Vol. 42 No.

1 · 2 January 2020

A Peece of Christ
Charles Hope

L V  
at the Louvre, until 24 February 2020

L V  R  
by Carmen Bambach (/search-results?search=Carmen Bambach) .
Yale, 2350 pp., £400, July 2019, 978 0 300 19195 0

T L L : T S L W ’ M E  P  
by Ben Lewis (/search-results?search=Ben Lewis) .
William Collins, 396 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 00 831341 8

L ’ ‘S M ’ C L S  C  
by Margaret Dalivalle (/search-results?search=Margaret Dalivalle) , Martin Kemp (/search-results?search=Martin Kemp) and Robert Simon
(/search-results?search=Robert Simon) .
Oxford, 383 pp., £35, November 2019, 978 0 19 881383 5

L
’ work has always been in demand. Following his training in Florence he moved
to Milan, where he worked for the duke, Ludovico Sforza. A er a brief spell as a military
engineer for Cesare Borgia, he returned to Florence. Then came a second period in Milan,
a few years in Rome at the invitation of the pope and nally a summons by Francis I to France,
where he died in 1519, aged 67. His reputation, already very high in his lifetime, continued to grow
a er his death, and he regularly appeared in lists of outstanding modern painters. The earliest
published account of his life, in the rst edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), is largely
devoted to comments about his personality, charm, extraordinary range of interests and, perhaps
surprisingly today, his reluctance to concentrate on painting. Almost all this material was taken
from various manuscript sources then circulating in Florence, but embellished in the retelling.
Thus the statement about his death was enhanced by the claim that he died in the arms of Francis
I, an episode that became an indispensable part of the Leonardo legend and was later depicted by
Ingres. (Although Leonardo did indeed die at Amboise, Francis was not there at the time.) There is
no clear indication that the author of the biographical account, the style of which is unlike that of
Vasari himself, had actually seen any paintings by Leonardo, so it’s understandable that the
comments about Leonardo’s in uence on later artists are extremely vague. More surprising is the
fact that no serious attempt seems to have been made by the author to consult people in Florence
who had known Leonardo while he was working there, although this was done for other artists. As
a consequence, many of the details provided about Leonardo’s life are demonstrably wrong.

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The expanded biography published in the second edition of the Lives (1568) wasn’t much of an
improvement. Vasari seems to have made some contribution, notably in adding references to
drawings by Leonardo in his possession. He may also be the source for a brief passage about the
un nished Adoration of the Magi, now in the U zi. Although it was the most signi cant work by
Leonardo in Florence, it had not been mentioned in the rst edition. The 1568 Life had already
been printed before Vasari went to Milan in 1566, and the only passage relating to Leonardo’s work
that can be credited to him is the statement, later in the book, that Leonardo’s most famous
painting, The Last Supper, was then only an ‘indistinct smudge’. It was already deteriorating by 1517,
within twenty years of its completion. Leonardo was equally unfortunate with his other major wall
painting, the Battle of Anghiari, for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. This was abandoned un nished
because of problems with the technique he had attempted, and the composition is known today
only through copies.

‘La Belle Ferronnière’

None of the other works mentioned by Vasari were on public display at the time, except an
altarpiece in Florence by Leonardo’s teacher, Verrocchio, in which Leonardo supposedly painted
one angel, and most of them cannot be identi ed with any degree of certainty. As it happens,
despite Leonardo’s fame his activity as a painter was largely mysterious. The one place where it
was possible to see authentic pictures by him, other than the ruined Last Supper, was outside Italy,
speci cally in the French royal collection, which included ve pictures acquired at di erent dates:
the Mona Lisa, another female portrait, La Belle Ferronnière, Virgin and Child with St Anne, the rst
version of Virgin of the Rocks and St John the Baptist. A new insight into his activity was provided by
the publication in 1651 of his so-called Treatise on Painting, a work produced a er his death by
combining di erent passages from his notebooks. Largely thanks to his fame the text was
frequently republished, although it is open to question whether painters of the 17th and 18th
centuries found much to interest them in the ideas of an artist born in 1452. Poussin, who
provided illustrations to the rst edition, is said to have remarked that everything of value in the
book could be written in large letters on a single sheet of paper.

