Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, oil on panel, c. 1510
“Apprentices! Who’d have them?” he thought – lazy good for nothings! He’d been looking for years for someone who had it, someone who could trump the others, who might just be worth bringing on and taking on. He’d encouraged them to compete, given them hard technical tasks, to see who could be the best artist, whose powers of observation were good enough; who could really give their work the truth it would need to stand for something the master might have done. One by one they’d fallen at the hurdles, squabbling, backbiting, preening themselves on his fame, “a talentless bunch of sugar-coated frauds, none of them real artists”.
He was tired of it all, but work still kept coming in and someone need to do it; and that wretched woman with the smirk on her face who’d been hanging around the workshop for far too long now, but which he just couldn’t get to the end of, needed finishing.
One last challenge, he thought, a grand paint-off, and if they failed they’d have to go: “A picture of Christ, the Saviour of the World, Salvator Mundi, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a solid crystal orb”, he announced. Who’d have the guts to paint the face of God? Who could master that tricky detail of the orb?
“You have two weeks. Get painting!”
Two weeks later and the results were displayed around the studio.
“A bunch of amateurs in a tent could’ve done better,” he muttered to himself as he considered the apprentices’ work: everything flat, no real modelling, the paint stamped on with a fist. One picture he singled out particularly – the competition had been blind, so he didn’t know whose it was at first – to show up just how bad they all were.
“I hope to God Our Saviour doesn’t look like that! The face of a pimp! And the hands, one is larger than the other and those fingers look like trays of sausages. The hair has something, I suppose, but it’s still drab, wispy, colourless. There’s no touch of life in any of it!”
He bent forward to scrutinize the picture further, stroking his long beard.
“This hand holding the orb, it doesn’t seem to be attached to anything. It’s just floating there!”
He was getting old; his eyesight wasn’t what it had been, but he had a pair of thick lenses he’d devised to perch on the bridge of his nose through which everything seemed so much larger.
“And that technical test I asked you to do, the crystal orb; anyone with the tiniest powers of observation would know that what can be seen through a solid object of crystal or glass will look distorted, enlarged or reduced, but you’ve painted the palm and sleeve as if there were nothing at all between them and the eye. Observation and truth are fundamental! If you can’t understand that, you’re not worthy to be my apprentice.”
Irritable now, he picked up a palette and began furiously mixing flesh tones. Then he applied himself to the other hand, the one raised in blessing, and with only a few of his brush strokes it became skin and muscle; there were bones in its structure. Blood seemed to pump through it. The rest of the painting, and all the other efforts hung about the workshop were put to shame.
“Who did this?”
One lad, whose name he could never remember, stepped forward, cap in hand, hooded brown eyes unable to meet the master’s. Blushing and grinning simultaneously.
“You’re fired! Pack up this crap and get out.”
A month or so later he heard of a painting, a “Real Leonardo” he was told, that had been sold in the market for some undisclosed, but he was led to believe, considerable sum by a young man who’d subsequently scarpered to Venice, or Rome or somewhere. A picture of Christ, “Salvator Mundi”. He couldn’t entirely deny his authorship, the right hand after all, and here he smiled to himself and shook his head.
“That lad, he’s no Leonardo, but he knows how to sell one.”