 2016, Carlo manifested his intention of granting me the same position in the then projected Pedretti Foundation, an intention which he confirmed in a signed document six weeks before his death on 5 January 2018 (Fig. 24). Regardless of offensive personal attacks, I will continue to denounce the artistically perverse attempted upgradings and disastrously damaging Leonardo restorations that noted interested parties boldly present as “miraculous recoveries of the original”.

Note 37: Note 37: Cf. Silvia Costa-Brizio, “Autour de G. Manzani, éditeur du Traité de la Peinture (1817)”, Léonard de Vinci entre France et Italie “miroir profond et sombre”, Actes du Colloque International de l’Université de Caen, 3-4 octobre 1996, Silvia Fabrizio-Costa and Jean-Pierre Le Goff eds., Caen 1999, p. 193-211.

Note 38: The outcome of the cleaning project of the Last Supper was to result unavoidably bad for one essential reason: the enormous portion of missing original material, possibly 60 to 80%. From close up photographs one can see the extent to which the mural was wrecked; in many places it amounts to several square meters, where just the blank wall is left. The lacunary areas being proportionally far more important than those of the retrieved original vestiges (some of them, nevertheless, are strikingly beautiful), planning the resurrection of the true image of Leonardo’s masterpiece made it a vain challenge right at the outset. The repainting, however tactful the way it has been processed, is now what mostly constitutes the mural’s image, which, of necessity, is nothing but a skilled, yet deceptive, modern reconstruction. The faithful representation of what the Last Supper once was lies in the best copies of the work executed by Leonardo’s disciples or followers, in particular those kept in the Royal Academy of Arts in London (by Giampietrino) and in Tongerlo Abbey in Belgium (by Solario?). Cf. Jacques Franck, “The Last Supper, 1497-1997: The Moment of Truth”, Achademia Leonardi Vinci, vol. X, p. 165-182; Pinin Brambilla Barcilon and Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo. The Last Supper, London, 2001.

Note 39: Cf. BBC News, Entertainment and Arts,” Sotheby’s declares ‘Frans Hals’ work a forgery, 6 October 2016. The painting had been sold for £ 8.5m in 2011 and had been classified “national treasure” by the French Ministry of Culture in 2008 following a favourable advice from the Louvre Museum in Paris (on the latter point, cf. Quentin Buvelot and Blaise Ducos, “A Rediscovered Portrait by Frans Hals”, The Burlington Magazine, February 2014, vol. 156, n° 1331 p. 102-103

November 25, 2021 | Categories: news | Leave A Comment »

Review: Peter Freeth RA – 40 Years of Aquatints

A remarkable show of haunting monochromatic prints is running at the Art Space Gallery (until 8 October). As can be seen in a short film made by the gallery’s director, Michael Richardson, Peter Freeth, who works without technical assistance or commercial collaboration, has devised a novel form of printing in which all parts of the plate are bitten simultaneously in the acid bath.

Each printed plate constitutes a richly allusive distillation of twinned reflections on some aspect of life and art. The catalogue includes two essays on Freeth’s method and production by fellow Royal Academician print-makers Anne Desmet and Michael Sandle. The latter notes that, precisely because of the non-participation of technical print-makers, Freeth’s etchings offer a view into the artist’s soul. The former discloses that despite his Slade painting school training, Freeth’s motifs derive not so much from life dutifully observed but from acts of “imagination, from notes and swift sketches, plays and poetry – Shakespeare and William Blake – and the Bible”.

For sure, the prints now hang before the viewer, immobile, as fixed and frozen at their precise moment of manufacture but, far from being pinned like butterflies to a board, the resulting images seep out of the paper and into our consciousness, drawing/commanding the viewer into engaged participation. A prone, injured man grips our attention not a jot less than it does that of the depicted passers-by and the Good Samaritan and his donkey (see Freeth’s Study for the Good Samaritan, Fig. 1, below) – we see the scene and by courtesy of an awesome artistic alchemy become players within its great drama. Is Freeth’s monumental The Big Black Bird Again – with beak as strong as a bolt-cropper (Fig. 2, below) – a sentinel or a menace to us? It is no pet.

Above, Fig, 1: Freeth’s Study for the Good Samaritan – 14 × 15 cm. Edition of 30

Above, Fig. 2: Top, The Big Black Bird Again – 80 x 42cm. Edition of 30; above, Horse – 48 × 60 cm. Edition of 30

There are no fewer than seventy-six such works of varying sizes but constant, unsettling power in this show (– we show five more below). Every single one is monumental regardless of size. All reward and merit full and intense contemplation.

Above, Fig. 3: Mr Parkinson Practices his Surrender – 26 × 23 cm. Edition of 45

Above, Fig. 4: Would You Adam’n Eve it? 11 × 17 cm. Edition of 30

Above, Fig. 5: A Glimpse of the Tempest – 42 × 60 cm. Edition of 30

Above, Fig. 6: Dreaming of Babylon – 42 × 33 cm. Edition of 18

Above, Fig. 7: Divided City with Broken Aqueduct – 43 × 64 cm. Edition of 30

Michael Daley, 28 September 21

September 28, 2021 | Categories: news | Leave A Comment »

Further thoughts about the ex-Cook Collection Salvator Mundi*

The Leonardo Salvator Mundi controversy turns on which artist’s hand is – or which artists’ hands are – present on the painting. Many scholars agree that more than one hand is present. Here, it is demonstrated that while two hands are present, neither belongs to Leonardo. [M.D.]

Jacques Franck, an art historian and a painter trained in Old Master techniques, was a curator/exhibitor in the Uffizi Gallery’s exhibition “La Mente di Leonardo” (2006) and served on the International scientific committee advising the restoration of Leonardo’s St Anne in the Louvre (2010-2012), where he also advised the restoration of Leonardo’s Belle Ferronnière (2014-2015) and that of Leonardo’s St John- the- Baptist (2016). A regular contributor to scientific journals, he is completing a research thesis on Leonardo’s sfumato technique at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.

