The Last Leonardo: The Making of a Masterpiece

CHAPTER 2
The Walnut Knot

The countryside north of Milan sweeps slowly up towards the still blue lakes and then the jagged outline of the Alps. Before the land rises to alpine heights there are foothills and farmland that were once dotted with walnut trees, whose thick canopies of smooth-edged leaves shuffled in breezes and shook in winds. Their dense webs of branches broke up the hot sunlight, and farmyard cats scratched their backs on the trees’ distinctive, deeply furrowed dark bark. The trees grew quickly, developing thick trunks – up to two metres in diameter – and lived up to two hundred years. They are mentioned in medieval Italian legends about female shamans who summoned the spirit world by dancing around them. Millennia earlier, according to Roman myth, Jupiter, the most powerful of all the gods, subsisted on walnuts when he walked among men.

In his notebooks, Leonardo studied the structure of the walnut and other trees in the same way he studied so many other phenomena of the natural world. He observed how the colouring of the leaves was a product of four things: direct light, lustre (reflected light), shadow and transparency. He went on to analyse more complicated principles governing the structure of trees. He discovered one of the basic mathematical laws of their growth, that the combined size of a tree’s branches is equal to the width of its trunk, and the smaller branches that spring from larger ones follow the same proportional rule. At the heart of Leonardo’s life work was this pairing of the minutely detailed observation of nature with an understanding of the principles governing the appearance and behaviour of things, which today we call empiricism. For Leonardo, something had to be understood before it could be drawn. In a note dated April 1490 in his largest set of notes, the Codex Atlanticus, he wrote: ‘The painter who merely copies by practice and judgement of the eye, without reason, is like the mirror, which imitates within itself all the things placed before it without cognition of their existence.’ In Leonardo’s paintings, the detail can be overwhelming. Each leaf, each fold of cloth, each curl of hair can be different from the one beside it, yet each may share the same formal structure.

Leonardo’s mind was poised between the medieval and the modern eras,* which is one of the reasons he is such an iconic and mysterious character today. His notebooks give the thrilling sensation that the modern idea of knowledge is being invented on their pages. The Codex Atlanticus contains, amid the drawings of machines, aeroplanes, weaponry and human anatomy on its 1,119 pages, enigmatic prophecies that double as riddles for court entertainment, a literary genre dating back to the Middle Ages.1 For example: ‘There shall appear huge figures in human shape, and the nearer to you they approach, the more will their immense size diminish’ (shadows), and ‘You shall behold the bones of the dead, which by their rapid movement direct the fortunes of their mover’ (dice). He also predicted that ‘There will be many who will be moving one against the other, holding in their hands the sharp cutting iron. These will not do each other any hurt other than that caused by fatigue, for as one leans forward, the other draws back an equal space; but woe to him who intervenes between them, for in the end he will be left cut in pieces’ (a saw). The humble walnut tree, too, receives a mention here: ‘Within walnut trees, and other trees and plants, there shall be found very great hidden treasures.’ The walnut tree from which the single plank of wood was hewn on which the Salvator Mundi was painted was not concealing treasure, but it – or at least the section used for our painting – did hold its own secret: a deformity dangerous for artists.

For many years the tree from which the Salvator Mundi sprang would have performed its duty providing nuts for culinary and medicinal purposes. Its annual harvest would have enriched Renaissance pasta dishes such as spiced walnut linguine, or fig and walnut ravioli, or would have been combined with the tops of the bitter rue plant in concoctions to ward off the plague. Then one day the decision would have been made to sell the wood of the tree. It would have been dug up with spades rather than felled with an axe, since the best wood is near the base. Some of the timber would have been used to make ornate carved tables, chairs and caskets for the homes of noblemen. Other blocks would be reverentially carved into statuettes of saints and placed on the ends of choir stalls, or in the niches of altars. The finest parts would be used for the intricate Renaissance craft of intarsia, or wood inlay: different types of wood, each a different shade, were cut into delicately shaped strips to build sepia pictures of landscapes or religious scenes, which were set into cabinets and desks. This walnut tree was cut into planks for all these purposes, and a single plank, 45cm wide and 66cm high, would become our painting.

