Months
after the painting Salvator Mundi sold for a record-breaking $450m (£335m), a
leading Oxford art historian is challenging its attribution to Leonardo da
Vinci.
Matthew
Landrus, a Leonardo scholar, believes most of the painting is by the artist’s
studio assistant Bernardino Luini, whose own work generally sell for less than
£1m.
“This is a
Luini painting,” Landrus said. “By looking at the various versions of
Leonardo’s students’ works, one can see that Luini paints just like that work
you see in the Salvator Mundi.”
The
picture, which portrays Jesus gesturing in blessing with his right hand while
holding a crystal orb in his left hand, was sold last November by Christie’s
New York as “one of fewer than 20 known paintings by Leonardo”.
Acquired
for the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, it will be unveiled in
September at the Louvre Abu Dhabi before its inclusion in a Leonardo exhibition
at the Louvre in Paris next year.
Some of the
world’s foremost experts confirmed the Leonardo attribution in 2011, when Luke
Syson, the then National Gallery curator, included the painting ina Leonardo
retrospective at the London gallery that year.
But other
leading experts have their doubts. Frank Zöllner, a German art historian at the
University of Leipzig, believes the Salvator Mundi could be a “high-quality
product of Leonardo’s workshop” or even a later follower, and Charles Hope, the
Italian Renaissance specialist, has argued that accepted Leonardo paintings look
“quite different”.
Michael
Daley, the director of ArtWatch UK, criticised the painting for its lack of
Leonardo’s “greater naturalism and complexity of posture”, and said Landrus’s
theory was “very interesting”.
The book is
a substantial update of his 2006 publication, which has sold about 200,000
copies in 15 languages. The Salvator Mundi had not yet surfaced then as a
Leonardo
Describing
Luini as one of Leonardo’s two most talented studio assistants (the other was
Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio), he has compared Luini’s Christ among the Doctors
in the National Gallery with the Salvator Mundi.
Landus
highlighted stylistic similarities, including the depiction of the gold bands
and the fabric on the robes, saying: “One sees a similar construction on both
of those gold bands and on the way the drapery is done. Luini did other paintings
that had very good gold tracery in them. Also Christ’s face in both paintings
has very similar modelling and, while the hairstyles are slightly different,
the approaches are quite similar. Also, the shoulders on Christ are very
similar.”
Pointing to
a photograph of the Salvator Mundi before its extensive restoration, he said:
“There’s a lot of missing paint in certain sections. So it really does add to
the discussion about how overpainted it is.”
The
Salvator Mundi was in fact attributed to Luini in 1900, when it was acquired by
Sir Charles Robinson for the Cook collection. Landrus said: “It’s more accurate
than just calling it a Leonardo.”
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