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Given his celebrity, it isn’t surprising that in past centuries a very large number of paintings have
been credited to Leonardo most of which have subsequently been eliminated from his oeuvre. The
main source of increasing knowledge about him was his surviving notebooks and drawings,
amounting to some ve thousand pages, which gradually became available, and from various
documents that are not always easy to interpret. The notebooks and drawings, which in their
content and quantity are quite unlike the surviving body of work of any other Renaissance artist,
con rmed much of what had been said about him in Vasari’s Lives: that he was interested in many
things including anatomy, that he was an outstanding and innovative draughtsman, and that he
was unable or unwilling to maintain a sustained involvement in the production of paintings.

Because only about a dozen surviving paintings are now generally accepted, the notebooks and
drawings provide the main insight into his personality and development as an artist. But they also
present formidable problems of dating, attribution and purpose, which are at the heart of Carmen
Bambach’s massive and extraordinarily impressive scrutiny. For years she has devoted herself to
the rst-hand study of the drawings and the ways in which they re ect Leonardo’s preoccupations,
especially as expressed in his notebooks. The book is in e ect an examination of Leonardo’s entire
career and thought, based principally but not exclusively on his drawings, and it illuminates every
aspect of his achievement. But the evidence at Bambach’s disposal is so vast and miscellaneous
and the problems that she discusses are so diverse and o en so technical that it is not clear that a
narrative approach is always the most e ective. It isn’t easy for the reader to establish a coherent
account of Leonardo’s changing interests in topics such as anatomy, optics or machinery, despite
the fact that the information is there in the text. Her book, although too large for easy
consultation, will be essential for any future account of Leonardo’s career, his artistic legacy and
the evolution of his thought and drawing practice.

The Louvre is the only possible venue for an exhibition that was always going to be the major event
of the h centenary of Leonardo’s death. The museum holds ve of his paintings: no other
institution can claim more than one. With loans of three other nished paintings, plus one
un nished picture and the National Gallery cartoon, as well as works closely related to him or
possibly in small part by him, the exhibition provides an unmatched opportunity to appreciate his
achievement as a painter. But inevitably the bulk of the show consists of his drawings, including
many of the most famous, lent by collections all over the world. And for those paintings that have
not been sent, and for some of those that are included, full-size infrared re ectograms have been
used, which provide much information about the way he worked. There is also an outstanding
selection of the surviving notebooks, or in some cases pages from them. But his scienti c and
mechanical investigations, which do not lend themselves well to an exhibition, are not unduly
emphasised. The focus is on Leonardo the artist, and in particular on his mastery of drawing
where his ideas seem to have been given visual form with e ortless uency beyond the reach of
any of his predecessors.

The most striking absence is the Salvator Mundi, bought in 2005 for $1175, when it was described as
a copy, and sold in 2017 for $450 million as a Leonardo. Its present location is not known for
certain, but it is said to belong to Mohammed bin Salman. The process, probably without parallel
in the history of art, by which a painting rst recorded for certain around 1900 in the collection of
Sir Francis Cook, when it was not regarded as of any particular merit, acquired its astonishing
price tag in only 12 years is told in absorbing detail by Ben Lewis. The key moment in this history
of the painting was its inclusion in the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan held
at the National Gallery in late 2011. There was no reference to it in the gallery’s main press releases
in May and July 2011, but it was mentioned and reproduced in a brief press statement of 13
July 2011:

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 ‘Salvator Mundi’

Leonardo is known to have painted the Salvator Mundi – an image of Christ holding a globe, with
his right hand raised in blessing. The version in a private collection in New York was shown a er
cleaning to the director of the National Gallery and to the curator of the exhibition as well as to
other scholars in the eld. We felt that it would be of great interest to include this painting in the
exhibition as a new discovery. It will be presented as the work of Leonardo, and this will
obviously be an important opportunity to test this new attribution by direct comparison with
works universally accepted as Leonardo’s. A separate press release on the Salvator Mundi is issued
by the owner.