The walnut timber of the Salvator Mundi was brought on a cart to Milan, a city with a population of between 150,000 and 300,000 people. Three times the size of Florence, Milan was evolving in concentric rings, its population spilling out beyond the city walls into new suburbs. The nobles lived in high-walled palaces, with thick rusticated façades, behind which lay inner courtyards with trees and fountains and sculptures on pedestals, cut off from the noise of the street. The city skyline was dominated by the Duomo, the cathedral, in the centre, and in the north-west by the Castello Sforzesco, the palace of Milan’s ruler, Duke Ludovico Sforza. There were shipyards, taverns, bakeries, a debtors’ prison, cloth and shoe shops. There were quarters specialising in different trades: one full of mills producing cloth and paper, or sawmills for cutting wood; another grouping artisans working with wool; another with metalworkers. There were 237 churches, thirty-six monasteries, 126 schools and over a hundred practising artists. Milan was, in Leonardo’s own sharp words, a ‘great congregation of people’ who were ‘packed like goats one behind the other, filling every place with fetid smells and sowing seeds of pestilence and death’. There were periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague, which would one day kill several of Leonardo’s assistants. Leonardo, who was (at least in his own mind) an urban planner as well as an artist and scientist, concocted plans to redesign the city, but they never left the drawing board.

Somewhere in the narrow streets of Milan was the carpenter or panel-maker who supplied the wood for the Salvator Mundi. This kind of artisan was the first of several craftsmen involved in the execution of a Renaissance work of art such as the Salvator. They were often required to construct large and intricate surfaces for paintings, building up a flat surface from planks of wood connected with animal glues and grooved joints, and combining panels of different shapes into elaborate altarpieces with wings on hinges. But the creation of the walnut panel for the Salvator Mundi was a relatively mundane task, since it was cut as a single piece of wood; it is therefore all the more strange that it was so poorly executed.

Leonardo may well have ordered a batch of panels, since two other Milanese paintings of his on walnut wood have been scientifically analysed and shown to have come from the same tree. The size was standard for devotional paintings, for which there was a large demand among wealthy Italian families. Typical subjects were the Virgin and Child, various saints including John the Baptist, and Christ, carrying the cross, crowned with thorns or as the Saviour of the World. Such pictures were hung in the owner’s bedroom or private chapel.

Wood has to be prepared for painting with various undercoats, just as canvas is usually primed. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, this was sometimes done by the artist’s assistants, but often by the panel-maker’s workshop. The Salvator Mundi’s panel was prepared more or less as Leonardo said it should be in his notebooks:

The panel should be cypress, pear, service tree or walnut. You must coat it with a mixture of mastic [also known as gum Arabic, a plant resin] and turpentine which has been distilled twice and with white [lead] or, if you like, lime, and put it in a frame so that it may expand and shrink according to its moisture and dryness … Then apply boiled linseed oil in such a way as it may penetrate every part and before it is cold rub it with a dry cloth. Over this apply liquid varnish and white with a stick …

Florentine artists had their wood panels prepared with gesso, a chalky substance, but Leonardo, in common with Milanese painters, preferred a mixture of wood oil and white lead as the ground. He had his ‘sized’ with a first layer of animal glue. Then two layers of undercoat were applied, one made of a recipe of lead white pigment, with little grains of soda-lime glass and a binding agent of walnut oil; the second of more white paint, mixed with some lead tin yellow and some finer glass. The result was a surface with an off-white colouring. The addition of glass was a familiar trick used by artists at the time to lift the brightness of their pictures and accelerate the drying of the paint. Light on a painting does not reflect only off the top surface of paint. If the layers are thin enough and partly transparent it can pierce through layers of pigment and be bounced back by fine granules of glass, creating an effect of translucence. For the final process of the preparation – I confess I do not know if this was applied in the case of the Salvator Mundi – Leonardo advised ‘then wash it with urine when it is dry, and dry it again’.