It is commonly believed in the art market that the more you argue and produce literature to defend a work’s authenticity, the less authentic it probably is. The Mona Lisa does not need any support to impose its genuineness as a heavenly Leonardo masterpiece and as such nobody has ever doubted it through the centuries, for it would appear nonsensical to any reasonable art historian. This is far from being the case with the Cook/New York version of the Leonardesque Salvator Mundi (Fig. 1, below) about which doubts have arisen all over the planet shortly after its first appearance as a newly-born Leonardo in London in 2011 at the National Gallery. Suspicion has reached such a point recently, that the work’s earliest supporters, Martin Kemp, Margaret Dalivalle and Robert Simon considered it necessary to publish in late 2019 a substantial three-part essay in defence of the painting – Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi & The Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts – that had originally been promised 2011. The following lines are by no means an attempt to discuss any of the latter authors’ positions, but are just an afterthought about what struck me most in the controversial panel when I first saw it several years ago. Given the existence of two drapery studies in Leonardo’s hand, kept at the Royal Library in Windsor Castle (Figs. 2 and 3, below) and close to the Leonardesque sequence of Salvator Mundi, no critic, among those less convinced of the master’s effective contribution to the actual making of the ex-Cook/New York Salvator Mundi has gone as far as doubting it completely. This must however be envisaged on serious material grounds and it would mean, as we shall see, a step forward in understanding studio practice in the master’s bottega. Besides the firm attribution to Leonardo himself by Kemp and others, three authors’ names have been suggested until now: those of Luini, by Matthew Landrus; Boltraffio, by Carmen Bambach; and Salai by Franck. Yet, except myself – on further thinking – none of the latter experts exclude, even as a minor share, the presence of Leonardo’s brushwork in various details of the composition. Consideration of these very different views, although seemingly paradoxical, might in part help solve the enigma concerning the organisation and mode of functioning of Leonardo’s studio.

Above, Fig. 1: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai with the assistance of G. A. Boltraffio or B. Luini?), Christ as Salvator Mundi, c. 1506/8-1513, oil on wood panel, 65. 5 x 45.1 cm (private collection).

Above, Fig. 2: Leonardo da Vinci, Drapery study, c. 1506/8-1510, red chalk on prepared paper, 22 x 13.9 cm, Windsor Castle, Royal Library n° 12524.

Fig. 3: Leonardo da Vinci, Drapery studies, c. 1506/8-1510, red chalk on paper, 16.4 x 15.8 cm, Windsor Castle, Royal Library n° 12525.

Above, Fig. 4: Pietro da Novellara, Letter of 3rd April 1501 to Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua, Mantua, Archivio di Stato.

Above, Fig. 5: Pietro da Novellara, Letter of 14th April 1501 to Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua, New York, private collection.

Above, Fig. 6: Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Isabella d’Este, 1500, black chalk, red chalk and ochre chalk on paper, 61.1 x 46.5 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre.

The situation can be summed up as follows: we know from two letters (Figs. 4 and 5, above) sent on 3 and 14 April 1501 by Pietro da Novellara, Isabella d’Este’s emissary in Florence, that Leonardo was overworked in those days, being involved in many projects while committed to the French King and his Court. Nevertheless, now and again the master – as is customary in art studios at all times – would retouch his assistant’s copies (or variants) after his works. Also, Salai, then twenty-one, appears to have become someone essential, holding a position of trust in the studio’s organisation (he was, for instance, instrumental in Novellara’s meeting with Leonardo). At this stage, he might well have taken over some commissions from Leonardo who, as we know, could not cope with the lesser ones not from the leading political powers – no painted portrait of Isabella or pictures meant for sacred purposes (i. e. any specific commission for an altarpiece) followed Leonardo’s drawn portrait of her (Fig. 6, above). Whatever the case, when comparing the infrared reflectograms of the New York Salvator Mundi and of Salai’s Head of Christ in the Ambrosiana (two works that bear numerous distinct material and aesthetic similarities that are strange to Leonardo’s own style and technique), evidence that Salai’s contribution to the New York panel was crucial cannot be discarded: the latter picture’s preliminary sketching out technique is without any doubt close to Salai’s own very recognizable practice, as observed in infrared light in his Head of Christ and other attributed works. The rarity of such a resemblance cannot be considered coincidental with paintings produced by one and the same studio (Figs. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15, below).

Above, Fig. 7: Salai, Head of Christ, 1511, oil on wood panel, 55 x 37. 5 cm, Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. Salai’s Head of Christ (obviously deriving from a workshop Salvator Mundi prototype) testifies to what Christ’s face in the Cook/New York version of Salvator Mundi, now greatly damaged, including the eyes, probably looked like at the outset. The staring eyes with a ‘metaphysical’ expression were necessarily quite different when the now missing dark brown pigments forming the iris were still unimpaired.

Above, Fig. 8: Infrared scan of Salai’s Head of Christ. The infrared image of the panel reveals the underlying heavy, systematic and unmodelled dark contours outlining the shape of the head down to the shoulders and that of the face and neck.

Above, Fig. 9: Infrared scan of the New York Salvator Mundi (a document of September 2007 that was not released on Dianne Modestini’s website, salvatormundirevisited.com, before 14 August 2020 (10 days after the present post’s release): the only IR scan reproduced there until then, still shown to date, was a later one made of the picture during the restoration process when the background was already repainted, hence the dark, blocked image in that section). Better preserved than the other zones of the composition, the oversimplified, thick and sharp outlining of the head (see upper right and top) compares well what is observed in Fig. 8, above: the sketching out work seems in the same hand. See also Fig. 11, below.

Above, Fig. 10: Infrared scan of the New York Salvator Mundi (detail of head).

Above, Fig. 11: Photograph in visible light of the New York Salvator Mundi before restoration (2006). Despite the heavy damage and paint losses, the thick outlining of the head, face and neck is still visible here on the right hand-side of the panel. Also, the intense sfumato effect in the face and neck now seen in the restored panel doesn’t show in the 2006 photograph. The recent conservation treatment  seems to have introduced an inappropriate  evanescence resembling Leonardo’s style of his late years. As revealed by the 2006 photograph, this section’s modelling was in fact firmer  and the shapes better defined, thus much more consistent with the Ganay version (Fig. 24, below).

Above, Fig. 12: Infrared reflectogram of Leonardo’s Saint Anne in the Louvre (detail). No heavy outlining appears in the underdrawing of the head of Leonardo’s Saint Anne in the Louvre. The contours and undermodelling are light and subtle.

Above, Fig. 13: Infrared reflectogram of Leonardo’s Saint John-the-Baptist in the Louvre. Strong dark shadowing defines here the shape of the face and that of the neck. Yet, its treatment is not systematic, just softly blended and evanescent, contrary to the sharpness seen in most parts of Figs. 8, 9, 10 and 11, above.

