The picture shows an auratic Christ, looking frontally at the viewer, like the saints on icons, his right hand raised in a gesture of blessing, in the left he holds a glass ball, symbol of the universe. In the meantime, the “Salvator Mundi” is only considered a handwritten Leonardo by a few, but it is a prime example of how a greedy art market can turn a piece of painted wood into a 400 million masterpiece.
The film documentary “The Lost Leonardo” by the Dane Andreas Koefoed gets very close without an omniscient narrator voice, without a raised index finger, but sometimes accompanied by music worthy of a thriller. Almost everyone who has been involved in deals with this plant since 2005 will be interviewed. There is the “Sleeper Hunter” Alexander Parish, who discovers a picture in a provincial auction catalog from New Orleans, offered as “from the environment of Leonardo da Vinci”. He thinks it is a “sleeper”, a real work by Leonardo. Together with art dealers from New York, he bought the painting for little more than $ 1,000.
Auction world record at Christie’s in New York
The dealers Simon and Adelsson also continue to give credible assurance that they consider the painting on a strangely inferior wooden panel to be an original. But would Leonardo ever have painted on such a board, admittedly from around 1500? Before the auction world record – still valid today – in November 2017 at Christie’s in New York, a lot had to be done with the heavily damaged, but undoubtedly old painting. The art dealers brought the picture to the very talented Italian-American restorer Dianne Modestini. She took the work out of a simple bag, put it on an easel, saw the qualities and the damage.
Modestini worked unusually long, namely years, on the supposed Leonardo. A restoration of this kind normally takes days to months. The little damaged parts, the lower half, were probably not the problem. But above, on the Salvator’s face, the typical aura emerged, the famous Leonardo sfumato, which in 2005 had not yet been seen at all. In 2010 the picture left Modestini’s workshop and immediately celebrated a huge success. The curators of the National Gallery in London include it in their exhibition: as a real Leonardo! Now the bitter specialist discussion begins: The German expert Frank Zöllner from the University of Leipzig says, for example: The little restored parts, the schematically applied curls, the blessing hand look like the work of a student of the Renaissance genius, while the heavily restored parts looked like an original. So are they all thanks to Dianne Modestini? Modestini defends himself: you cannot paint like Leonardo.
–
