Did Leonardo's science of art prove the authorship of his most expensive painting?
In short: The Salvator Mundi is the world's most costly painting, yet its attribution remains a subject of intense debate. By examining the physics of light and the depiction of refraction within the Christ figure's orb, scholars are attempting to decode whether this masterpiece is truly a Leonardo original or a clever imitation.
The Salvator Mundi features a depiction of Christ holding a crystal orb, a subject that allows for a rigorous scientific interrogation of Leonardo da Vinci's hand. A prominent Leonardo specialist and Oxford University Emeritus Professor of Art History, Martin Kemp, suggests the artwork demonstrates Leonardo's profound grasp of optics. Specifically, Kemp suggests that the depiction of the heel of the hand through the orb shows birefringence, which would imply the orb is made of calcite rather than glass or quartz.
However, this scientific attribution faces significant scrutiny. Critics point out a striking absence of the complex refraction effects that should naturally occur in a solid orb of that configuration. In a real physical environment, any solid orb—whether made of calcite, quartz, glass, or a water-filled vessel—would cause extreme geometric distortion. The image seen through such an object should be both vertically and horizontally inverted, and nonlinearly reduced for objects located behind it.
In the Salvator Mundi, the folds and drapery of the figure's clothes appear to continue with essentially no geometric distortion when viewed through the orb. This lack of distortion contradicts the laws of physics, as the image should undergo violent non-linear enlargement or inversion near the central back surface. While Kemp uses these optical details to support the attribution, the absence of these expected distortions remains a central point of contention in the debate over the painting's provenance.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Leonardo's Salvator Mundi: Scholarship, Science and Skulduggery - Martin Kemp
- Also: Art history: Sight and salvation | Nature
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