But the panel-maker had done an exceptionally poor job. Deep within the prepared panel, unbeknown to the artist who was about to receive it, behind the preparatory layers of oil, gesso and urine lay a hidden problem. Unlike the walnut panels on which Leonardo painted other famous portraits such as La Belle Ferronnière and Lady with an Ermine, the Salvator’s panel contained a large knot in the lower half, right in the centre. Such knots were usually filled in with vegetable fibres, wood filings or fabric, as the Florentine artist Cennino Cennini advised in his fifteenth-century painter’s manual. But, in a second oversight, difficult to reconcile with the expertise of Renaissance woodworkers, who well knew the properties of their materials, that was not done to this piece of wood.2 It seems that either the panel-maker or an assistant in Leonardo’s workshop to whom the task had been delegated was careless with the selection and preparation of the wooden panel, and the defect was then hidden under layers of primer.

Even so, Leonardo would surely have taken a look at the back of the panel and seen the knot. The likelihood of that raises a second puzzle. Leonardo is known to have been interested in the technical aspects of making a painting. It seems out of character for him to accept such a flawed surface to paint on, especially if the work was destined for an important client. In humid and dry conditions a knot like this expands and contracts at different speeds from the rest of the wood, so that if the panel, looking far ahead into its future, became dried out, or wet, it would push and pull, perhaps taking the panel to breaking point, and creating splits and cracks. Alternatively, a knot is a weak point, so that if the picture was one day to be knocked or dropped, it could split around the knot. The knot in the walnut panel on which the Salvator Mundi was painted was a gnarled, ticking time bomb.

* Historians see the ‘modern’ period as beginning around 1500. Often they refer to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as ‘early modern’.

CHAPTER 3
Buried Treasure

Squinting at a computer screen one day in his home office, Alex Parish discovered the Salvator Mundi. It was listed for sale in an online catalogue of an obscure auction house in New Orleans, the St Charles Gallery. This was in 2005, three years and a few months before Robert Simon would board his flight to London carrying the painting under his arm. Parish thought the picture looked promising, and the price was so low that it was worth taking a small risk. He remembers: ‘I had a recollection of a similar thing that had come up with Sotheby’s a few years before. I bought the picture because I know this is just the sort of thing other people like to speculate on.’ He contacted Simon, who had himself also spotted the picture, as he subscribed to the gallery’s mailing list and received a hard-copy catalogue by post. Parish suggested they buy it together, fifty-fifty, the same way they had jointly bought many works before. Simon agreed.

Until he discovered the Salvator Mundi, Parish was a small-time Old Masters dealer whose career in the art world had been full of false starts, along with the treadmill of low-value backroom sales.

The art world has a glamorous image as a global nomadic court presided over by latterday kings and queens – the blue-chip gallerists (gallery owners), artists whose work fetches million-dollar-plus auction prices, and multi-millionaire collectors, around whom swarm smaller galleries and dealers and emerging artists. In the second half of each year the entourage moves en masse from art fair to art fair: Basel, the FIAC in Paris, TEFAF in Maastricht, Frieze London, the Armory and Frieze New York, Hong Kong, Miami, taking in auctions in London and New York on the way, in a blaze of parties and packing cases.

And yet, this is only the sparkling surface. Behind the scenes are many other people who are not born into riches, who do not have a large designer wardrobe or a taste for high society, and who are drawn into the art business not so much by a love of art, which everyone gives as their primary motivation, but by their hunger for an experience much more exciting, akin to gambling or hunting for buried treasure. For them, the attraction is the exhilaration of buying a painting from the first show of an unknown graduate artist, in the hope that five years later he or she will be part of a group show in a public institution. Or, as is the case in our story, coming across, after years of searching, an old painting ascribed to a third-rate provincial school but which, they believe, might be by an artist of great renown.

