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MICROSTORY OF ART ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM Some More Salvator Mundi Monkey Business

(20.11.2022) Here are some brief refutations of recent Salvator Mundi monkey business:

One) Rectangular?

It has been claimed that the décolleté of the version Cook Salvator Mundi has a rectangular shape, and that this would have been identified as women’s fashion.
The answer to this is: a) the décolleté is not rectangular (the angle is a 45 degree angle, as can easily be seen in the cleaned state photograph); b) this shape does occur in paintings by Giovanni Bellini as well as by Giorgione – and the respective garments are weared by men (for example disciples of Christ); c) the idea that a Renaissance painter provided his customers (kings and queens, and so on) with a representation of Christ, the son of God, and this representation would have been visibly designated as that of a gay Christ, is so absurd, that one has to question the historical awareness of the people who make such claims: do we really have to think that, over the time span of 500 years, no one would have scandalised such representation? And do we have to think that nobody would have scandalized it at Leonardo’s time?

Two) Discovery?

»However, their Salvator does not have the cuffed sleeve of one of the drawings, while exactly the same cuffed sleeve is visible in the Yarborough-Worsley Salvator Mundi, which is an undisputed workshop painting.« This was written by Ben Lewis in his book on the Salvator Mundi, published in 2019, referring to the relation of the Yarborough Salvator Mundi with the Windsor workshop drawings. The informations go back to observations that Heydenreich made in 1964, to which I referred myself (on my website, beginning in 2016), and his observations. Now we are confronted with the same observations, in 2022, as being allegedly new. Which is at best a rediscovery, and not a discovery, and one would expect experts to know the history of their own field, as well as the work of fellow-scholars. And if Melzi was in posession of these workshop drawings, why not asking, as I have in my book, if a version based on one of these drawings (such as Yarborough) could have been made at Melzi’s time, rather than at Leonardo’s time?

Three) The Detroit Disaster, again

Robert Simon has, deservingly, now drawn our attention to the Salvator Mundi of the Detroit museum, again. The basic informations that he presents, enriched with his own comments, can all be found on the website of the Detroit museum since long. And here are the questions Simon does, again, not raise: if the Detroit Salvator turns up, in 1821, with a at least half false provenance information (it definitively cannot have been painted for French king Francis I), how to rule out, that the Detroit Salvator is in fact the one Henrietta Maria had, respectively the one that was, in 1763, in Buckingham House (which could be, again, another one, or the one Henrietta Maria owned)? Because someone parted with the one in Buckingham House (if this was indeed version Cook, that turned up later somewhere else); and logic implies that, if someone parted with it, it could also have ended up in the posession of oboist John Parke, prior to 1821. Brief: the alleged provenance of version Cook could in fact be the earlier part of the provenance of the Detroit version. If you can rule this out, rule it out. And the provenance of version Cook, contrary to claims made by Simon and others, would still not be established.

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