‘Male Mona Lisa’ could be yours (for more than $100M)
Pictures don’t do it justice.
In person, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi is haunting, a 500-year-old portrait of Jesus Christ that seems to radiate from within while displaying a staggering mastery of anatomy, optics and craft.
For somewhere (way) north of
$100 million, it can be yours. “This is the holy grail of Old Master paintings, some people call it the male Mona Lisa,” says Francois de Poortere, head of the Old Masters department at Christie’s, which will auction off the painting in New York on Nov.
15. “People are deeply taken by this work. You could buy it and just build an entire museum around it.”
Salvator Mundi, which means “Savior of the World,” is stopping in a few cities around the world for a brief series of public displays that include Hong Kong, London and New York.
It is the only one of da Vinci’s 20 known paintings (don’t forget, this definitive Renaissance man
was also an engineer, astronomer and set designer) in private hands.
Although the Louvre Museum’s Mona Lisa might be more famous, Mundi displays a unique radiance over that yellowing gem because it has been cleaned.
Who will buy this da Vinci? Museums would need a huge endowment to muster tens of millions so quickly, so billionaires are more likely candidates.
Though art collectors will be eager, Mundi may well go to “someone who is eager to have the best of the best,” says de Poortere, noting that Bill Gates paid
$30 million in 1994 for da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, a compendium of sketches and notes that encapsulate the Florentine’s humanistic brilliance.
De Poortere says the owner of Salvator Mundi is a European collector. Walter Isaacson’s newly released book, Leonardo da Vinci, says it was bought a few years ago by a Russian fertilizer billionaire from a consortium of Swiss art dealers for $127 million. It’s doubtful the next owner will pay less.
What’s staggering about this painting — which experts say da Vinci painted around 1500 when he was 48 and roughly when he also was working on the Mona Lisa — is that for centuries it vanished.
An expert hunch coupled with high tech brought it back to the world.
In 1958, Mundi surfaced in England as a heavily darkened and overpainted version of itself and was attributed to another artist. It sold for £45, which is worth about £1,600 today — or
$2,100. How’s that for a yard sale score?
The painting then wound up at an estate sale in the USA around
2005, where it sold to the consortium of dealers for a figure in the five figures, according to Christie’s. That group suspected it might have something special on its hands and commissioned New York art expert Robert Simon to painstakingly clean the work over a five-year time.
Then the heavens opened.
“A number of things started pointing to the fact that this was Leonardo’s work,” says de Poortere, who notes that many artists over the centuries made copies of Salvator Mundi and attributed the lost original to da Vinci.
Among the telltale signs: Beyond Jesus’ lustrous curls (a Leonardo hallmark) and detailed
hands (da Vinci spent hours dissecting cadavers and had a unique ability to render limbs lifelike), an X-ray showed a pentimento, the term used to describe when an artist makes changes, such as moving a finger position, to an original work.
“Anyone simply copying someone else’s painting isn’t going to bother to change the position of a finger,” says de Poortere, who notes that Jesus’ right thumb appeared to have been shifted by da Vinci.
Isaacson’s biography (which has been optioned by da Vinci namesake Leonardo DiCaprio, who plans to play the lead role) says infrared light scans revealed the artist pressed the palm of his hand against Jesus’ left eye to create a blurred, or so-called sfumato, effect.
Sfumato is a technique da Vinci pioneered in an effort to render portraits more lifelike, given that our eyes don’t see everything in focus but rather give preference to objects that are closer. In Salvator Mundi, Christ’s hands, which are closer to the viewer, appear in sharp detail, while the face has a soft focus.
“Just take one look at the exquisite blessing hand, the wonderful curls and that captivating gaze, and you know you’re looking at something done by a genius,” de Poortere says.
Although the Louvre Museum’s “Mona Lisa” might be more famous, “Mundi” displays a unique radiance over that yellowing gem because it has been cleaned.