Such successes are far from guaranteed. Like any other industry to which people are drawn by the glow of fame and fortune emanating from those at the top, the art world has a very narrow peak of achievement and a wide base of footsoldiers, bottom-feeders and also-rans. One of those at the base of the hierarchy was Alex Parish. As he himself says, ‘I’ve been down to a suitcase more than once in my life.’ Born in 1954 into a lower-middle-class American family, he majored in art history at Ohio Wesleyan University and then moved to New York, where he worked in the gift shop of the Museum of Modern Art. He left after two years and tried unsuccessfully to set himself up as a dealer, but ‘through a combination of zero training, zero initiative, a certain amount of youthful lack of discipline, etc., I ground to a halt after a few years’. He went to London in the early 1980s and took a one-year course in the art market, not at a prestigious establishment like Sotheby’s Institute of Art, but at a private school, the New Academy for Art Studies, run by art historians Lucy Knox and Roger Bevan. When he returned to New York, he worked for a while in another gift shop, this time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then ‘begged to get the shittiest job at the shittiest auction house in New York City, and managed to do it. I worked there for two years and ended up writing their catalogue.’ While he was there he succeeded in identifying an interesting-looking undervalued painting that had been consigned to auction, the kind of painting known in the trade as a sleeper. The Salvator Mundi can well lay claim to being the greatest sleeper ever discovered.

The painting Parish spotted was a seventeenth-century Dutch pastoral scene, which he brought to the attention of the renowned Old Masters gallery Colnaghi. It was a gesture that displayed an appropriate combination of knowledge and ambition. Colnaghi took him on, and he worked for them in New York for two years, from 1980 to 1982, but not in a high-profile position. It was not an easy business in those days, he recalls. ‘No one was selling old Italian pictures or English pictures, or anything like that, in New York at the time.’ After a couple of years he went to work for Christie’s. It was another low-paid job, but he was becoming increasingly fluent in the lingo of art market insiders: ‘I was essentially the guy on the floor, taking the pictures into the back room, black-lighting them [putting them under an ultraviolet light to show up how much over-painting had been done], turping them down [cleaning them with turpentine], showing them to all the trade [that is, not to private collectors but to dealers and gallerists, who usually get the first look at new arrivals].’ He had one further invidious task: ‘I was the one who always got sent down to the front counter to tell people that their van Dyck was really not what they thought it was, and thank you for coming.’

At Christie’s, Parish found once again that he had a talent for spotting sleepers. ‘I was working late one night in 1985,’ he remembers. ‘I was the only person around from my department, and a picture came in. I got a call from a girl downstairs, “Please come take a look at this painting before you leave.” I went down and there was an enormous picture, four feet by six feet, with a couple of mirrors, just dropped off by some picker.’ A ‘picker’ is a dealer-middleman who buys from myriad regional auctions, from the estate sales of deceased collectors and from antique shops across the United States, and then takes the works to New York and consigns them for sale, hopefully for a higher price. ‘I looked at it, and I was like, “Oh my God, this could be by Dosso Dossi.”’ You need a thorough knowledge of sixteenth-century Italian painting to know a Dosso Dossi when you see one. He is one of those few artists, like El Greco or Gustave Moreau, who seem to exist outside history. His mysterious paintings of obscure allegories and mythological scenes, featuring magicians, pygmies and unicorns alongside the more conventional array of saints and madonnas, all bathed in the gentle, golden evening light of Venice, reach forward from the Renaissance to the Primitivism and Surrealism of the twentieth century.

‘So I told the girl, “Don’t tell anyone about this. It could be worth $100,000,”’ Parish told me. ‘And I called my boss, who was still over at the main building, and I said, “I think there’s a Dosso in the warehouse.” And he was totally dismissive. “Shut up. Get back to work.” End of story. What was I to say? I’m just a flump. He was an expert. So I totally forgot about it. About two weeks later, I’m in a meeting with someone, and I get a call from him and he says, “Oh my God, there’s a Dosso in the warehouse.” And I’m like, “Yes.”’ Parish’s deadpan indicates a life full of rejections because he didn’t come from the right social strata for the art world.