Above, Fig. 14: Attributed to Salai, Saint John-the-Baptist in a landscape, c. 1508-1515 (?), oil on wood panel, 73 x 50. 9 cm, Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.

Above, Fig. 15: Infrared reflectogram of Salai’s Saint John-the-Baptist in a landscape in the Ambrosiana. Another work after Leonardo traditionally attributed to Salai. Compare Figs. 8, 9 and 10, above: Salai’s heavy and very dark sketching out does not match Leonardo’s grace and subtlety perceivable even in the preliminary graphic stages of his own works (Figs. 12 and 13, above). No thick dark contour outlines the top of the Saint’s head because the background is a very luminous one here.

However, taking into account Novellara’s testimony regarding Leonardo’s occasional retouchings of his assistant’s copies, and, at the same time the existence of original red chalk drapery studies in close relation with the Salvator Mundi workshop sequence it has been assumed, yet without further development, that Leonardo acted in the making of the best parts of the 2017 New York sale picture – specifically, in Christ’s face and blessing hand. Within a standard scholarly rationale, such a scenario might well be considered acceptable, but it cannot be so considered from an experimentally and artistically informed perspective. Effectively, when addressing the pragmatic aspects of painting that are necessarily implied when assessing which part of a given work is attributable to one hand or another, historical research cannot sensibly proceed without investigating, as much as possible, the practical context of Renaissance art studios, in which sphere scholars often underestimate the highly informative potentials of artistic technical issues. In this regard, enough technical evidence of practice is displayed in the New York Salvator Mundi visually to help us grasp some basic information. Firstly, taking Leonardo’s original productions (both paintings and drawings) as a means of comparison, nowhere can be seen in his oeuvre as many inconsistencies as displayed here. Among them, the oddly long and thin nose, the simplified mouth, the over shadowy neck (with hardly any correctly defined anatomical detail in this large dark section), the stiff blue drapery, the mechanical hair ringlets, the childishly conceived left hand, the flat orb, and, above all, despite their neat finish, the wrongly raised fingers in the blessing hand, a quite inconceivable depiction from a brilliant artist like Leonardo. Secondly, what matters most is not this amount of clumsily painted details, because, while clumsy, they are still globally right, and thus plausible with regard to real life.

Much more preoccupying are the raised fingers, one of which rotates clockwise, displaying to the onlooker a full view of its nail, a detail that would be practically out of sight here should the rules of perspective be dealt with properly (Fig. 16a and 16b, below). Any academic art student well knows no teacher worthy of the name will accept anatomical inconsistency: it represents vis-à-vis classic art practice a fundamental transgression, much like false notes or rhythmical inaccuracy in classical music and must be deleted. Good art teachers always want that their students’ faulty anatomical forms be redrawn correctly. With Leonardo, a leading teacher and one of the greatest anatomists ever, there is little chance that he might have painted the faulty fingers, and hardly any possibility, either, that this anomalous detail be validated in one of his studio’s productions without a good reason. If anyone were to doubt this, it must be reminded that the Florentine artist had studied the movement of the hand and fingers extensively as appears notably in the Codex Atlanticus (fol. 124 verso (45 v-a) and fol. 273 a recto (99 v-a); J. P. Richter’s anthology, §§ 353-354). In addition, it should be noted that in various Christ Blessing painted by the Leonardesques in the same period (except for the studio Salvator Mundi copies in which the blessing hand is faithful to that in the Cook version – see Fig. 17, below -, following the master’s exemplary lesson (Fig. 16b, below), the finger movement of the blessing hand is perfectly correct (Figs. 18 and 19, below). Therefore, it is far from proven that the master, contrary to his own well-established concepts and practice, could have suddenly changed his mind about the orthodox representation of a human hand in a single picture and nowhere else in his other paintings.

Above, Fig. 16: [a] The New York Salvator Mundi (detail of blessing hand); [b] Leonardo da Vinci, the Annunciation, Florence, Uffizi Gallery, detail of the Virgin’s proper left hand (mirrored image showing the young Leonardo’s perfect treatment of a hand gesture close to the New York Salvator Mundi’s blessing hand).

Above, Fig. 17: A sequence of 16th century variations after a Salvator Mundi prototype produced by Leonardo da Vinci’s main assistants c. 1506/8-1513. Compare the blessing hand in Figs. 1 and 16a, above.

Above, Fig. 18: Marco d’Oggiono, Young Christ Blessing, early 16th century, oil on wood panel, 35 x 26 cm, Rome, Borghese Gallery.

But if Leonardo had little to do with the New York Salvator Mundi beyond the Windsor sheets, who else might have improved the blessing hand to the point where its disputable anatomy and movement went unnoticed by many respectable scholars? The response lies explicitly in the fact that long before leaving Milan for several years in late 1499, Leonardo was in charge of an important studio and had to run it so as to have enough availability to face his very many and demanding activities as a military engineer, architect, cartographer, hydrologist, etc., and, at the same time, to honour various other commitments (in particular regarding the huge Sforza cavallo), or to organise festive Court celebrations inherent to Duke Ludovico Sforza’s service. It is therefore clear that his studio was assisted by excellent painters like Boltraffio, Marco d’Oggiono, Ambrogio De’ Predis and possibly other skilled, yet unrecorded artists, well before his return to Florence in 1500 after Ludovico’s fall. It must also be considered that, because he had the human and artistic means to perform such a challenge, in other words a well-trained team, Leonardo in person not only accepted but actually encouraged his best assistants to imitate his art to such a degree that no unspecialized onlooker would detect a difference. This was necessarily the case when the Cook version of the Salvator Mundi was painted (c. 1506/8-1513?), especially between 1506-1508 when, in Milan again, Leonardo was legally obliged to complete the Virgin of the Rocks, probably by then the London version (Fig. 20, below). In effect, rather than discern distinctly, one can guess in the altarpiece the presence of Boltraffio’s brush among other ones: the homogenous result of these intermingled contributions produces visually a global ‘Leonardo effect’ most difficult to dissect into recognizable individual styles. This aspect is particularly well illustrated with the Madonna Litta, to which Leonardo and Boltraffio had so tightly collaborated many years before, around 1490, that it is almost impossible to know who did what and where in the panel (Fig. 21, below). Later on, c. 1507/8-1513, another assistant and fully trained maestro, Bernardino Luini, whose presence in Leonardo’s bottega is not formally documented, just probable, would demonstrate his great ability to assimilate Leonardo’s style and technique. Many of his works betray this outstanding mimetic facility, in particular the handsome Christ Inv. 80 kept in the Ambrosiana in Milan (Fig. 22, below), whose blessing hand is strangely close to that seen in the Cook version of the Salvator Mundi, although Luini’s Christ’s correctly drawn limb doesn’t display the perspective and anatomical inconsistencies observable in the New York sale picture.

