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| Van Meegreen's fake Vermeer |
Christie’s Is Selling This Painting for $400+ Million. They Say It’s by Leonardo. I Have Doubts. Big Doubts.
Sandwiched
between onlookers who’d waited in line outside in the cold to be
ushered into the dimmed Christie’s gallery to gaze and gawk at what the
auction house trumpets as “the greatest and most unexpected artistic
rediscovery of the 21st century” — that is, a brand-new Leonardo da
Vinci lost in the 1600s, scheduled to be auctioned off this week — a
well-known expert in the field leaned over and asked me a question. “Why
is a Leonardo in a Modern and Contemporary auction?” Before I could
say, “Yeah! Why?” he answered, “Because 90 percent of it was painted in
the last 50 years.” He’s right. Not only does it look like a dreamed-up
version of a missing da Vinci, various X-ray techniques show scratches
and gouges in the work, paint missing, a warping board, a beard here and
gone, and other parts of the painting obviously brushed up and
corrected to make this probable copy look more like an original.
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| The DaVinci in question |
The painting is titled Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World)
and is a portrait of a smoky floating man in a blue robe looking at us,
raising his right hand in blessing, holding a crystal orb in his left
hand, pictured against a black background. It’s said to have been
painted around 1500, when the real Leonardo would have been 48 years old
and already the most famous artist alive. On Wednesday night, this
small picture is being auctioned off by Christie’s with massive
jubilation. The opening bid is set at $100 million. (Which might even
seem cheap when you remember that Damien Hirst’s 2007 For the Love of God, a
diamond-and-platinum-encrusted human skull, was priced the same.) This
explains why one Christie’s official rapturously primed the collector
pump by wondering aloud if someone might bid “$2 billion.” In a world
this out of whack, that could happen. Promoting the sale is a glossy
162-page book with quotes from Dostoyevsky, Freud, and Leonardo, and
several platitudinal Christie’s videos of enraptured gazers gawking in
wonder at “the new masterpiece.” Don’t miss the extended clip of three
male company bigwigs pitching it to Hong Kong clients as “the holy grail
of our business, a male Mona Lisa, the last da Vinci, our baby,
something with blockbuster appeal, akin to the discovery of a new
planet, and more valuable than a petro chemical plant.”
I’m
no art historian or any kind of expert in old masters. But I’ve looked
at art for almost 50 years and one look at this painting tells me it’s
no Leonardo. The painting is absolutely dead. Its surface is inert,
varnished, lurid, scrubbed over, and repainted so many times that it
looks simultaneously new and old. This explains why Christie’s pitches
it with vague terms like “mysterious,” filled with “aura,” and something
that “could go viral.” Go viral? As a poster, maybe. A two-dimensional
ersatz dashboard Jesus.
Why else do I think this is a sham?
-go to links-
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