There are two odd features about this statement. The rst is the claim that Leonardo ‘is known to
have painted the Salvator Mundi’. He certainly produced drawings of details of costume that were
used in other paintings of the subject, but it doesn’t follow that he did so himself. There are other
instances in which known pictures on his design are certainly not entirely autograph, although it
is o en supposed, not necessarily correctly, that he contributed to them, and this possibility was
pointed out in the catalogue of the National Gallery exhibition. And if the attribution of the
version displayed needed to be tested, why was it being exhibited as the work of Leonardo? In the
catalogue none of the scholars to whom the picture had been shown was identi ed and their views
were not reported, yet no reservations were expressed about the attribution.

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One of the two owners identi ed at the time, an art dealer named Robert Simon, did produce a
press release before the exhibition opened, ‘summarising the ownership, critical and conservation
history of the painting’, as he now puts it. In this he rather coyly stated that the picture was
‘privately owned and not for sale’ and that in 2005 it had been ‘brought to [him] for study and
research’. In fact, he had bought it at auction with another dealer, Alex Parish, evidently as an
investment (but he alone was named as owner in the provenance of the picture given by Christie’s
in 2017); and already in June 2011 it had been reported that the picture ‘belongs to a group of Old
Master dealers, including Robert Simon’. Simon listed about a dozen art historians who had seen
the picture and stated that ‘the study and examination of the painting by these scholars resulted in
an unequivocal consensus that the Salvator Mundi was painted by Leonardo, and that it is the single
original painting from which the many copies and versions depend. Individual opinions vary
slightly in the matter of dating.’ Simon did not explain why he, rather than the National Gallery,
which had consulted the various scholars in the rst place, had issued the press release, especially
given that the picture was supposedly not for sale, nor why he provided a PR contact (who, it
seems, now works for Harry and Meghan). According to Lewis, Simon and Parish began to look
for buyers soon a er the exhibition closed.

Lewis interviewed the ve external scholars consulted by the National Gallery in 2008, all of whom
gured in Simon’s list. According to him, two supported the attribution, two didn’t commit
themselves and one (Bambach) rejected it, while suggesting that Leonardo retouched some
passages. No consensus, one might think. But Lewis’s account has been challenged by Simon in a
letter to the TLS of 4 October 2019, in which he said that he had sent a dra release to those who
had attended the 2008 meeting, and all of them had approved it. Unfortunately, he did not specify
whether the text of the dra release corresponded to the nal one. Not that it greatly matters. Not
only had Simon persuaded the National Gallery to display his picture, even before it went on show
he had told the press that the gallery’s experts had endorsed the attribution. His press release was
at the heart of the case Christie’s made for the painting in its sale catalogue, along with the
National Gallery’s unquali ed endorsement of the attribution.

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Simon, and later Christie’s, did not explain what evidence, notably about the restoration history
and supposed provenance of the picture, was available to the scholars who had given an opinion or
how they had dealt with such evidence. This approach is common enough in the art trade, in
which attributions are o en based on little more than the views of art historians. Many of those
who specialise in making such attributions have great con dence in their own judgment, even
when this has proved fallible, and they tend to discount or give a tendentious spin to documentary
evidence and information about provenance that does not t with their theories. But it is not
necessarily possible to establish who painted a now very damaged picture half a millennium ago
simply by looking at it on an easel, especially if it has been extensively restored. While a
specialised knowledge of Leonardo’s drawings and of the content of his notebooks is required for
the kind of connoisseurship displayed in Bambach’s book, it is not so clear that art historians are
uniquely quali ed to make judgments about his paintings, let alone about one that does not in the
least resemble his generally accepted works. These are all in public institutions; it doesn’t take a
great deal of commitment to become familiar with them and excellent reproductions are readily
available. But why is a deep familiarity with Leonardo’s ideas more relevant to reaching the kinds
of judgment required to assess the Salvator Mundi than the expertise of, say, a trained artist? As it
happens, only one of the Leonardo specialists who have written about the picture (not one of
those consulted by the National Gallery) has commented on the fact that Christ’s eyes are not at
the same level, a basic error one would not expect to nd in a painting by Leonardo. Many art
historians seem to believe that artistic training is irrelevant to the practice of connoisseurship, but
this attitude merely facilitates the activity of forgers. The knowledge that the art historian can
contribute is of a di erent kind, involving issues such as the study of provenance and familiarity
with the available information about the work of Leonardo’s assistants and followers.

