{"id":61769,"date":"2019-11-26T16:58:12","date_gmt":"2019-11-26T21:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=61769"},"modified":"2025-09-30T10:29:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T14:29:20","slug":"salvator-mundi-disappearing-masterpiece","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/salvator-mundi-disappearing-masterpiece\/","title":{"rendered":"The Salvator Mundi Painting: Leonardo\u2019s Disappearing Masterpiece"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n The Salvator Mundi Painting: Leonardo\u2019s Disappearing Masterpiece\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

Leonardo da Vinci was prolific in producing sketches and notes, but as a painter, he was painfully slow. It took him four years to paint the Mona Lisa and, in all, fewer than 20 paintings that are attributed to the Renaissance master.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Salvator Mundi<\/a> is one of them. Latin for \u201csaviour of the world,\u201d it\u2019s a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth wearing Renaissance robes, as he gazes magnanimously and cradles a crystal orb. It\u2019s one of Leonardo\u2019s most copied paintings, but for centuries the original was thought to be lost. Then it was found, and now it\u2019s missing again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Less than 20 years ago, Salvator Mundi was hanging inconspicuously in a stairwell in Louisiana. Overpainting had obscured the 500-year-old work. The passage of time had worn the paint and warped the walnut panel that backed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It went to auction as part of an estate sale in 2005 and sold for $1,000 to a New York City art dealer who thought it might be an early copy of Leonardo\u2019s work. During restoration, signs pointed to the painting being the original. In 2017 Christie\u2019s sold it at auction for more than $450 million \u2013 the highest price ever paid for a work of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Salvator Mundi: An Interational Mystery<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Then, it disappeared again. Its buyer was a Saudi prince and the plan was for the painting to be displayed at the Louvre Abu Dhabi beginning in 2018. That never happened and rumours swirled that the missing masterpiece was on board the yacht of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman \u2013 though there was no actual evidence to support the claim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how exactly did Salvator Mundi go from the home of a Baton Rouge businessman to the centre of an international mystery involving a monarch\u2019s super yacht?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cDuring restoration, remarkable things emerged,\u201d says Martin Kemp<\/a>, emeritus professor in the history of art at the University of Oxford<\/a> and a leading scholar of Leonardo\u2019s art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Nov. 21, 2019, Kemp delivered Leonardo\u2019s Salvator Mundi: The Story and the Research<\/em> at this year\u2019s Herzberg Lecture<\/a> at Richcraft Hall. The annual lecture honours Gerhard Herzberg, a former chancellor of Carleton University and recipient of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPerhaps the most telling are pentimento — the Italian word for regret, or a change of mind. When the cleaning was done, there was a trace of an earlier position of the thumb — a kind of ghost thumb that\u2019s straight. All of the copies of the painting all have a tucked-in thumb, and not a straight thumb. That doesn’t prove it is Leonardo\u2019s work, but it does mean that important creative work is going on in order to determine the correct position of the hand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t the only pentimento in the painting, and there were other signs too. The locks of Jesus cascaded helically, as in Leonardo\u2019s sketches of turbulence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLeonardo was deeply involved in what I call the science of art,\u201d says Kemp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow things behave . . . how materials behave and how light behaves. The curls of his hair have been painted with enormous vitality — living vortices painted with brilliant touch. Leonardo compared this kind of curling with the movement of water.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Painting Techniques Point to Leonardo<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Before it was sold at auction, Kemp had the opportunity view and study the work, and he notes that it uses painting techniques that were favoured by Leonardo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Above the eye brow, there is the print from the edge of a hand. You would press this bit of the hand against the moist paint to achieve a soft modeling effects. It\u2019s not a fingerprint — this is not a crime scene investigation — b<\/em>ut that pattern of the hand, pressed gently into the paint to create a blending of the highlights and the flesh tones . . . it’s very characteristic of Leonardo, but on the whole, his pupils did not do it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the time being, analysis of the work by art historians will necessarily be limited to memory and photography. Salvator Mundi\u2019s location remains unknown, and it was not included in a major showing of Leonardo\u2019s work that opened at the Louvre in Paris in October 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is a picture that should be in the public domain,\u201d Kemp says, \u201cbut I\u2019m not worried it won\u2019t be looked after. If you pay $450 million, you\u2019re probably going to get good advice and look after it carefully.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Herzberg lecture this year was part of Cinquecento – Carleton\u2019s year-long celebration that has been looking at da Vinci\u2019s work with fresh eyes. In Italian, Cinquecento means 500 and, for this series of events, refers to the 500 years since his passing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leonardo da Vinci was prolific in producing sketches and notes, but as a painter, he was painfully slow. It took him four years to paint the Mona Lisa and, in all, fewer than 20 paintings that are attributed to the Renaissance master. Salvator Mundi is one of them. Latin for \u201csaviour of the world,\u201d it\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":61776,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[28],"cu_story_tag":[1919],"class_list":["post-61769","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cu_story_type-community-partnerships","cu_story_tag-faculty-of-science"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"blueprint"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/61769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/61769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97380,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/61769\/revisions\/97380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=61769"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=61769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}