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MICROSTORY OF ART ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM Some Salvator Mundi Documentaries

(27.9.2022) Since the Salvator Mundi documentary by Andreas Koefoed was aired by ARTE, I got a chance to see it. Here are a number of my thoughts after having seen it.

First of all: as far as Salvator Mundi scholarship is concerned, the film is, as the film by Antoine Vitkine, already hopelessly outdated (and I am saying that as a scholar who has delivered much substance and much new substance). But neither of the two documentaries was meant to focus primarily on actual research or on the ›concert‹ of largely dilettante scholarship that made this saga actually possible. As a scholar I am tempted to contradict what is said in the Koefoed film, already at 1:59, when it is said (or suggested) that one does know that Leonardo had painted a Salvator Mundi and that it is lost. Simply a simplification: we don’t know that, because it could be that Leonardo only provided a design and that other painters actually did realize it. Brief: the core of the whole Salvator Mundi controversy is actually (and paradoxically, since it does happen largely silently) about questions not being asked, since a cartel of interests did suppress such questions intentionally or unintentionally. One, but only one example is the questions of provenance of the painting: if now, but only today, one does stress that namings in old inventories could refer to the painting in question, but that we don’t know that for sure, this is after more than ten years, in which no research has been done into the provenance history of other Salvator Mundi versions, and in which by no scholar (except by me) the question has been raised and researched, if these namings could indeed refer to other paintings. To delve into such questions means to delve into complexity, and such complexity is probably out of range of documentaries like the one by Andreas Koefoed, while we are still listening to the reverberations of the ›the painting had been in the collection of three kings‹-trumpet. This does not speak against the film, but these things have to be said. Both documentaries, on a level of serious scholarship, are completely irrelevant.
Still there are important things said or shown in the Koefoed film. One does see much naiveté and much cynicism, but more important is something Jerry Saltz had to say, and also here it is complicated: I am disagreeing with him calling the painting ›junk‹ for example, but I am completely agreeing with what he has to say at 1:10:18ff. concerning the ›circle of love, power, money and influence‹, one does not want be excluded from. Salvator Mundi scholarship has been so bad, so biased, so negligent, so irresponsible, exactly because of that. One does go along. And the sad truth is that the academic discipline of art history has shown little resistence against wishful thinking, rather joining the circle to produce some more. And this did not start with the Salvator Mundi version Cook, on which the whole world is or was focussing. This is only – or already – the third example: Heydenreich failed with his authentication of the Zurich version, Pedretti with his support of version Ganay, and the whole establishment of today did fail with version Cook (without any reflection or awareness of the two earlier failures). Because simple and elementary rules of scholarship got neglected (for example to avoid bias), and nothing of that is really depicted in the two films which go along with the temptation, while they portray small excerpts of scholarship, to portray other subsystems of the art world. But the circle of which Saltz is speaking does also exist in scholarship, and this is out of the focus of the two documentaries (only in the Vitkine film one does get a few glimpses of it).

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