Above, Fig. 19: Giampietrino, Salvator Mundi, c. 1530 (?), tempera on wood panel, 50 x 39 cm, Moscow, Pushkin Museum.

Above, Fig. 20: Leonardo da Vinci and workshop, the Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1493/95-1508, oil on wood panel, 189.5 x 120 cm, London, National Gallery.

Above, Fig. 21: Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio under Leonardo’s supervision, the Madonna Litta, c. 1491-1495, tempera on wood panel transferred to canvas, 42 x 33 cm, St Petersburg, The State Hermitage. This small devotional painting has long been thought a genuine Leonardo until two preparatory studies in Boltraffio’s hand, completing Leonardo’s own project but paid little attention before 1990, were properly linked to the panel by D. A. Brown and M. T. Fiorio, thus proving that Boltraffio’s contribution was extensive. The particularly meticulous execution of the smooth and waxy sfumato in the flesh zones is very close here to the modelling encountered in the Salvator Mundi’s blessing hand (Cook/New York version, Fig. 16a, above).

Above, Fig. 22: Bernardino Luini, Christ Blessing, c. 1525 (?), tempera and oil on wood panel, 43 x 37cm, Milan, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.

Salai had of course never reached that level of accomplishment although by 1500-1510 he was probably in charge of the lesser commissions which Leonardo could not execute for want of time (some of the copies after the Louvre Saint Anne might testify to his specific involvement in the studio’s activity (Fig. 23, below). In my eyes it is doubtless that right at the outset Salai’s share in the New York Salvator Mundi prevailed and that Leonardo had practically none, because nothing that is absolutely typical of his own manner of making appears in the work. For example, on close examination it is obvious that the swirling folds in the sleeve of Christ’s blessing hand, a detail in which some specialists recognize Leonardo’s own hand, is in fact a very simplified motif taken from the far more complex Windsor drapery studies: any skilled collaborator could execute this passage with brio (Figs. 1, 2 and 3, above). However, given that the typology of the underlying layers in the New York panel so greatly resembles that encountered in Salai’s Head of Christ of 1511 in the Ambrosiana and – as noticed by me while completing this essay – in the Ganay version also (one, moreover, in which the design of the Saviour’s face strangely resembles Salai’s own Christ (Figs. 7, above, and 24, below), the debate can only waver over who handled the improvements and ‘finishings’ in the painting in attempt to make it as close to Leonardo as was the case with the Madonna Litta (albeit with Boltraffio’s involvement being far more important in the latter picture). Also, according to when the Cook version of the Salvator Mundi might be considered to have been painted, the name of Salai’s collaborator will emerge more conspicuously: Boltraffio is a likely candidate by, say, 1508, at the time he was perhaps helping Leonardo terminate the London Virgin of the Rocks, and Luini before Leonardo’s voyage to Rome in 1513. I would personally favour Boltraffio’s contribution because his assimilation of Leonardo’s style was perhaps even deeper than that of Luini – besides, he had known Salai for a long time and, for that reason, might have accepted to improve the blessing hand as a friendly move towards Leonardo’s protégé, hence the pentimento in the thumb. Boltraffio, for sure, was a great artist and no anatomical mistakes like that in the Salvator Mundi’s blessing hand are seen in his paintings. While the making process of the New York Salvator Mundi’s blessing hand and those in the Mona Lisa (Figs. 25 and 26, below) look roughly similar, the likeness is superficial and deceptive for a clear distinction exists both in terms of their technical executions and their visual effects. While the technique used in the Mona Lisa is much more evanescent and allusive to the tiniest detail, thus producing an impressive feeling of both real life and mystery, the careful, waxy modelling of the Salvator Mundi‘s blessing hand appears schoolish by comparison, with a touch of prettiness that is uncharacteristic of Leonardo’s usual vigour. Worthy of note, in the same zone, is the marked use of lead white as seen in the London Virgin of the Rocks, in which Boltraffio’s contribution can hardly be doubted (Fig. 27, below). The X-radiographs of both the New York Salvator Mundi and the Mona Lisa are most revealing about the different ways each artist followed to create the hands (Fig. 28 a and b, below).

Above, Fig. 23: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai?), the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and a lamb, c. 1508-1515 ?, oil on wood panel, 104.8 x 75.5 cm, Florence, Uffizi Gallery.

Above, Fig. 24: The Ganay Salvator Mundi (Leonardo’s workshop), unrestored, viewed in daylight (detail of head). Compare the thickish dark uneven curved outlining of the head (not to confuse with the perfect arc traced just above) as seen in infrared light in the New York Salvator Mundi (Figs. 9 and 10, above) and in Salai’s Head of Christ in infrared light also (Fig. 8, above). The similarity of the facial features in Salai’s Head of Christ and in the Ganay Salvator Mundi (especially the noses with a same shape and curvature) is striking. The obvious artistic/technical interrelation of both pictures with the Cook version of the Salvator Mundi tends to prove that Salai, beyond his own Christ, had a crucial part in the two other works probably jointly with a different artist each time. A very likely scenario since, in addition, the X-radiographs of both Salai’s Head of Christ and that of the Ganay version display global similarities, thus increasing the presumption of the three paintings’ mutual relation.

Above, Fig. 25: The New York Salvator Mundi (detail of blessing hand as in Fig. 16a, above). The sfumato effect here is very analogous to that in the Madonna Litta (Fig. 21, above), in the London version of the Virgin of the Rocks (Figs. 27a and b, below), in which Boltraffio’s noteworthy contribution is presumed, and also, to some extent, in Luini’s Christ blessing (Fig. 22, above). The sweet chalky flesh tones are due to the substantial use of lead white, a pigment producing a white image in X-radiographs.

Above, Fig. 26: Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa, c. 1501- 1510/15, oil on poplar, 77 x 53 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre (detail of hands).

Above, Fig. 27: Leonardo da Vinci and workshop, the Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1493/95-1508; detail of St John: [a] = In direct light, [b] = X-radiograph). [b] shows a white image in the sections containing a substantial quantity of lead white.

