Conspire magazine6/21/2023 The masterly right hand and restored face still Something beyond these words perhaps even beyond his other works She spoke of the tresses in his hair as influenced by the myriad drawings Leonardo made about water screws and the flow of liquid… I found it all very compelling and bought the poster from the Henry and it’s now somewhere in storage. Mixed in with all this hysteria are gentler, shared reminiscences of halcyon days studying art history at the University of Washington in the 1980s, when the painting hung for several months in the Henry Art Gallery, and how their professor, “would play Italian music from the period as she passionately made a case that this painting was by the hand of Leonardo. Nobody draws comparisons between Leonardo’s cosmic orb and the glowing, mysterious, rather beautiful orb that the US President, King Salman of Saudi Arabia and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt were pictured clasping together in Riyadh recently, although this is a line of inquiry I’d love to lead us all down (but won’t). More generally, there are many accusations of art world money-laundering, and a whole raft of conspiracies binding the painting to Russia and Trump and in various ways, my favourite of which concludes that it’s in the latter’s penthouse in Trump Tower, hanging, perhaps, beside his fake Renoir. Others still question the rendering of the rock crystal orb he’s holding in his left hand, representing heaven’s crystalline sphere, and why it doesn’t seem to refract the light accurately. Yet another says Christ’s nose is too long. Another blames the conservator for having moved the eyes into the wrong place. One criticizes the placement of the eyes relative to the skull, noting that Leonardo, who was known for dissecting and sketching corpses, would never have made such a mistake. Many commenting suggest that the painting has disappeared because its owners have come to think it’s fake. Few things in today’s culture are as compelling as a good messageboard, and this one feels like a new Da Vinci Code for the collective paranoia and cultural commentary years, written, like Bernadette Corporation’s Reena Spaulings, by more than a hundred different authors. While there’s no need to restage here the arguments over whether it’s really a Leonardo, how weirdly it’s been restored (it looks crazy, like it’s been face-swapped), how it came into the hands of Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, and how it was sold again, though they’re all fantastic reads, I will say how much I enjoyed the comments threads below the New York Times article, with all of their art historical, geopolitical, high financial and religious conspiracy theories. But then, before it was authenticated in May 2008, in a studio above London’s National Gallery, as Leonardo’s lost masterpiece, few had any idea that such a painting existed. Since it was sold at Christie’s New York in November 2017 for $450.3 million, to, the New York Times claims, rogue Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, it hasn’t been seen. At the Louvre in Paris, which is hosting a blockbuster Leonardo exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of his death this autumn, they also have no idea where it’s gone. According to staff, nobody knows where it is. While a great museum, there are hardly any famous works inside, and the one masterpiece that was supposed to have been unveiled last September, the most expensive painting in history, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, or “Saviour of the World”, wasn’t there. Last month, I snuck away from my press trip to Sharjah and rode the buses four hours down the coast of the Arabian Gulf to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which floats above the turquoise waters under an ornate metal dome designed by Jean Nouvel. Dean Kissick swims through the conspiracy theories surrounding Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi.
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