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"Christie’s Is Selling This Painting for $100 Million. They Say It’s by Leonardo. I Have Doubts. Big Doubts." - Jerry Saltz
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Started by comicwiz,

49 posts in this topic

Rip

Rip

Posted
Posted (edited)

There are few theories out there. A lot of underpainting, and overpainting in that area. Here is a massive pic showing the rock/glass mark detail.

Zoom in. It's really amazing. Check out the ultra detail in the bottom lower right. To me at least that area smacks of da Vinci style detail.

http://s797.photobucket.com/user/grodd_photos/media/brown-hand_zpsj20bwhep.jpg.html

Edited by Rip
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Rip

Rip

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Here is what I think is the best theory behind the rock crystal ball. But there's numerous ones out there.

http://www.arthistorynews.com/articles/812_Salvator_Mundi__its_all_balls

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/750715/the-male-mona-lisa-art-historian-martin-kemp-on-leonardo-da-vincis-mysterious-salvator-mundi

The orbs in other Salvator Mundis, often they're of a kind of brass or solid. Sometimes they're terrestrial globes, sometimes they're translucent glass, and one or two even have little landscapes in them. What this one had was an amazing series of glistening little apertures — they're like bubbles, but they're not round — painted very delicately, with just a touch of impasto, a touch of dark, and these little sort of glistening things, particularly around the part where you get the back reflections. And that said to me: rock crystal. Because rock crystal gets what are called inclusions, and to get clear rock crystal is very difficult, particularly big bits. So there are these little gaps, which are slightly irregular in shape, and I thought, well, that's pretty fancy. And Leonardo was a bit of an expert on rock crystal. He was asked to judge vases that Isabella d'Este was thinking of buying, and he loved those materials. 

So when I was back in Oxford, I went to the geology department, and I said, "Let's have a look at some rock crystal." And in the Ashmolean Museum, in a wunderkammer of curiosities, there is a big rock crystal ball, and that has inclusions, so we photographed it under comparable lighting conditions I also began to look at the heel of the hand underneath the globe in the "Salvator Mundi"; there are two heels. The restorer thought it was a pentimento, but I wondered if he was recording a double refraction of the kind you get with a calcite sphere. If this proves to be right, it would be absolutely Leonardesque. I like these things when they're not just connoisseurship. None of the copyists knew that. They just transcribed it. Some of them do better than others, but none of them got this crystal with its possible double refraction. And one of the points of the crystal sphere is that it relates iconographically to the crystalline sphere of the heavens, because in Ptolemaic cosmology the stars were in the fixed crystalline sphere, and so they were embedded. So what you've got in the "Salvator Mundi" is really a "a savior of the cosmos", and this is a very Leonardesque transformation.

Edited by Rip
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comicwiz

comicwiz

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Attributing the globe to a rock crystal is one thing. The issue as I see it is the way light and the optical effect of the globe/ball refracts no light. In fact, the folding effect in the robe travels linearly through the ball. This is phsyically impossible, unless what he is holding is an optical illusion - and this is not a globe, but a thin circular sheet of crystal. Even then, you would expect those lines from the robe to appear magnified at least fourfold, rather than abide to a linear consistency as is revealed in the painting.

Here, there is no light bending at all. I'll reserve further thought on this when I see these supposed photographs of two heels, but even then, you have the issue that it barely abides to the physics of what it would look like to see through a concave lens acting as a prop, to appear as if someone were holding a ball in this manner. As much as Leonardo might have been an enthusiast of such minerals or objects, I'm not sure this exemplifies his manner of reflecting the science of how a rock crystal ball would function under ANY lighting conditions. 

What this person appears to be perpetuating is this notion that Leonardo found some anomalous condition where in the "right" lighting conditions, the rock crystal ball would function in a way where the physics of light refracting would no longer apply, but I don't buy this brand of pseudoscience. It's harped on in a way where it appears to suggest an achievement moment of perfect clarity, but the way those inclusions are painted, and the way the base of the ball is highlighted in the palm reveals a faint light source from above (see rock crystal photo below, where you can see the reflection of the light souces on the top edge and center of the sphere). Even in such circumstances where the light source is dimmed to achieve "see-throughness" that is otherwise not physically possible, you would still need to account for the background imagery to curve and appear magnified with an intense blurring that there would be no way you would be able to connect a pattern or line continuosly from where the robe stops and the sphere begins, much less 4 solid fold lines, and one large fold line casting a wider shadow effect.  In sum, whoever painted this didn't even consider any of this as an afterthought, and instead painted in the optical effect of looking possibly outside his window to see how his shirt was air drying for inspiration.