The Salvator Mundi from the Cook collection does not altogether t Simon’s assertion that
Leonardo painted a picture of the subject that then inspired others. None of the other 11 or so
versions has a colour scheme that is remotely comparable to it, and several of them also di er in
this respect from one another. In some the composition extends further to the right, but the Cook
picture has not been cut down on that side. And in only one other is Christ’s drapery visible
without distortion through the crystal orb in his le hand, as it is in the Cook picture. This is a
work now in Naples, which was used as the basis for restoring this area in the Cook picture, but
the drapery already looked much the same when it was rst recorded. As his notebooks show,
Leonardo was interested in refraction, and would have been well aware that drapery seen through
a solid transparent sphere could never be without distortion. Martin Kemp tried to explain this
anomaly on the grounds that Leonardo was observing the principle of decorum: just as artists
didn’t show refraction of Christ’s legs in water in paintings of his baptism, so too Leonardo
avoided it here. The argument seems very far-fetched, and does not account for the fact that in
virtually all the other known versions of the composition the sphere is shown in a more convincing
way. In short, the di erences between the various versions are not obviously consistent with the
idea that they were based on a painting by Leonardo. It seems more likely that they were based on
a cartoon a er his design, especially as there is no evidence of a print before 1650. There is no
clear indication from the 16th century of the existence of a picture of the Salvator Mundi by
Leonardo himself, and it is rather surprising that he should have made one given that his other
works do not suggest that he would have been interested in producing something in which the
principal gure is entirely static and frontal, as well as lacking any kind of characterisation. The
related drawings are generally thought to date from some time a er 1500 – that is to say, from a
period in which he was able to pick and choose what he painted.

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The picture itself is a ruin, with the face much restored to make it reminiscent of the Mona Lisa,
and the main arguments for Leonardo’s involvement in its execution as well as its design rest on
the supposed excellence of the least damaged parts, namely Christ’s right hand, some of the
pattern on his costume and the lower section of the crystal sphere. But is it realistic to suppose
that art historians in the 21st century can be sure that these sections are by Leonardo himself,
rather than by some skilled assistant? To paint them no invention was required, merely manual
skill of a high order, and an attribution made largely on the basis of these passages alone can
hardly be taken seriously. It is also signi cant that no compelling visual comparisons have been
provided between these passages and those either in paintings by Leonardo himself or in works by
his closest followers.

U
the most substantial published discussion of the Salvator Mundi is by Lewis.
The new book by Margaret Dalivalle, Martin Kemp and Robert Simon – the leading
gure in the process by which the Salvator Mundi was accepted as a work by Leonardo –
seems to have been the one announced as forthcoming with Yale University Press in 2011.
Although Kemp was not mentioned at that time in connection with the picture, according to
Lewis he was entirely convinced about the attribution when consulted by the National Gallery in
2008; he also saw the picture in New York later that year. Of all the experts involved, he has the
broadest conception of what a work by Leonardo might look like, and at just that period he was
attempting, although with very limited success, to persuade others that Leonardo was responsible
for a portrait on vellum known as La Bella Principessa which most other Leonardo specialists
consider a modern forgery or a 19th-century pastiche.

The Yale project was cancelled ‘due to a change in editorial policy’. In 2017 Oxford University Press
reported that they would publish the book in 2018, and it nally appeared last November. The
reason for the long gestation has not been explained, but may re ect an attempt to clarify the
provenance of the painting. The claim in the blurb that this is ‘the de nitive study on the
rediscovered da Vinci masterpiece’ is excessive. There is no systematic discussion of the many
versions of the subject from the circle of Leonardo, the account of the restoration of the picture is
cursory and incomplete, and there is no real attempt to lay out the evidence in a clear and
comprehensive way, allowing the reader to decide on the issues involved. It is more a piece of
advocacy than objective scholarship, and in this respect contrasts with Lewis’s much more
readable and informative study. Unexpectedly in a book published by Oxford, the treatment of
primary sources is inconsistent and unsatisfactory; they are sometimes given only in translation
and sometimes with garbled transcriptions.

