Issue 5 · Winter 2021

Art Worlds

What We Talk About When We Talk About Leonardo

Mark Rosen 

Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci. Simon and Schuster, 624pp., $22 paper.

Martin Kemp, Living with Leonardo: Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond. Thames and Hudson, 288pp.,  $35 cloth.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi has been in and out of the news. It is the world’s most expensive painting, having sold for $450.3 million dollars at a Christie’s auction in 2017. No one’s seen it for a while, but it’s believed to be somewhere in the Persian Gulf. Or in storage, where the owner can avoid paying duties. It’s been heavily restored, with less than a quarter of its surface original to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. It may have been painted by Leonardo with assistance. Actually, it might not be by the artist’s hand at all.

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This article appears in Athenaeum Review Issue 5 (Winter 2021), pp. 10-18. Download a PDF copy.
Filed under Art History