Experiences like these led Parish to an epiphany. ‘The pickers and runners would arrive at Christie’s with a truckload of paintings, and I would value each picture. I’d look at what they had and it was like, “No, that’s $4,000. That’s $2,000. We don’t want that, we don’t want that, we want this.”’ He could see that most of the runners did not know enough about art history to know what they were buying. ‘I saw a gap in this supply chain for someone who had the knowledge to go out and look in the backwaters of America.’

So he set himself up once again as an independent dealer, specialising in Italian painting. Once again, it didn’t work out. It was still difficult to find buyers for the Italian pictures he unearthed. In the meantime, his wife gave birth to triplets and he moved out of New York to a larger house. He now had a large family and a small income. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, buying old paintings and then ‘shovelling’ them through the auction houses. It was around this time that he became a born-again Christian, a highly unusual commitment for someone in the art world.

Help came around 1996 in the form of a phone call from the largest Old Master dealership in the world, founded by Richard Green. Green has galleries on Bond Street in London, but was looking for someone to find paintings for him in the United States. ‘In their heyday, they were flipping,’ says Parish – using another art market term, this time referring to fast-turnaround buying and selling – ‘something along the lines of six hundred pictures a year – two hundred at fairs, two hundred through their galleries and two hundred through auctions.’ Parish worked for Green’s son Jonathan, who told him, ‘Go and look for pictures for us.’

Jonathan Green sent Parish into the hinterlands of America to scour auction houses, estate sales and remote regional galleries for promising works of art. ‘I needed to be trained at first, because I didn’t know anything about the breadth of merchandise they bought, but it turned out to be a happy marriage because I didn’t hugely affect the bottom line there,’ Parish told me, indicating that his salary was modest. Meanwhile, his contract permitted him to buy and sell works of art for himself on the side, although a gentleman’s agreement meant his employer got first refusal. In addition to travelling, he subscribed to trade newspapers and catalogues, going through them and asking for Polaroids of any pictures that looked promising. But, he says knowingly, ‘Within a few years the digital revolution totally reinvented this business.’

At the time, the United States was awash with paintings whose value their owners did not have a clue about. From the late nineteenth into the middle of the twentieth century, American collectors had ‘vacuumed up’ European Old Master paintings, usually buying from impoverished European aristocrats whose wealth had been eroded by the recessions of the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, and by the two World Wars. ‘All the Americans were desperate for class, and all the Europeans were desperate for money,’ says Parish. This was the era in which the precursors of today’s billionaire art collectors, robber barons like J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon and John Rockefeller, amassed peerless collections which later formed the foundations of the country’s great museums. But less prominent middle-class families also collected. The paintings they bought were often unsigned and in poor condition. Over the years they had been damaged, become the victims of misguided restoration, and been passed down from generation to generation until they reached the hands of people who weren’t interested in art. ‘These pictures were finally starting to bubble up into the market.’

Thus was born a perfect storm of lightning-fast information technology, surging supply and deep demand. Parish was a like a meteorologist who tracked the new commercial climate. ‘There was this frontier in terms of Old Masters, where all these pictures were coming up and no one knew what they were being sold, and I was looking at that frontier.’

Parish acquired from a colleague a database of five thousand auction houses across America. He whittled the list down to about a thousand that sold paintings. If the auction houses didn’t upload online or send out hard-copy catalogues, Parish got on their electronic mailing lists and asked for jpegs of anything that looked interesting. ‘I was in a tiny office, surrounded by books, and I spent – I’m not kidding you – fourteen hours a day going through this thing. Hunting, hunting, hunting. I mean, literally: click, click, click, click. I was not going to let a picture sell in this country that I didn’t know about.’

Soon Parish was buying a painting a week for Green, using this database. Green requested ‘sporters and nautical’ (that is, paintings of sporting scenes and sailing ships) or ‘Victorian and silks and satins’ (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits of noblemen and ladies dressed in expensive fabrics). The art market had embraced the online database, and Parish was poised to show what a powerful tool it could be.