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The most substantial section of the book is a study on the provenance by Margaret Dalivalle. She
had originally proposed that the picture had belonged to Charles I and had been acquired for £30 –
a rather low sum – by a certain John Stone a er the execution of the king in 1649, when it was
described as ‘a peece of Christ done by Leonardo’. This tted with an earlier theory that a Salvator
Mundi by Leonardo had entered the English royal collection via Charles’s French wife, Henrietta
Maria. Given the presence in France of various paintings by Leonardo this did not seem
implausible. However, there is no supporting evidence for the theory. Dalivalle has now shown
that Stone’s picture was recovered by Charles II in 1660, and in 1666 was called ‘Our Saviour with a
globe in one hand and holding up the other’; it then disappeared from view. Lewis has pointed out
that in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow there is a painting by a follower of Leonardo showing an
adolescent Christ holding a globe and raising his other hand. The brand on the back of the panel
indicates that it came from the collection of Charles I. Dalivalle points out that there was another
picture by Leonardo recorded in the same collection, described either as ‘A lords gure. In halfe’
or ‘Christ en bust’. She suggests that these two pictures could have been the one in the Pushkin
and the Salvator Mundi. But the evidence is hardly compelling. There is little reason to suppose that
the Salvator Mundi was ever in the royal collection. It may not even have been in England in the 17th
century. Wenceslaus Hollar’s print of 1650, which has similar drapery – a strong indication that it
was based on the Cook picture – was published in Antwerp, and there is no good reason to
suppose that he copied the picture in England and then returned to Antwerp, as Dalivalle seems
to propose.

It is hard not to be impressed by the skill with which Simon promoted his picture, or not to be
dismayed by the way in which the National Gallery found itself involved and even exploited. When
such an institution, nanced out of public money, chooses to exhibit a previously unknown work
with an unquali ed attribution to Leonardo, the public is entitled to know the evidence on which
that attribution was based. Otherwise, it is more a marketing ploy than a contribution to
knowledge. But the evidence that was provided included misleading or unsubstantiated assertions
about the provenance of the picture and a public statement by the then owner. The trustees
urgently need to consider their policy about loans of this kind, preferably before the forthcoming
Titian exhibition. As for the current owner, he and his advisers evidently did not carry out due
diligence before making their purchase, but it can be hazardous not to do so when such huge
sums are at stake and when art historians and the art market generally are so free with their
opinions and so astute in their marketing.

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Letters
Vol. 42 No. 2 · 23 January 2020

Charles Hope, writing ostensibly about the great Leonardo exhibition at the Louvre as well as several
books, in fact focuses on the Salvator Mundi – it accounts for roughly two-thirds of his piece – and,
more speci cally, on the circumstances of its initial presentation to the public, with which I was
intimately involved (LRB, 2 January). In so doing Hope relies on Ben Lewis’s The Last Leonardo, and
repeats some of that book’s inaccuracies, even discounting my refutation of them. An example: Lewis
states that only two of the ve scholars who saw the painting at the National Gallery in 2008 approved
the attribution to Leonardo. In fact I contacted each of them in July 2011 and all con rmed their
positive opinion of the attribution for a press release announcing the painting’s discovery. As Hope
notes, I stated this in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement of 4 October 2019, but the ever doubting
professor wonders whether the dra text I submitted to the scholars for their approval was the same
as the one eventually issued. It was, verbatim.

Hope questions why I, and not the National Gallery, prepared that release, ‘given that the picture was
supposedly not for sale’ – it was not – and that the release gave the name of a PR contact, a person
who he has discovered with relish now represents Harry and Meghan, as if that were somehow
relevant. The answers are disappointingly simple. A formal presentation of the then unknown
painting had been anticipated, and a rash of error- lled articles appeared in the press in July 2011. The
press release was issued at the request of the National Gallery, since that was proper protocol: I
represented the owners, not they. And its purpose was purely corrective, not promotional. Having no
press contacts, the owners engaged a communications rm, whose task was simply to issue the
release, respond to requests for photographs (hence the PR contact), no more than that.

