Thinking about Leonardo

With the current Exhibition on display at the NGA London, a number of interesting things about Leonardo have been getting a little bit more play in the mainstream press.

While I tend to write more often on a more modern approach to art, it is not without knowledge in the past. (And let’s be honest – anyone who has even a smattering of interest in art should have a reasonable understanding of the history of art)

I was reading the latest interview at ArtInfo this morning and the interview of Martin Kemp was pretty riveting. Among the many things he discusses about Leonard and the “Salvator Mundi.” the two that jump out at me are Leonardo’s interest and knowledge in geology and optics. The geological piece is about the Rock Crystal that the Jesus figure is holding and the optics has to do with depth of field. The depth of field one is really curious because DoF is primarily a photographic concern – and here we see Leonardo using the effect well before what we might call pre-photography.

Often we as viewers have been down the path that Leonardo is a genius – and let’s be frank – he was. However the thinking that is being show in the image of Salvator Mundi as Jesus is just phenomenal.

(small excerpt of the interview below) (URL:  http://artinfo.com/news/story/750715/the-male-mona-lisa-art-historian-martin-kemp-on-leonardo-da-vincis-mysterious-salvator-mundi )

Excerpt begins here…

What was striking for me was the orb, and I’ve subsequently researched it quite heavily. The “Salvator Mundi” obviously holds the mundus, the world which he’s saving, and it was absolutely unlike anything I’ve seen before. The orbs in other Salvator Mundis, often they’re of a kind of brass or solid. Sometimes they’re terrestrial globes, sometimes they’re translucent glass, and one or two even have little landscapes in them. What this one had was an amazing series of glistening little apertures — they’re like bubbles, but they’re not round — painted very delicately, with just a touch of impasto, a touch of dark, and these little sort of glistening things, particularly around the part where you get the back reflections. And that said to me: rock crystal. Because rock crystal gets what are called inclusions, and to get clear rock crystal is very difficult, particularly big bits. So there are these little gaps, which are slightly irregular in shape, and I thought, well, that’s pretty fancy. And Leonardo was a bit of an expert on rock crystal. He was asked to judge vases that Isabella d’Este was thinking of buying, and he loved those materials.

So when I was back in Oxford, I went to the geology department, and I said, “Let’s have a look at some rock crystal.” And in the Ashmolean Museum, in a wunderkammer of curiosities, there is a big rock crystal ball, and that has inclusions, so we photographed it under comparable lighting conditions I also began to look at the heel of the hand underneath the globe in the “Salvator Mundi”; there are two heels. The restorer thought it was a pentimento, but I wondered if he was recording a double refraction of the kind you get with a calcite sphere. If this proves to be right, it would be absolutely Leonardesque. I like these things when they’re not just connoisseurship. None of the copyists knew that. They just transcribed it. Some of them do better than others, but none of them got this crystal with its possible double refraction. And one of the points of the crystal sphere is that it relates iconographically to the crystalline sphere of the heavens, because in Ptolemaic cosmology the stars were in the fixed crystalline sphere, and so they were embedded. So what you’ve got in the “Salvator Mundi” is really a “a savior of the cosmos”, and this is a very Leonardesque transformation.

Another thing I subsequently looked at is that there’s a difference from what we would call depth of field — the blessing hand and the tips of the fingers are in quite sharp focus. The face, even allowing for some of the damage, is in quite soft focus. Leonardo, in Manuscript D of 1507-1508, explored depth of field. If you bring something too close to you, you can’t see it and it doesn’t have a sense of focus. If you’ve got it an optimum point, it’s much sharper. Then you move it away and it gets less sharp. He was investigating that phenomenon. So there are these intellectual aspects, optical aspects, and things in terms of these semiprecious materials that are unique to Leonardo.”