Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Christie’s Auction House
- The Leonardo da Vinci painting “Salvator Mundi,” which just sold for a record $ 450 million, has an unusual flaw.
- It doesn’t obey the laws of physics in a crucial way that’s uncharacteristic of da Vinci.
- The flaw has led some historians to question the painting’s authenticity.
- Defenders say he did it on purpose.
“Salvator Mundi,” a painting that has been identified as one of Leonardo da Vinci’s lost works, sold for a record $ 450 million at a Christie’s auction Wednesday night.
A major flaw in the painting — which is the only one of da Vinci’s that remains in private hands — makes some historians think it’s a fake. The crystal orb in the image doesn’t distort light in the way that natural physics does, which would be an unusual error for da Vinci.
See that crystal orb?
AP Photo/Seth Wenig
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?
juhe-IdeeID/Shutterstock
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 appears to be 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 — 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.”
While the painting was widely confirmed as a da Vinci in 2011, some scholars have suggested that “Salvator Mundi” was a product of da Vinci’s workshop, or was made by another follower without the master’s talent.
ArtWatch UK director Michael Daley told The Guardian that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove the painting’s authenticity. “The Salvator Mundi is dead-pan flat, like an icon, with no real depth in the modeling,” Daley said. “Another unexplained peculiarity is that the figure itself is heavily and uncharacteristically cropped.”
Larry Busacca/Getty Images; Hulton Archive/Stringer
Defenders of the painting’s authenticity say that da Vinci ignored physics on purpose, perhaps to illustrate Christ’s powers. Isaacson himself believes it was an intentional decision to paint it that way and does not believe the painting is a fake.
Christie’s speculated that Da Vinci included a distractingly incorrect glass globe because he didn’t want to distract viewers from Christ himself. According to Reuters, most art scholars have agreed that the painting is an authentic da Vinci.
“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 Mundi” 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.
The $ 450 million purchase price beats previous records by a mile. The most that was ever paid for a piece of art at auction was $ 179.4 million, for Picasso’s “Women of Algiers (Version O)” in May 2015. The most ever paid for a work of art overall was $ 300 million, for Willem de Kooning’s “Interchange” in September 2015.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect Walter Isaacson’s position on the authenticity of the painting.
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