‘It is hard not to be impressed by the skill with which Simon promoted his picture,’ Hope writes, ‘or
not to be dismayed by the way the National Gallery found itself involved and even exploited.’ This is a
compliment I vigorously reject. I have no skill in promotion. I have worked as an art dealer and
consultant for many years, but have never allowed commerce to interfere with my judgment. Nor in
this case did I do anything other than present the results of my research and the painting’s
conservation history to others. Hope writes that I ‘persuaded the National Gallery to display [my]
picture’. I did not, and could not have. The loan of the Salvator Mundi was requested by the gallery a er
the painting had been extensively studied by art historians and curators, and following the approval of
senior sta and trustees. I fail to see how the gallery was exploited.

Hope states that ‘it is not necessarily possible to establish who painted a now very damaged picture
half a millennium ago simply by looking at it on an easel, especially if it has been extensively restored.’
This is of course true, but Hope should be aware that a wealth of criteria beyond the ‘easel’ inform any
decent scholar’s judgments today. In the case of the Salvator Mundi, these included documentation of
the painting’s conservation history, material analyses, technical imaging, research into provenance
(both con rmed and not); studies of iconographic, theological and optical issues; and a review of the
picture’s relationship to preparatory drawings, variant copies and later derivations. All this
information was shared openly and transparently, and without advocacy, with any scholar who
examined the painting.

What’s more, Hope writes, ‘it is not so clear that art historians are uniquely quali ed to make
judgments’ about Leonardo’s paintings, ‘let alone about one that does not in the least resemble his
generally accepted works’. Clearly this caution against connoisseurship does not apply to Hope
himself, whose inability to recognise the many connections between the Salvator Mundi and other
works by the master is itself of concern. His opinion about the painting’s authorship is of course his
freely to make, but his criticism of the manner in which the painting was introduced to the world is
both inaccurate and irrelevant.

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Other statements in the review are arguable or require correction. The face in the Salvator Mundi is,
Hope writes, ‘much restored to make it reminiscent of the Mona Lisa’, which seems a perverse
expansion of conservator Dianne Modestini’s statement that she had studied detailed photographs of
the Mona Lisa ‘trying to understand how to x the little damage to the mouth of the painting’. More
comical is Hope’s patronising claim that the current owner ‘and his advisers evidently did not carry
out due diligence before making their purchase’ – an unbelievable assertion that I doubt he would ever
make were the purchaser from a part of the world closer to his own.

A last correction concerns the genesis of our book, which is not the same as the Yale University Press
publication announced in 2011. That book was to feature essays by several scholars in addition to
Martin Kemp and Margaret Dalivalle, as well as an extensive discussion of the known variations of the
composition by me, and a full conservation and technical dossier by Modestini and a team of
conservation scientists. It was cancelled by Yale in what I politely called ‘a change in editorial policy’.
In fact we were informed that Yale now had a rule that they did not publish studies of individual works
of art, and that the picture was no longer in the news. Both reasons seemed specious; perhaps a
con ict with other books published by Yale informed the decision. In any case Oxford accepted our
proposal only in its reduced form. I have continued to work on an expanded study of the copies and
variants, while Modestini has since shared all the conservation documentation and technical images
on the website salvatormundirevisited.com.

Robert Simon
New York

Charles Hope, in his account of the Salvator Mundi, claims that Robert Simon ‘persuaded the National
Gallery’ to display the picture in its Leonardo exhibition. In fact, Simon never even proposed that it be
included. I was shown the painting in New York before I became director of the National Gallery. A er
I did so and learned that a Leonardo exhibition was being planned, I mentioned the painting to the
curator of the exhibition and he went to New York to see it. He then, on his own initiative and in
compliance with the unwritten protocol expected by the trustees of a national institution in such
circumstances, convened a group of external scholars to discuss it. None of these scholars expressed
dissent from the proposal that the painting was by Leonardo. Nor did they do so more than two years
later, when the press release announcing the inclusion of the painting in the exhibition was prepared.

Speculation about the provenance of the painting was then peripheral to its attribution, and the claim
that it was by Leonardo was indeed made by looking closely at the few parts that were relatively
undamaged.

There is no doubt that by including a painting in a loan exhibition its commercial value may increase,
but it is not infrequently the case that the opposite occurs, and I think it was rather courageous of
Simon to agree to lend his painting.