Above, Fig. 28: [a] = X-radiograph of the New York Salvator Mundi (detail of blessing hand), [b] = X-radiograph of the Mona Lisa (detail of hands section located by a white oval outlining). It is now an established fact that Leonardo uses less and less lead white in the flesh paint of his fully autograph paintings as his technique develops in subtlety, in particular from 1500 onwards. The X-ray characteristic densely white image revealing the use of lead white in paintings does not appear in the hands of the Mona Lisa, whose forms are not discernible here; conversely, the technique used in the blessing hand of the New York Salvator Mundi is proven very different by X-ray imaging, where the limb’s shape is distinguished clearly. While the latter work is contemporary with the Louvre masterpiece, its execution compares well that of the London version of the Virgin of the Rocks, from the same period also, a studio altarpiece in which Boltraffio’s contribution was very probable and the substantial use of lead white evident (Figs. 20, 27a and 27b, above).

Incidentally, it has sometimes been hypothesized that Leonardo painted Christ’s face on the Salvator Mundi in an “out-of-focus” fashion, thus misty and blurred, in order to mark the spatial distance separating the face and the blessing hand and, thanks to this stylistic trick, suggest visually that the more distinctly shaped limb comes forward like in a real life 3-D effect. Yet, despite the ruined state of the picture when observed without any repaint, either old or recent, no such presumed artistic device can be seen in the otherwise unlike-Leonardo, heavy modelling of what subsists of the face: the overall treatment and definition of the values of light, shade and tone is exactly the same in both Christ’s face and blessing hand (Figs. 1 and 11, above). Whatever the case, a very interesting document appears to support the final supervision of the Cook version of the Salvator Mundi by Boltraffio: the impressive Study for the heads of the Madonna and Child in metal point kept in Chatsworth (Fig. 29, below) shows the extent to which Giovanni Antonio mimics Leonardo’s style (with slight departures that make a big difference) while displaying an unspontaneous, yet brilliant treatment of the Virgin’s hair in a graphic ‘hard-edge’ spirit close to Christ’s somehow systematic curls falling on His proper left shoulder (Figs. 30 and 31, below). A feature that is strikingly at variance with Leonardo’s usual treatment of curled hairs in his late years – as clearly appears in the Angel’s more evanescent and fluffy curls in the London version of the Virgin of the Rocks (the latter figure’s autograph status has always been accepted contrary to the rest of the Holy group) (Fig. 32, below). In fact, cork-screwing curled hairlocks are frequently seen in compositions not by Leonardo like, for instance, the Prado Mona Lisa, and the two studio productions of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, one belonging to the Duke of Buccleuch, another kept in a private collection in New York (Figs. 33, 34a and b, 35a and b, below). More might be said on the inconsistencies in the New York Salvator Mundi panel, notably Christ’s proper left hand holding the crystal orb where the fingers are arranged in a strictly regular and unnatural sequence that somehow evokes the ribs of a small upturned umbrella (Fig. 36 a and b, below). Needless to say, such a solecism cannot denote Leonardo’s presence in that section – whereas, an additional pointer finally reveals that, if not Boltraffio in Leonardo’s studio, some other talented artist could have coped with the blessing hand without problem so as to make it closer to the master’s spirit: the remarkable Study of a hand in the Ambrosiana, sometimes attributed to Ambrogio De’Predis or to Marco d’Oggiono, is more eloquent than any words in this connection (Fig. 37, below).

Before ending, another oddity of the blessing hand should be mentioned, given its prime importance. Thanks to their precision, some remarkable visual documents reveal that the pentimento in the thumb increases the suspicion that Leonardo had little to do, if anything at all, in the making of the New York Salvator Mundi (Figs. 38a and 38b, below) . Interestingly, the Modestini cleaning has let emerge the initial form of the thumb, which, in fact, was shapeless and ill-defined at the outset, with two thumbs instead of one. Apparently, both were executed during the same painting session and not successively as is often thought. It might be considered that, following Leonardo’s well-known theory of componimento inculto (shapeless rough), the artist had sketched out two thumbs with a view to ultimately select the one best suiting his intentions. But this scenario is hardly acceptable: none of the initially elaborated thumbs is right in terms of anatomy and perspective. Both fingers have in fact been executed on the warm underpaint that served to make the brighter flesh tones, over which layer some basic modelling was painted with darker hues, yet, in each case the thumb was wrong. The more elaborate one, finally shaped as is seen today thanks to Boltraffio’s retouching (or whoever else did it save Leonardo), was seemingly meant to show the thumb’s first phalanx bent and not raised – while nearly in profile, a difficult angle to depict accurately even by a skilled artist. This was not really consistent with the position of the hand – already rather awkward – and this is why the wiser and easer solution was to show the inside of the thumb in front view, now raised and not bent anymore (but still wrong because not defined clearly, thus departing from the orthodox anatomy and movement of any human hand). The abandoned thumb was far too detached from the metacarpal bone to express what characterizes a natural hand gesture (a rough black outline along the right hand-side of that thumb could be an attempt to correct its faulty axis). Should any doubt subsist about Salai’s main authorship in the ex-Cook Collection Salvator Mundi, a further pointer would seem to contradict it doggedly: the confrontation of the unrestored blessing hand ( Fig. 38b, below) with the reversed infrared image of the Ambrosiana’s St John-the-Baptist (attributed to Salai, Figs. 14 and 15 above) reveals the strange similarity of the thumbs in each painting, including the hesitant positioning of the finger, a singular feature seen in both equally (Figs. 39a and b, below ). Under such circumstances, it is difficult to imagine that Leonardo contributed in this project materially, except for advocating the sensible, yet unsatisfactory, solution retained ultimately.

Above, Fig. 29: Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Study for the heads of the Madonna and Child, c. 1498-1500, silverpoint on paper, 29.7 x 22 cm, Chatsworth, Duke of Devonshire and Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement.

Above, Fig. 30: The New York Salvator Mundi (detail of Christ’s ringlets).

Above, Fig. 31: Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Study for the heads of the Madonna and Child (detail of the Virgin’s hair).

Above, Fig. 32: Leonardo da Vinci and workshop, the Virgin of the Rocks (detail of Angel’s hair).

Above, Fig. 33: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Salai?), the Mona Lisa, c. 1501-1515, oil on wood panel, 76. 3 x 53 cm, Madrid, Prado Museum.

