Charles Hope

It is hard to imagine any other painter or sculptor, living or dead, ever attracting this kind of attention, but it is equally hard to attribute it to Leonardo’s artistic talent, especially as he is chiefly known for one work, the Mona Lisa (or two, if one considers the almost wholly repainted Last Supper). Leonardo is considered to be not just an artist, but a man with an astonishing range of interests and insights, someone for whom there is no historical parallel.

The idea of a church as a place for the dead as much as for the living has now largely disappeared, but it was central to religious thought and practice in the Renaissance and later. The living prayed in church for the souls of their dead friends and relatives in purgatory, while hoping that the dead were praying for them, as they were encouraged to believe. The images around the church of the saints and especially of the Madonna provided consolation and reassurance.

Art historians often ask where the saints and the Virgin are and what are they doing in altarpieces, especially those, common in Venice, in which the painted space seems an architectural extension behind the frame. Perhaps we should recognise that these figures are images, just like Donatello’s statues, and that such questions are not applicable to them.

There is no clear indication from the 16th century of the existence of a picture of the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo himself, and it is rather surprising that he should have made one given that his other works do not suggest that he would have been interested in producing something in which the principal figure is entirely static and frontal, as well as lacking any kind of characterisation.