#put ture sventon on it if anyone can do it it is him

[skeppsbrott]

Är detta din bakgrund? https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvator_Mundi_(m%C3%A5lning) coolt! Verkar vara en försvunnen tavla, vilket adderar till mystiken kring verket. Sätt Ture Sventon på mysteriet!

D e den här:

So the lore for this painting is immense. Indeed, it was a "lost" Leonardo, which is a big deal because we have VERY FEW surviving Leonardo oil paintings. Like, maybe twenty -few, plus a handful of drawings and frescos as well as his manuscripts. Why Leonardo even is a big deal to begin with is a whole other question - in a bunch of ways his works are certainly astonishing in their own right, but are they really that much more amazing than any other renaissance artist? This is me playing the devil's advocate.

(ETA: this got long)

The thing about fame and notoriety is that it isn't even about quality to begin with. Taylor Swift isn't the biggest pop star because she makes the greatest pop tunes, she's the biggest pop star because she also embodies an ideal of what that even means, because her persona plays in to her works in a way that is emblematic of pop music and pop culture. Leonardo is that great but he is also an excellent frontman for the renaissance and a very particular idea of a Master Artist. I have seen one Leonardo face to face and the work is immaculate. It is very strange to be in the presence of because it is an immense amount of value and work into something that today mostly functions as an artifact. It is a glimpse into a different way to imagine value.

Back to the subject at hand - there are like, twenty Leonardos, and out of pretty much nowhere this painting Salvator Mundi shows up. We know it is a "lost work" because Leonardo had a studio with people who studied or aided him in his production and so there are a lot of master studies and reproductions of it. This particular painting showed up at an auction in 2005, attributed as a copy, where it was purchased by art dealers. If you know anything about this painting, it is probably that in 2017 it sold for over $450 Million, the greatest sum of money paid for a painting by a WIDE margin (over $100 million more than the second most expensive if Wikipedia is to be believed - by the way, take a look at that list, there's a lot of great art on it). The dealers originally paid less than $2,000 for it so that is a pretty penny for them.

But the thing about that price tag is that it is really just shorthand for what an utterly outlandish object this even is - Starting at the provenance it was already one of the most famous lost paintings of western tradition.

It is attributed to the defining artist of the European art tradition. It is a "male companion" to the most famous painting in the world. Between the late 1700s and its reappearance in 2005 we don't really know what happened to it. Or rather, we never knew what happened to it, or where this particular painting has been. We assume it is the object described in inventories and sales notices in the 1600s! We assume that that object noted as inventory is the original but really we do not know! There is a painting in a 1525 inventory that is believed to be the original, but even that, we have no idea!

The story of how this object got deemed an original was and remains a bit of a scandal in the art world. The Lost Leonardo is a 2021 documentary that goes into it in a very through and compelling way.

As you notice, the image I have for a lock screen is not the restored painting but the cleaned and scraped one. The restoration was also highly controversial and many believes the painting in its current state is way overdone, especially for such a historical object, especially considering how disputed its attribution has been.

(The story of how this object got deemed an original was and remains a bit of a scandal in the art world. The Lost Leonardo is a 2021 documentary that goes into it and it is absolutely worth a watch.)

I think the restored painting is gorgeous. I obviously haven't seen it in person (as far as we know the buyer was a proxy for the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the painting itself has not been on display since) but there is a silent power in the gaze of the saviour that I admire.

That said - the painting post-cleaning but pre-restoration is what really does it for me. What that Saudi prince paid 450 000 000+ USD for was not the image but the object. When I look at the scuffed up and damaged wooden panel, while I see the image of Christ gazing at me through five hundered years, I also see the object and all the ways in which it seems to drive people to a sort of rational delirium.

Fittingly for my theological inclinations, I also do not particularly care if it is indeed an authentic Leonardo or not, the mystery is what intrigues me and either way the object itself is captivating. It is a piece of wood with pigment on it. Some guy made it five hundered years ago in the likeness of a model in an attempt to capture an idea as massive as Christian theology into a single picture for a single customer. It survived wars and revolutions and reformations and while I know the image and the story of the object intimately, I have never actually seen it and I probably never will, it is paint on a wooden panel and it is quite likely to outlive me by centuries.

Pretty whack shit.