- The Leonardo da Vinci painting "Salvator Munti" has a major flaw.
- It doesn't obey the laws of physics in a crucial way that's uncharacteristic of da Vinci.
- Critics say the flaw indicates it's a fake.
- Defenders say he did it on purpose.
A major flaw in a painting identified as one of Leonardo da Vinci's lost works makes some historicans think it's a fake. The crystal orb in the image doesn't distort light in the way natural physics does, which would be an unusual error for da Vinci.
See that crystal orb?
It's transparent in a way that shows exactly what's behind it.
A real glass sphere would show a distorted version of what's behind it.
Da Vinci's version shows a clear version of Christ's robe, as if it were a window pane.
Take this image, for example. See how the light filtered through the glass renders the image upside-down?
The sphere in da Vinci's painting wouldn't show such a drastic flip, because the orb is close to Jesus's body. But the reflection should at least be distorted.
It's a rookie mistake.
Da Vinci painted the portrait — of Jesus Christ dressed in Renaissaince Era clothing, crossing his fingers in one hand and holding a crystal orb in the other — in around the year 1500. After being bought and sold a few times, the painting was lost to history. In 2011, it was rediscovered and authenticated as one of da Vinci's works.
But the glass orb raises some doubts about the painting's authenticity. It's especially puzzling, writes Walter Isaacson in his biography of the artist, because da Vinci was famously fastidious about the reflection and refraction of light in his work. At the time he made "Salvator Mundi," he was "deep into his optics studies" and filled his notebooks with diagrams of light bouncing at different angles, according to The Guardian.
"Solid glass or crystal, whether shaped like an orb or a lens, produces magnified, inverted, and reversed images," Isaacson writes. "Instead, Leonardo painted the orb as if it were a hollow glass bubble that does not refract or distort the light passing through it."
Isaacson echoes the criticism of other da Vinci scholars, some of whom suggest it was a product of da Vinci's workshop, or was made by another follower without the master's talent.
"The Salvator Mundi is dead-pan flat, like an icon, with no real depth in the modeling,"said ArtWatch UK director Michael Daley. "Another unexplained peculiarity is that the figure itself is heavily and uncharacteristically cropped."
Defenders of the painting's authenticity say da Vinci ignored physics on purpose, perhaps to illustrate Christ's powers. Christie's, strangely, speculates that Da Vinci included a distractingly incorrect glass globe because he didn't want to distract viewers from Christ himself.
"It is our opinion that he chose not to portray it in this way because it would be too distracting to the subject of the painting," a spokeswoman told The Guardian.
The history of "Salvator Munti" has had a lot of twists and turns. It was sold at auction in 1958, with its authorship unknown, for less than $100.
In the late 2000s, it was sold again, restored, and identified as a da Vinci work. The painting was displayed in London's National Gallery in 2011. In 2013, the chemicals billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev purchased it for $127.5 million. It's expected to be purchased for at least $100 million at auction later this month, according to The Guardian.
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