Until 2005, no new works from the genius hand of Leonardo da Vinci had surfaced for a century. Then, an American art dealer buys a Renaissance image of Jesus painted on a wooden board for $10,000 at an estate sale. Is it a true work of the artist? The Lost Leonardo follows the travails of the now infamous Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World) over a turbulent decade, rife with power, wealth and ego. The alleged “last Leonardo da Vinci in private hands” created unprecedented riptides on the international art scene. Today, we know it as the world’s most expensive painting ever sold at nearly half a billion US dollars. The catch? The jury is still out on its claim as an original Leonardo.
The storms brewing around Salvator Mundi arose from a case of contentious attribution: is it a true Leonardo or not? So, calling the film The Lost Leonardo belies the very subject: polemical entanglements and unsolved mystery about the painting’s authorship. Naming the Renaissance Master in the title could serve a clever marketing ploy to draw audiences. Paradoxically, it also forgoes the controversy at the heart of the movie. Are the makers hinting at a spoiler? Or are they aligning with one side of the debate?
We follow a neatly laid out timeline of the painting, beginning at its purported “rediscovery” in 2005 and subsequent restoration by Dianne Modestini, a New York based art restorer. She tells us how the painting was deemed a copy by one of da Vinci’s followers or students. Reviving the damaged and overpainted image, she chances upon a striking similarity between Jesus’ upper lip with that of the Mona Lisa. She’s struck gold (although later she refuses to tell us the amount she made from the lucrative sale). Her word is taken as holy. Worldwide frenzy ensues and the “Leonardo” is picked up by the British Museum, which displayed it grandly without unequivocal authentication by experts. It was touted as the “Male Mona Lisa.” A reminder of the problematic title of the movie which attributes the lost work directly to da Vinci.
The format is classic documentary style: close-up first-person vignettes, pregnant pauses, nervous eye movements, interlaced with dramatized reconstructions of this mythmaking journey. Cynics come on to accuse Modestini and her club of falsehoods, they argue the painting is a reconstruction, not an original. The pro-Leonardo camp comes across assertive but there is a lingering sense of dubiousness, unease and deception. In one scene, we see Modestini with a small, square painting of fruit, in the house she shared with her deceased partner. “I think he painted this, or maybe it was me. No, I think it was him,” she mumbles. To balance her incredulity, we are also shown that she puts up all her data and findings on an open access website. Who is to be believed, we wonder?
As the film progresses, we meet a motley crew of art critics, investigative journalists, museum curators, CIA and FBI agents and academics. Each offers technical or circumstantial arguments for and against the legitimacy of the painting’s authorship. We are also made privy to the nefarious world of art commerce. A world described as “opaque” and “not transparent” by multiple interviewees. One Swiss privateer, Yves Bouvier, stands out, the “freeport king” who operates tax-havens for the rich. He acquires and sells the painting to a Russian billionaire for $127M.
The film labors slowly towards the explosive $450M price tag and the identity of its final buyer. We are left with a cliffhanger: the Louvre was supposed to loan the piece and display it, after carrying out its own tests, in 2019. It never showed up, or did it? Confusing and obscure as the truth remains, the film delightfully weaves together Machiavellian motives, human greed, intentional oversight and high-level doublespeak in the art world.
With one or two exceptions (when we hear the interviewer posing a question), the makers take a backseat, there is no voiceover, and instead some news clippings and faint buzz recordings are interspersed in the timeline. Like the ghost of Leonardo, the creators leave the forum for others to occupy. A laudable attempt to uncover truths without spoon-feeding us a neat, final answer. Nietzsche, the inveterate nihilist, would have enjoyed this narrative style. Indeed, The Lost Leonardo appears to hinge on his adage: all things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails […] is a function of power, not truth.
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