The painting fits our Gospel reading this week. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” – John 6:51
The fact that its “Salvador Mundi” by Leonardo da Vinci makes it even the more special. The discovering of a new Leonardo painting shook the art world in 2011. There were only some fourteen surviving Leonardo paintings in the world and the last one to be discovered was the “Benois Madonna” more than 100 years ago. This one was thought to exist only in copies.
This painting is small, 2×1.5 feet with cracked wooden frame and had suffered from centuries of neglect and poor restorations.The panel had also been subjected — unsuccessfully — to a forced flattening, and then glued to another backing. The worst offenses were crude areas of overpainting, in an attempt to hide the botched panel repair. And then there was plain old dirt and grime.
It shows Christ facing facing forwards with two fingers of his right hand raised in blessing and a crystal globe in his left hand. “Salvator Mundi” (Savior of the World) painted in 1500 is known to have been owned by English king, Charles I before moving around various private collections until 2005, when the current owner brought it to Robert Simon of Robert Simon Fine Art to study.
There were three immediate clues of the true painter:
1 One was a so-called “pentimento,” an alteration in the painting showing traces of previous work
2 The other was the painting of Christ’s curls. Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist at the Louvre had the same curls.
3 The fingers were especially significant because, as Oxford Leonardo expert Martin Kemp put it, “All the versions of the ‘Salvator Mundi’ have rather tubular fingers. What Leonardo had done, and the copyists and imitators didn’t pick up, was to get just how the knuckle sort of sits underneath the skin.”
It was compared to two preparatory drawings, housed in the Royal Library at Windsor, that Leonardo made for it. It was also compared to some 20 known copies and found to be superior to all of them. The new owners desired to build a consensus for this conclusion that it was a Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo provided an original treatment of this subject. Look at the orb or world resting in Christ’s left palm. Normally this orb was painted as brass or gold, may have had vague landforms mapped on it, and was topped by a crucifix. We know that Leonardo was a Roman Catholic, as were all of his patrons. However, he creates what appears to be a sphere of rock crystal. It reflects Leonardos studies what later became optics. Looking through it shows the natural distortion of looking through glass or crystal. Fundamentally, Leonardo was always trying to connect the natural and spiritual worlds together. No one had created a world like this which was very realistic!