Nice frame ! Astonishing painting ! Outrageous price tag !
Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World), if you havent heard, just sold for a record sum– an amount that doesn’t phase me in the slightest. After all, it’s already priceless, so $450M sounds like a bargain! I just hope the undisclosed buyer gives the public a place to see it somewhere, in real life, so they can be shocked at how relatively small it is for something so famous (and so remarkably painted).
Of course, in this case the size of the image, if you are to ascribe to David Hockney’s controversial ‘camera obscura’ theory, suggests that Da Vinci may have used lenses to create such photo-realism (the size of the lens determines the size of the picture). Having worked with photography for 40 years I think Hockney is on target and it certainly explains why Da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ has such depth of field: The face of Christ is slightly soft and the raised hand and the crystal ball is sharp. The softness of the face also makes the portrait so enigmatic. Lenses or not, with only 20 paintings known in existence, DaVinci’s artistic legacy is beyond mind boggling.
Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi also has a little gift concealed within the composition. While the world bangs on about the price tag maybe we should be looking a little closer at the art? So I applied the Golden Ratio, a compositional favourite of Da Vinci, laying a template over the painting, hoping to find something beautiful hidden within the structure…and voila!
The nautilus shell-like red curved line sweeps down from the top right-hand side of the painting, connecting the head, the raised hand and the crystal ball and leads our eye literally to the Heart of the matter. The epicentre of the painting, the very thing that will save the world, according to the Maestro’s painting, is love.
Stephen Fearnley is an award-winning filmmaker, artist and composer. He composes transformational soundscapes for the meditation journeys of One Mind Live – a unique worldwide online group meditation community. To sample One Mind Live, go HERE