 

crystal ball.JPG

Edited by comicwiz
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Hekla

Hekla

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Posted

To me, the cloth over the left shoulder - as well as the globe - seems off. Looking at other Leonardo paintings, he uses more complementary colors for layers of clothing and they are represented as an obviously different materials. The cloth seems flatter over the shoulder than it should and Leonardo is more precise with light sources than that. I think the cloth over the shoulder was repainted by another hand and the orb had to be repainted as well. 

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Rip

Rip

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Most certainly. If you look at the close up, you can see that there is a lot of what looks like poor restoration still on the cloth and in that area of the orb. The face also had a lot of work clearly done. The black background looks off as well. The black looks too fresh and rich IMO.

Also various areas of the painting has been scrubbed down showing base layers. It certainly not as Leonardo painted it. Or that is if he finished it. He was well know to have a tough time finishing his stuff.

As I mentioned before there has been a lot of overpainting (restoration) and underpainting exposing underlining layers (pentimenti).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-16/is-the-450-million-salvator-mundi-leonardo-da-vinci-painting-a-fake

Every time a painting was scrubbed, “when you clean something like that orb, which is delicately painted, you end up taking something away from it,” Beddington continues. “And that’s normal.”

For years people thought it couldn't have been from da Vinci because heck frankly it didn't look like his work with all of the horrible resto. Bloomberg has a couple pics from Christies featuring a black and white what the painting looked like in 1903 when it still had a poorly added mustache. Then a more recent pic in the process of removal.

I can't say I know the true answer of the globe, depending on which scholar you talk to, it gets different answers. Some state that he simply didn't want to detract from the rest of the piece. There are various books, and other media coming out talking about these aspects in more detail. Hollar's engraving from 1650 have a bit more optical deflections so that's interesting also.

I would say its the most mysterious & interesting aspect of the piece next to the straight-on pose.

 

 

 

 

Edited by Rip
Adding Hollar's differences mentioned from an earlier post on pg 2
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ESeffinga

ESeffinga

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Posted

Nice summation of the goings on.

With the numbers involved here, it'd make my head explode, but after the Kaws sale this weekend, I think it's already popped... maybe should stick a link to that in the Lichtenstein thread?

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cstojano

cstojano

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, ESeffinga said:

Nice summation of the goings on.

With the numbers involved here, it'd make my head explode, but after the Kaws sale this weekend, I think it's already popped... maybe should stick a link to that in the Lichtenstein thread?

Got a link for the Kaws thing? I don't follow as I have NEVER understood what it was all about. I take it the sale disappointed, however.

 

Hmm, maybe not disappointing.

 

http://www.artnews.com/2019/04/01/kaws-auction-record-14-7-million/

 

That is quite a jump for an artist's record sale: from 3 to 15 million. Meanwhile we debate Egyptian Queen's final price...

Edited by cstojano
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Bronty

Bronty

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15m for a living artist's illustration based on the Simpsons is quite something.   I don't get it either, but I don't follow contemporary art at all

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Bronty

Bronty

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Right, which is why I don't get it, like at all.  

Furthermore, I don't think there's anything to "get" about that piece anyways.    DOn't know about the greater body of work

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Bronty

Bronty

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Imagine being the Simpsons illustrator whose work was "repurposed."   Awkward.   (Bill Morrison perhaps?)

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BCarter27

BCarter27

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Posted
12 hours ago, delekkerste said:

The Invention of the "Salvator Mundi" Or, How to Turn a $1,000 Art-Auction Pickup Into a $450 Million Masterpiece

Some good stuff here... :popcorn: 

I'm such a sucker for this mess... Conservation and restoration processes and questions are endlessly fascinating to me.

Makes you wonder how much it would have gone for in its conserved state following the board re-stabilization?

3755.jpg?width=1225&quality=85&auto=form

 

I can't seem to find the link at the moment, but I read a rumor or anonymous report that the piece was sent to Europe for further restoration and was botched. No idea if that's true, but whoops.

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