The debates

Is the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo?

Christie’s sold it as a Leonardo. Carmen Bambach of the Metropolitan Museum gives most of it to his assistant Boltraffio with only small retouchings by the master. Matthew Landrus of Oxford names Bernardino Luini as the main painter. Frank Zöllner says the heavy restoration makes any verdict very hard. In 2021 a Prado catalogue listed it as a workshop work supervised by Leonardo.

The National Gallery showed it as autograph in 2011 after scholars reached consensus. Martin Kemp sees “that uncanny strangeness that the later Leonardo paintings manifest”. A 2018 Louvre laboratory study found his faint outlines, many changes of mind and his typical materials. The Louvre’s printed volume concluded it was entirely autograph though damaged by brutal restorations.

Wikipedia: Salvator Mundi (Leonardo) · The Guardian (2 June 2019) · The Guardian (6 August 2018) · The Guardian (26 May 2019) · BBC News (12 July 2011)

How original and buildable were his inventions?

Few of his designs were built or even feasible in his lifetime. Marc van den Broek found older prototypes for more than 100 inventions credited to him. Similar drawings exist from ancient Greece and Rome, China, Persia and medieval Europe. His armoured vehicle would not move forward if built as drawn.

His originality lay in combining older ideas and showing them at work. Some smaller devices entered manufacturing such as a bobbin winder and a wire-testing machine. A bridge based on his 1502 design was built in Norway in 2001. In 2019 MIT engineers showed a scale model of it would stand. His heart drawings guided a surgeon in 2005.

Wikipedia: Leonardo da Vinci · Wikipedia: Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci · BBC News (28 September 2005)

A procrastinator who left commissions unfinished?

He left the Adoration of the Magi and Saint Jerome unfinished. He abandoned the Battle of Anghiari. The Virgin of the Rocks led to long fights over completion and payment. Matteo Bandello watched him paint from dawn to dusk then not paint for days. Vasari has him regret on his deathbed that he had not practised his art as he should.

Defenders point to method and health. He chose slow experimental techniques that let him revise. A 2020 study argued his gesso and oil method for Anghiari could never have held on the wall. A visitor in 1517 found his right hand paralysed. In 2005 Alessandro Vezzosi argued that paralysis kept him from finishing the Mona Lisa.

Wikipedia: Leonardo da Vinci · Wikipedia: The Last Supper (Leonardo) · Wikipedia: The Battle of Anghiari (Leonardo) · The Guardian (1 May 2005)

Who sat for the Mona Lisa?

Vasari wrote in 1550 that it showed the wife of Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo never delivered it to the family. Writers have proposed Isabella d’Este, Isabella of Aragon, Cecilia Gallerani, Caterina Sforza, his pupil Salaì and even Leonardo himself.

A margin note by Agostino Vespucci dated October 1503 was found at Heidelberg University. It says Leonardo was then painting Lisa del Giocondo. The 2019 catalogue raisonné holds that the portrait probably shows her. The Louvre now titles it the Portrait of Lisa Gherardini. Its curator Vincent Delieuvin cautioned that the note cannot prove it is this panel.

Wikipedia: Mona Lisa · The New York Times, The Lede (15 January 2008) · Musée du Louvre: The Salle des États and the Mona Lisa

The 1476 accusation and his private life

On 9 April 1476 an anonymous note accused him and three other young men of sodomy with Jacopo Saltarelli. The charges were dismissed and dismissed again in June. Speculation about his sexuality began in the 16th century. Freud built a theory on a mistranslated childhood memory.

The case proves no act. It failed because the law required a signed accusation and this one was anonymous. Some suggest the Medici-linked Tornabuoni family helped. Walter Isaacson reads his long bond with Salaì as intimate. A 2021 Guardian essay argues that such relations were common in Florentine workshops and should be stated plainly.

Wikipedia: Personal life of Leonardo da Vinci · Wikipedia: Leonardo da Vinci · The Guardian (26 March 2021)

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