Above, Fig. 34: [a] = Detail of curls in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre, [b] = Detail of curls in the Prado Mona Lisa. [a] displays Leonardo’s extremely natural depiction of the sitter’s hair curls in the legendary portrait while [b] reveals the studio’s mechanical treatment of the same detail.

Above, Fig. 35: 35) [a] = Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, c. 1501 (?), oil on wood panel transferred to canvas, 50.2 x 36.4 cm, New York, Private Collection, [b] = Detail of Madonna’s hair.

Above, Fig. 36: [a] = The New York Salvator Mundi (detail of Christ’s proper left hand), [b] = Umbrella pattern comparing the New York Salvator Mundi’s proper left hand.

Above, Fig. 37: Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (Ambrogio De’Predis or Marco d’Oggiono?), c. 1495 (?), Study of hand, metal point and white highlights on light blue paper, 13 x 12.9 cm, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

Above, Fig. 38: [a] The New York Salvator Mundi (detail of blessing hand, restored stage); [b] The New York Salvator Mundi (detail of blessing hand rid of old repaints – see Fig. 11, above). As appears in [b], the dual, hesitant construction of the thumb reveals that its author was not very familiar with human anatomy. Quite obviously, Leonardo’s rigorous precepts to the painter in this field did not apply in any making stage of what stands here as a ‘theoretical hand’ and not one faithful to nature.

Above, Fig. 39: [a] The New York Salvator Mundi (detail of blessing hand rid of old repaints, like in Fig. 38b, above); [b] detail pasted from the reversed infrared image of Salai’s attributed St John-the-Baptist in the Ambrosiana (Figs. 14 and 15, above). A worthwhile comparison insofar as it helps to better situate Salai as an artist and his particular role in Leonardo’s bottega.

Above, Fig. 40: Extract from Salai’s posthumous inventory of the estate of 21st April 1525 (typed transcription).

Given the preceding, and contrary to the generally accepted idea, no determining fact or document proves that the studio productions deriving from Leonardo’s original compositions, whether painted or just sketched out graphically, were inevitably supervised and retouched in all cases by the master in person. And even if it were so, how much of Leonardo’s own work could be quantified in the New York panel as it stood before the recent conservation treatment? On visual examination of the relating technical image (Fig. 11, above), no essential detail suggests that Boltraffio would not have executed it jointly with Salai, especially as what has survived of the original paint layer, notably in Christ’s face and blessing hand, brings enough information to see that Leonardo’s faultless and easily recognizable brushwork must have vanished if the master ever contributed to the work’s execution significantly, because it is indistinguishable, thus missing entirely in the composition as it appears without the Modestini restoration, and so to the point that no claim of its hypothetical former existence can be sustained on sensible, scientific grounds. Against this absence of evidence of Leonardo’s hand on the Cook version of the Leonardesque Salvator Mundi, much solid material exists to propose another attribution that is entirely consistent with what the work really looks like – namely, Salai, jointly with Boltraffio. Such a conclusion, I believe, offers a better understanding of the studio works, which were produced by various permutations of collaboration, in which the master is close spiritually, yet not quite there. It should be noted, additionally, that beyond the above-mentioned artistic and technical flaws, doubts about Leonardo’s authorship are the more justified as a Salvator Mundi painting is recorded and priced 25 scudi in Salai’s posthumous inventory of the estate established on 21 April 1525: “Uno Christo in modo de uno Dio padre”, which was the then designation of such a visual representation of Christ (Fig. 40). Therefore, despite that concise – yet very clear – mention, no objective element opposes the identification of the ex-Cook Collection Salvator Mundi with the recorded Christo since, 1) the New York sale’s IR imaging displays technical features consistent with Salai’s sketching out practice, 2) no documented eventual provenance of this kind has been connected to Leonardo himself by far until now.** (A and B.)

Finally, because Leonardo stands among the greatest artists that ever existed, it is always tempting to increase his very restricted pictorial corpus with works that fall short doing it full justice. Yet, art at this level of accomplishment cannot be speculated about without the necessary critical approach and minimum knowledge of how Renaissance painters used to proceed in their creation, – mostly founded on perfect drawing – especially as in Leonardo’s case, his Treatise on Painting delivers crystal clear data to the researcher regarding its authors’ supremely elevated standards. We must therefore face the truth: this latest case of an upgraded studio item does no justice to Leonardo’s genius; it does not correspond to the highest standards encountered in his original autograph works and theoretical writings on painting. As such, its attribution to Leonardo himself must be rejected and given now, more appropriately, to his close circle of collaborators working on their own while still depending from the master’s occasional suggestions, whether drawn or verbal***.

* I wish to thank Michael Daley warmly for welcoming the present contribution of mine on the ArtWatch UK website and for having adjusted its presentation with the utmost care and kindness.

**A: On this point see in particular, G. Bora, D. A. Brown, M. Carminati, M. T. Fiorio, P. C. Marani, J. Shell, The Legacy of Leonardo. Painters in Lombardy 1490-1530, Skira Editore, Milan, 1998.
**B: See J. Shell and G. Sironi, “Salai and Leonardo’s Legacy”, in The Burlington Magazine,, CXXXIII, no. 1055, pp. 95-108.On Salai’s own pictorial production listed on the 1525 posthumous inventory and the original Leonardo paintings (including the Mona Lisa) which he sold to king Francis I in 1517-1518, see B. Jestaz, “François 1er, Salaï et les tableaux de Léonard”, Revue de l’Art, no. 126, 1999-4, p. 68-72.” On a specific agreement between Leonardo and Ambrogio de’ Predis about the master’s moral rights over the copy of the Virgin of the Rocks, see Grazioso Sironi, Nuovi documenti riguardanti la ‘Vergine delle rocce’ di Leonardo da Vinci, Giunti Barberà, Florence, 1981, p. 23-25 (document VII of 18 August 1508).

*** The recent cleaning of the Louvre’s Bacchus (initially painted as St John in the Wilderness) has revealed that this workshop composition of a higher artistic status than that of the Cook Salvator Mundi did not include the master’s material contribution although he had drawn an elaborate preparatory red chalk study for it (whereabouts unknown since 1973).

Jacques Franck, 3 (& 24) August 2020.