Parish often turned to other dealers he trusted, like Robert Simon, to share the financial risk of buying works in which Green wasn’t interested.* At his peak Parish was holding stakes in up to seventy pictures over the course of a single year, taking 50 per cent, 33 per cent, and occasionally 25 per cent shares in the purchases. It was a very hit-and-miss business. ‘If I had a picture for $1,500 and it brought $15,000 at auction, then that to me would be like, “Hallelujah!” I had a couple of years in a row where I would land one picture, be it for $500 or $5,000, and it would come back at about $100,000. It was really great. I think I did that three or four times in a row.’ But there were also times when pictures Parish bought and consigned to auction did not sell. ‘It’s difficult, particularly when you’re buying from the internet and you’re buying from small photographs, which is what the trade had evolved into. You have to “spec” from photos. And it is speculation. A certain percentage of them, when you see them in the flesh, are stinkers. They come back to punch you in the nose. I was selling those things off at whatever price I could get, 99 per cent of them at a loss, just to get some seed capital back.’

And then one day Parish was clicking away as usual when he spotted the listing for the Salvator Mundi in an online catalogue from the St Charles Gallery in New Orleans. It was Item 664. ‘After Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519)’ it began, and then, ‘Christ Salvador Mundi, oil on cradled panel, 26 inches by 18½ inches.’ Was the misspelling of the Latin ‘Salvator’ perhaps due to a Spanish-speaking typist? ‘Presented in a fine antique gilt and gesso exhibition frame.’ The estimate – an auction house always states the price it thinks the lot may achieve – was just $1,200 to $1,800. The painting was illustrated in the hard-copy catalogue that Robert Simon saw at the same time, with a very low-resolution black-and-white photograph. Christ’s clothes had become a gloomy grey, his cheekbones and forehead glimmered oddly out of the murky darkness, and the fingers of his blessing hand seemed illuminated by pale candlelight. ‘It looked kinda interesting. School of Leonardo is always interesting, and the price was very good,’ Parish told me with a grin.

Parish asked the St Charles Gallery down in New Orleans to send him a photograph. ‘When it arrived, I pulled it out, I held the picture, and in an instant I could see, like any Old Master dealer can, this part is totally repainted, this part is pretty much untouched, and this part, which included the hand, was like, “Oh my God, that’s period! That’s period.” You know what that means? Period means it’s of the era it’s trying to be. You see seventeenth-century rehashes of Renaissance pictures, nineteenth-century rehashes of Renaissance pictures. This was clearly of the era it purported to be from. And it was pretty good quality. I’m looking at the hand and I’m looking at the drapery and I can clearly see this is not simply one of numerous copies. This is an extremely good, high-quality copy.’

He and Simon decided to buy it. The rest, as they say, is art history.

Nothing in the known universe, no item, object or quantity of material, has ever appreciated in value as fast as the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. It was sold in May 2005 to Simon and Parish for $1,175 – a sum considerably less than the figure of ‘around $10,000’ the pair later quoted to the media. In 2013 they sold it for $80 million, then four years later, in 2017 – a mere twelve years and six months after it was sold for not much more than $1,000 – it was auctioned by Christie’s New York for $450 million.

* Jonathan Green recounts a story of how he found himself in a taxi with Parish in London in the mid-2000s. Parish pulled out his mobile phone and showed Green a detail of a blessing hand. It was from the Salvator Mundi, but Green didn’t know that. ‘What do you think of this?’ he asked nonchalantly. Green nodded appreciatively. Green says Parish never offered him the painting, and told me, with magnanimity, ‘I don’t hold anything against him.’ Parish has a different version of the story. ‘I had bought the Salvator Mundi at least a year or two prior to leaving Green, and I’d mentioned it to them a couple of times, but they were so contemptuous of me in some respects. You know, “Just, shut up. Go get us coffee.” That kind of tone of voice. So, OK. Okie dokie …’ Parish drew out the last two words with his excellent drawl, and never finished the sentence.