By Robert A. Rees

Robert A. Rees is the director of Mormon Studies at the Graduate Theological Union. He is compiling a collection of his essays on the Book of Mormon, and can be reached at [email protected].

 

 

On October 2017, I got a call from my son-in-law Paul Clark informing me that Salvator Mundi, a painting of Christ by Leonardo da Vinci, would have a rare three-day showing in San Francisco. I knew I had to be there.

So the next day, my friend Mara Alverson and I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and wended our way to Christie’s Auction House in the Dogpatch District. We were surprised to find only a few dozen people waiting in line and soon found ourselves standing eight feet from the painting, with a clear view and ample time to take it in.

According to Christie’s, Salvator Mundi is “one of fewer than 20 surviving paintings accepted as from the artist’s own hand.” But that confirmation was only made recently after a long history of its being attributed to one of da Vinci’s students and only after extensive cleaning and analysis by da Vinci experts. The painting, which has a long, uncertain, and even mysterious provenance, auctioned for over $450,000,000!

Standing in front of the painting, it seemed impossible to plumb the depths of Leonardo’s artistic-spiritual vision, even if I had hours to spend in its contemplation. I had the feeling that Leonardo had captured something of the Savior’s essence and presence that I had not seen in the thousands of other portrayals of Christ I have viewed over the past sixty years (including at a number of museums and galleries in London last summer). It was the same feeling I have when listening to Bach’s St. John and St. Matthew Passions and his great Mass in B-Minor.

I have come to recognize that feeling in the presence of great art, music, and literature—“a witness of the spirit” that confirms the revelation of something both true and beautiful. Wallace Stevens says, “The wonder and mystery of art, as indeed of religion in the last resort, is the revelation of something ‘wholly other’ by which the inexpressible loneliness of thinking is broken and enriched.” Some of what is “wholly other” is revealed by what is “holy other”—spiritual insights of heart, mind, and soul that help one transcend the ordinary to experience the extraordinary. That’s what I felt pondering Leonardo’s Christ.

We have very little knowledge of what Christ looked like. Most scripture scholars and cultural archeologists posit that the Nazarene likely looked like a typical Jewish man of his time. After all, he is recorded as easily slipping away from crowds or enemies, and Judas had to specifically identify him to those seeking his harm. Thus, we can speculate that physically he had no especially distinguishing features. This is confirmed by Isaiah who said, “He has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him” (53:2). But his spiritual beauty was always there for those who had eyes to see, as is evident in Leonardo’s spiritual imagination. As the artist himself said, “There are three classes of people: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.”

Salvaltor Mundi utterly captivated me—through both the painting itself and its constituent parts. For example, I was drawn into the deep blue of Christ’s tunic and stole, which is made richer by Leonardo’s technique of beginning with underpainting and then applying glazes in a style known as sfumato (from the Italian word meaning “smoke”). In da Vinci’s own words: “When a transparent color lies over another color differing from it, a compound color is composed which differs from each of the simple colors.”

It is significant that Christ’s tunic is blue, a color associated in Medieval paintings with “heavenly grace,” which is why it is also the color most often identified with Mary,