No, The Salvator Mundi Is Not a Split Androgynous Image.

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UPDATE: I just made a video version of this post if you’d prefer to kick back and watch rather than read.

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For some mysterious reason, my video about the Salvator Mundi not being a real Leonardo, basically because it sucks, has suddenly been getting a lot of traction after being buried by the algorithm for 2 years. And so I’ve been fielding a lot of comments, and people keep telling me that one half of the Salvator Mundi is a man, the other is a woman, and THAT is why the face is lopsided and the savior of the world looks like he lost three heavyweight prize fights in a row. You see, Leonardo in his unbridled genius did this on purpose.

No, the very simple reason that the face is so painfully distorted is 500 years of extensive physical damage resulting in the panel being cracked in two, a comic overpainting, cleaning with caustic chemicals that dissolved surface layers of paint, worm tunneling, and a restorer’s attempt to connect the dots to make it look like a finished painting. The restorer conceded that it was impossible to fix the abraded eyes, and whole sections of hair were missing. She misread a shadow under the nose as part of the nose, and thus you have a bulbous, skewed tip of the nose, and that’s just one among many amateur figurative painting mistakes the professional restorer made.

While it is true that one side has a wider jaw, and that is a characteristic of masculinity, this was also a restorer error in that she inadvertently accentuated an impression that was due to catastrophic wear and tear. Please note that the supposedly female entity is a bearded woman with a wide masculine nose, and the male version looks like he had overly ambitious rhinoplasty in a California cosmetic surgery clinic.

My video about the Salvator Mundi remains to this day the most detailed, comprehensive, and persuasive documentary revealing the fraud of passing off this abysmal restoration as a true, autograph Leonardo. Was it deliberately buried until years after the record sale by Christies. Who knows? I’m glad that it finally has been let out of video prison for a breath of fresh air, though I suspect its time in the sun will be short lived.

If you haven’t seen my digital restoration/recreation of what the image might originally have looked like, behold:

Curiously, this image appears almost nowhere online, and that’s relative to my other work. Note that I was permanently banned from the art history sub-reddit when I shared it there. If I were in “conspiracy theorist” mode I’d wonder if a few strings weren’t pulled and if this image weren’t deliberately suppressed. Someone a little softer in the head might think the richest people and art institutions in the world don’t take super kindly to their botched restoration being exposed as not the height of Leonardo’s mystical genius. I got lots of other work and stuff to worry about, so I just “keep on rolling on with a praise from the lord above” [lemmie know in the comments if you know where that lyric comes from]. You can read more about this piece here: Final Salvator Mundi Digital Restoration & Resurrection. Prints are available!

ADDENDUM

In the comments on the video, someone suggested that the infrared photo of the painting would be more telling regarding the original artist’s intent. I couldn’t resist doing a quick experiment, so here are the results for the infrared, plus the cleaned version.

Above is the infrared version. The left side, I guess, is the male side, and the right is the [bearded] female side. Well, I can see how someone who is inclined to view one side as more one gender or another—keeping in mind that either side is always going to be more of something than the other—would view the one on the right as the female side, though the expression isn’t flattering, nor is the chin. Keep in mind that the faces do not split perfectly down the center, and moving the split either way will give slightly different results, though they are all going to be pretty close to this.

Incidentally, I would argue that the left side looks more like Iggy Pop, though I hope we can all agree that this is my subjective impression and purely coincidental.

Above, the cleaned state before restoration is to my eye the most convincing as a gender split. Minus the beard and mustache the right side here is the most persuasively feminine out of the three pairs. Notice in this pair that the eyes on the head on the left are further apart, but I couldn’t bring them closer together without losing almost all of the end of the nose. There are ways I could try to compensate for that, such as dividing on a slight diagonal.

Considering that Renaissance artists, including Leonardo, frequently painted their figures as relatively androgynous–though as a unified whole, and not split down the middle–it’s not much of a surprise at all that either side of a portrait of Christ would appear somewhat feminine.

Below is “Christ Giving a Blessing” by Leonardo’s student, Bernardino Luini:

This portrait of Christ looks more feminine in total than any half face of the Salvator Mundi. When this trend to overall androgyny is so common, the 50/50 concept doesn’t convince me when the ostensible full female side is less feminine than the conventional androgynous look. And, again, the face does not split easily.

The much more likely explanation for a difference in general appearance of the face, above and beyond the extensive damage to the painting and cosmetic restoration, is simply that one side of the face is more lit and the other more in shadow. The light is obviously coming from the upper right, which is clearly evident in Christ’s blessing hand.

Before it occurs to someone else, here’s what happens if you split and mirror my own restored/recreated version:

Mine has the least difference, as it were because I tried to compensate for the mismatched halves.

Had my experiments shown me something more convincing, I would gladly take up the 50/50 theory, but for me, it’s a bit like seeing Jesus in the clouds or Iggy Pop. The supposed female halves also look a bit goofy, and that doesn’t make me want to dig deeper. The idea that Leonardo would paint such a split image, given how awkward the result would likely be, seems to me out of step with art history, and not remotely likely enough for me to have entertained on my own. However, since I have endeavored to countenance arguments on both sides of the table, I was willing to do these quick experiments, and am not slamming my mind shut on the topic. That said, because there is not a clean split down the middle of the face, the original project would need to have been a subtly molutaled transition that would be doomed to be lopsided and ungainly: a recipe for aesthetic failure. I just don’t see this, however much the idea may appeal to some, as a likely project for Leonardo to have undertaken.

For now, I maintain that the difference between the two halves of the face is primarily due to the extensive wear and tear on the painting, as well as one side being more in shadow and less lit. In the final restoration this is further complicated by the restorer misinterpreting shadowed areas such as in the very unfortunate tip of the nose.

~ Ends

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