Nicholas Penny
London SW4

Vol. 42 No. 3 · 6 February 2020

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Nicholas Penny refers to an ‘unwritten protocol’ involving the consultation of external scholars before
a national institution exhibits works in private hands whose attribution might be controversial
(Letters, 23 January). Regardless of the relevance of that protocol, the websites of the National Gallery,
the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum all indicate that these institutions are unable or
unwilling to provide an authentication for objects belonging to members of the public. Yet this is
precisely what was done by the National Gallery in the case of the Salvator Mundi, then owned by a
consortium of art dealers. The gallery’s press statement announced that ‘it will be presented as the
work of Leonardo,’ and in the catalogue it was called ‘an autograph work by Leonardo’. The experts
consulted by the gallery in 2008 were not asked to provide an authentication, and this is con rmed
both by the fact that their opinions were not reported in the catalogue and by explicit statements from
at least two of them, Maria Teresa Fiorio and Pietro Marani.

There is also an unwritten protocol among scholars that when advancing a signi cant new proposal
the evidence should be provided in full and objectively. Yet the gallery chose to exhibit an unknown
and very damaged picture with a provenance going back to 1900 as an authentic work of Leonardo, the
rarest and most highly prized of all European painters, rather than as a possible work by him, without
providing much of the relevant evidence. Readers of the catalogue would not have known who had
endorsed the attribution, or on the basis of what evidence, particularly about the restoration. It was
easy enough to establish that the claim in the catalogue (repeated in the Christie’s catalogue of 2017)
that Henrietta Maria had received proof copies of Hollar’s print was unfounded, but to the best of my
knowledge the rst reproduction of the painting a er the overpaint had been removed was published
only in 2017, on a very small scale, on page 66 of Christie’s catalogue. I see no reason to revise my
belief that in this instance the trustees were asleep at the wheel.

Charles Hope
London W2

Robert Simon claims that the Salvator Mundi, of which he was a co-owner at the time, was ‘not for sale’
in the summer of 2011 when he issued a press release announcing his discovery of the painting and its
forthcoming premiere at the National Gallery. He writes: ‘Hope questions why I, and not the National
Gallery, prepared that release, “given that the picture was supposedly not for sale” – it was not.’ This
statement appears to be disingenuous. Since the publication of my book The Last Leonardo I have been
sent testimony by the renowned international antiques and carpet dealer Michael Franses, in which he
states that he attempted to sell the Salvator Mundi on Simon’s behalf in 2009-10. Franses relayed to me
via email that the collector-dealers Warren Adelson, one of the co-owners of the painting, and Edward
Shein, presumably another co-owner, asked him ‘to nd a buyer outside of the USA’, giving him ‘a
written exclusive contract for one year’; Simon, he said, ‘was aware of this contract as I was directly in
touch with him over the year’. Remarkably this agreement was on a ‘no win no fee basis’.

Franses put together two large dossiers of documents, one for restoration, the other for provenance,
and says he also made an expensive ‘30-minute video in ve languages based upon the manuscripts by
[Martin] Kemp and [Margaret] Dalivalle’. This suggests that the scholars Kemp and Dalivalle also
played a part, knowingly or not, in e orts to sell the painting. Franses talked to the Louvre,
Hermitage, Vatican, Berlin Gemäldegalerie and Qatar to see if anyone would take the painting, but
was rebu ed by the Prado. The plan was to get a museum to agree to accept it as a Leonardo and then
nd wealthy donors who would pay for it for that museum. Apparently the Qataris were prepared to
o er something in the region of $160 million. The director of the Louvre at the time, Henri Loyrette,
was ready to declare it a national treasure, if the owners would only send it to the Louvre for
examination and nd a buyer. The purchase, Franses points out, ‘would have in turn given the donor a
90 per cent tax deduction’. Simon, apparently, baulked at sending the picture to the Louvre for
examination in case they didn’t like it. Franses writes: ‘Simon was scared that if the Louvre did not
authenticate the painting, then Luke Syson [of the National Gallery] might have changed his mind
about exhibiting it.’ Things did not go so well with the Vatican: when Franses went to see the
museum’s curator Arnold Nesselrath, he apparently fell asleep during the meeting. Perhaps what
Simon means is that he brie y took the Salvator Mundi o the market between July 2011 and February
2012 to avoid any embarrassment to the National Gallery.

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