August 3, 2020 | Categories: news | Leave A Comment »

Forthcoming events: The Ben Lewis Salvator Mundi Lecture and the new ArtWatch UK Journal

ArtWatch UK Notices: On October 1st, AWUK holds the tenth Annual James Beck Lecture (Speaker: Ben Lewis, author of The Last Leonardo) in London and publishes its thirty-second members’ Journal “From Sistina to Salvator”

For details of the Beck Memorial Lecture and for AWUK membership details, please contact artwatch.uk@gmail.com

New members will receive the new Journal 32 and Journal 31, The Proceedings of the 2015 LSE Law/ArtWatch UK/ Centre for Art Law conference “Art, Law and Crises of Connoisseurship”.

Michael Daley 20 September 2019

September 20, 2019 | Categories: news | Leave A Comment »

The Louvre Museum’s bizarre charge of “fake information” on the $450 million Salvator Mundi

The Louvre Museum in Paris has attacked one of its own named Leonardo restoration consultants – Jacques Franck – with professional disparagement and an allegation of having conveyed “fake information”.

Above, Fig. 1: Left, the Louvre Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi as when taken in 2005 (still sticky from a recent treatment) to the New York studio of the restorer Dianne Dwyer Modestini; right, as when taken in 2008 by one of the consortium of owners, Robert Simon, to the National Gallery in London for a covert viewing by a small group of Leonardo specialists.

Above, Fig 2: Left, the Louvre Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi as exhibited in the National Gallery’s 2011-12 exhibition Leonardo da Vinci – Painter at the Court of Milan; right, as seen at the end of Modestini’s restoration programmes in 2017 at Christie’s, New York.

Whenever vicious personal attacks are made by institutions on experts, two things should always be considered: what, precisely, is being said; and, what has been left unsaid. The Louvre’s Trumpian “Fake information” slur on Franck was made by its press officers in response to a report by Dalya Alberge in the Sunday Telegraph (“Paris Louvre ‘will not show’ world’s most expensive painting amid doubts over authenticity”) that the Leonardo painting technique specialist, Jacques Franck, has been told by high level politicians that the Louvre Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi will not be included in the Paris Louvre’s forthcoming Leonardo exhibition and that Louvre staff “know that the Salvator Mundi is not a Leonardo”.

Jacques Franck’s role as advisor to the Louvre’s Leonardo restorations

In attempts to defuse and refute Franck’s (honest) testimony, the museum’s press officers have also scattered red herrings and sown misinformation. To the Mailonline (“Is the world’s most expensive painting a FAKE?”) they claimed that:

“M. Franck was part of the scholars who have been consulted 7 or 8 years ago for the restoration of the Saint Ann.

“He is not currently working on the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition and has never been curator for the Louvre.

“His opinion is his personal opinion, not the one of the Louvre.”

It should go without saying that when called by the Louvre to give technical advice, Franck’s expert views are his own and not those of the museum – why else would he be being called in? No one had claimed that Franck is a Louvre curator. No one had claimed he is working on the Louvre’s forthcoming Leonardo exhibition. So, contrary to appearances, nothing was being refuted. However, on the extent and frequency of his contributions, it would seem that the Louvre’s officials have misinformed the museum’s spokeswomen who have in consequence scattered seriously misleading accounts around the press.

Contrary to their claims to the press, Franck’s association with the Louvre had not ended in 2011-12 after the controversial restoration of Leonardo’s the “Virgin and Child with St Anne” – see Endnote 2 and Figs. 8, 9 and 10. In 2014 his advice was sought by the Louvre when it planned to restore Leonardo’s portrait of the Belle Ferronnière (see Figs. 3 and 4 below). Vincent Pomarède was the Head of Paintings at the time, he had launched the project but before the restoration began he was appointed principal Assistant to the Louvre Museum’s Chairman. He was replaced by Sébastien Allard as Head of Paintings, who became ipso facto, as is the usual custom in the Louvre, the Chair of the scientific advisory committee, while Pomarède retained a prominent role in that committee, partly on account of having promoted the project when Head of Paintings, and also on account of being close to the Louvre’s own Chairman. At this stage he decided that Franck’s contribution was officially that of his special “private adviser” during “all the time that restoration would last”.

Two years later, in 2016, when the cleaning of Leonardo’s Saint John-the-Baptist started, Franck was asked jointly with Ségolène Bergeon Langle, the former head of Conservation in the Louvre (and a legendary figure of the French museums’ restoration), to supply “all remarks and advice” to the then new head of Paintings, Sébastien Allard, on joint visits to see the painting with him in the conservation studio.

The Paris Louvre’s inscrutable position on the Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi

The case against Franck, as offered by the Louvre press office on 18 February to the Art Newspaper (“’We want Salvator Mundi’ for Leonardo blockbuster, Louvre says”) rested on two claimed statements of fact: that “the Musée du Louvre has asked for the loan of the Salvator Mundi for its October exhibition and truly wishes to exhibit the artwork”; and, that “the owner has not given his answer yet.”

Those claims are utterly perplexing. As the Art Newspaper noted, the Louvre’s statement suggests that the painting is not, after all, owned by the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum, but by a single individual, widely believed to be Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Can that really be the case? If so, when did the Paris Louvre make a direct request to him to borrow his painting for its big celebratory 2019 Leonardo exhibition? The terse but vague Louvre phrase “has asked” gives no indication of the timing of the request but the Louvre was understood, like the Royal Academy, to have requested such a loan in the immediate aftermath of the Salvator Mundi’s triumphant $450 million sale in November 2017. Was that earlier request renewed, or is it the sole and original request to which the Paris Louvre press office now refers? Either way, the question arises: What grounds has the Crown Prince given to the Paris Louvre museum for withholding his permission to borrow the Salvator Mundi?

Curatorial Dogs that have not barked

Could it be that the Paris Louvre does still wish to include the Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi (it would be immensely politically embarrassing for it to exclude the Abu Dhabi Louvre Museum painting from this year’s long-planned Leonardo extravaganza) but is no longer prepared to describe the painting in its own catalogue and literature as it was described first in the National Gallery exhibition of 2011-12 and later by Christie’s at its 2017 sale – namely, as a Salvator Mundi that “was painted by Leonardo da Vinci [and that] is the single original painting from which the many copies and student versions depend”? If, however, as today’s press officers imply but do not expressly state, the curators and the director of the Louvre really do presently consider the Abu Dhabi painting to be precisely as described in Christie’s’ sale literature, why was no one with curatorial authority at the museum prepared to make that claim publicly and within the official response to Franck’s cited contrary testimony? For that matter, has any Paris Louvre curator ever supported the Salvator Mundi’s Leonardo ascription in written scholarly form?

At the same time, is it not also possible that the Salvator Mundi’s individual owner or the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum – whichever presently pertains – will not accede to a loan request on anything less than an assurance from the Paris Louvre that, if included in the major Leonardo anniversary exhibition, it will be categorised as an entirely and unquestionably secure autograph Leonardo prototype painting? If such possibilities are not the case, what exactly has been the cause of the fifteen month-long stand-off between Paris and Abu Dhabi and the cause of the latter’s failure to exhibit the painting – or, even, to disclose its whereabouts? As for the present ownership, after the work was auctioned in November 2017, Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism released a statement saying it had acquired the work for the new Louvre Abu Dhabi museum.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi’s undisclosed whereabouts

The Abu Dhabi museum was scheduled to launch the Salvator Mundi last September but it cancelled its own event with no explanation. It had been widely expected that the Louvre Abu Dhabi would announce plans to exhibit its Salvator Mundi on the 10 February 2018 official visit of the French Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, who toured the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum on Saadiy island in the Emirati capital, specifically to launch the French-Emirati “Year of Cultural Dialogue” in the company of Shiekh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, CEO of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. But once again, the world’s most expensive painting made a no-show on a no-explanation: the Minister and the CEO both declined to answer any questions about the unexplained decision not to exhibit the painting in Abu Dhabi. (See “A day in the life of the new Louvre Abu Dhabi Annexe’s pricey new Leonardo Salvator Mundi ” and Fig. 5 below.)

Above, Fig. 5: The French Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe (centre) poses with Shiekh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (right), CEO of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, during inauguration of BNP paribas Abu Dhabi Global market Branch on February 10, 2018, as photographed by Karim Sahib for AFP and featured in Art Daily’s “The Best Photos of the Day” on February 11, 2018.

Whatever the problem was on those two earlier occasions, it is clear on the Paris Louvre’s press office’s latest statements that that blockage remains in place – just as the whereabouts of the painting itself remain undisclosed fifteen months after the painting was sold for a world record price. The essential question therefore remains outstanding: Why will the Abu Dhabi Louvre museum neither exhibit its own Salvator Mundi painting nor agree to lend it to the Paris Mother-Museum? In truth, the issue here is not one of fake information by critics of the attribution, but of a bizarre combined refusal by two museums and/or a prince to explain their own repeatedly aborted-actions and prolonged failures to reach an agreement or disclose information.

If Franck’s sources are correct in claiming that the Paris Louvre Museum has lost confidence in the Salvator Mundi as an autograph Leonardo, then an explanation for the present perplexing state of affairs offers itself: there exists today a perfect state of mutual paralysis as the Louvre wishes to avoid an international, inter-governmental embarrassment by including the Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi painting but not as an accredited autograph work; while the owner(s) will gladly lend it but not as an attributed work of Leonardo’s studio.

The present manifest disinclination of the Louvre’s own officers and curators to make any personal declaration of confidence in this Salvator Mundi’s Leonardo attribution is encountered also among almost all of the painting’s original dozen or so Christie’s-cited supporters. If, as the Paris Louvre’s press officers claim, the Abu Dhabi painting really does retain the confidence of both the museum’s own curatorial staff and the dozen or so scholars identified as supporters by Christie’s ahead of the sale, as an autograph work of Leonardo, they would all seem to share a funny way of not-showing it. As things stand, and as we were reported as saying in the 17 February Sunday Telegraph, “What we now have is effectively an un-dead painting – no one believes in it; no one will say where it is; no one can lay it to rest.”

Endnote 1:

Experience shows that on matters of art restoration Louvre press office claims are sometimes best taken with a pinch of salt. In 2010 we carried a report of a covert second repainting at the Louvre of a face in a Veronese painting – see “A spectacular restoration own-goal: undoing, re-doing and (on the quiet) re-re-doing a Veronese masterpiece at the Louvre Museum.”

Above, Figs. 6 and 7: However good their intentions, however avowedly “ethical” their professional codes, restorers, like forgers (who are often themselves restorers or ex-restorers), cannot avoid leaving personal imprints and those of their cultural milieus in their repainting. The more ambitious the aspirant, the more deficiencies of artistic reading and anatomical understanding can be imposed on mute works of art. The Louvre Veronese restorer above seemed in thrall to the pneumatic forms and miniaturised features of Botero. That such eccentric aesthetic predilections should ever have been institutionally authorised would augur badly for the Mona Lisa herself in a Louvre Museum today where the curators are bingeing on radical restorations as they play catch-up with the technological adventurism long-encountered in British and American museums.

In June 2010 when the arts journalist Dalya Alberge asked for explanations of this second covert and unrecorded repainting of the Veronese face, the Louvre press officer stated that the restoration had consisted of the painting being merely “scrubbed up” (“bichonnée” – a term normally used for very light interventions such as dusting or retouching a minor scratch unnoticed in the museum etc). That the museum’s official description bore little connection with the pictorial truth of the situation can be seen at glance above at Figs. 6 and 7 and here:

“Louvre masterpiece by Veronese ‘mutilated’ by botched nose jobs”.

Endnote 2:

On the Paris Louvre’s controversial restoration of Leonardo’s the “Virgin and Child with St Anne”, see:

“The Louvre Leonardo Restoration Committee Resignations”;

“What Price a Smile? The Louvre Leonardo Mouths that are Now at Risk”;

“Another Restored Leonardo, Another Sponsored Celebration – Ferragamo at the Louvre…”;

“Rocking the Louvre: the Bergeon Langle Disclosures on a Leonardo da Vinci restoration”.

Above, Figs. 8, 9 and 10: Top and centre, a detail of the Louvre’s “Virgin and Child with St Anne”, before restoration, left; after restoration, right. Above a detail of the Abu Dhabi Salvator Mundi, as exhibited at the National Gallery in 2011, left, as sold at Christie’s in 2017.

In the above three sequences we can see the principal twin consequences of “restoration” procedures: with a bona fide Leonardo masterpiece (top and centre) values are diminished and degraded. With a not-Leonardo, above, we see attempts to move a painting further towards a modern conception of what bona fide Leonardos look like. The outcomes – degradation or falsification – can occur on the same work. There are more restorers than ever before in history and they are ceaselessly working and re-working a finite pool of old master paintings which resemble themselves less and less. Pontormos and Giorgiones alike increasing resemble coloured drawings.

Michael Daley, Director, 22 February 2019

February 22, 2019 | Categories: news | Leave A Comment »