Jean-Pierre Isbouts - The da Vinci Legacy: How an Elusive 16th-Century Artist Became a Global Pop Icon

A hush fell over the crowd as one of the last lots of the evening was brought into the room. Those in the front rowsthe top buyers, curators, and billionaire collectorsmoved slightly forward in their seats, craning their necks to better see the portrait on the dais in front of them. Among their ranks were some of the most powerful dealers and collectors in the world, including New Yorks Larry Gagosian; David Zwirner and Marc Payot of Hauser & Wirth; Eli Broad and Michael Ovitz from Los Angeles; and Martin Margulies from Miami. Those standing in the back of the room pushed and jostled in the hope of catching a glimpse of the painting, a surprisingly small panel at just 26 by 19 inches. Outside, New York was enjoying one of the last balmy nights of the citys famous Indian summer, but inside, the air conditioning systems were working overtime to cool the rising heat of the packed room.

Jussi Pylkknen, the global president of Christies, seemed unfazed as he looked at the more than one thousand dealers, advisors, journalists, and critics who had somehow secured tickets to get inside his auction hall at Rockefeller Center. He cleared his throat, brushed some dust from the lectern in front of him, and said, And so, ladies and gentlemen, we move on to Leonardo da Vinci, his masterpiece of Christ the Savior , previously in the collection of three kings of England. Inwardly, however, Pylkknen could barely contain his excitement.

The reason is simple: works by da Vinci are rare. So rare, in fact, that any time a bona fide work by this elusive Italian artist makes it to an auction floor, it automatically generates headlines all over the world. Unlike, say, Vincent van Gogh, who could turn out one or more paintings in a day, Leonardo labored over his paintings for months, even years. The reason, his 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari claimed, is that the work of his hands could rarely match the perfection of his imagination. But that judgment tells only half the story. The fact of the matter is, Leonardo saw himself as much more than a mere painter. He was fascinated by science, nature, human biology, and great mysteries such as the flight of birds or the movement of water. He burned with ambition to become a famous architect like his friend Donato Bramante, or an engineer like his fellow Florentine Filippo Brunelleschi, who had secured his fame by creating a vast dome over the central crossing of Florences cathedral. At the same time, Leonardo was fascinated by optics and the way our eyes perceive the effect of atmosphere and depth; he spent hours investigating the play of light and shadow on the face of a beautiful young woman. Yes, Leonardo believed he was much more than a paintera character who, in the quattrocento, the 15th century, was still considered little more than an artisan with a dirty smock. If he were alive today, he would be called a true Renaissance man, even though, ironically, that term had yet to be invented when Leonardo was alive.

As a result, there are only some eighteen paintings that we can reliably accept as true da Vinci autograph works today. That is an amazingly small number, especially when you consider that Leonardos contemporary, Sandro Botticelli, completed well over a hundred paintings during the same time period. And these are just the Botticellis that we know of, since the artist burned a goodly number of his mythological paintings after he heard the sermons of a fiery monk named Savonarola. Worse, two of Leonardos most famous frescoes, the Last Supper in Milan and the Battle of Anghiari in Florence, are no longer visible in their erstwhile glory: the former because the mural is hopelessly damaged, and the latter because it was overpainted in the latter part of the 16th century. Only a handful of copies give us an inkling of the immense visual power that these works brought to the Renaissance.

For Leonardo, this was especially unfortunate because frescoeswhich cannot be bought or sold, and always remain in placewere the principal medium in which an artist could secure his reputation for all time. Leonardos chief rivals, Raphael and Michelangelo, had sealed their celebrity with a series of highly successful frescoes in Rome. Raphael made his name by painting murals for the stanze (or the papal rooms) in the Vatican, while Michelangelo became immortal for his magnificent frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.

Little wonder, then, that when Leonardo finally made his way to the Vatican, long after these rivals had made their mark, he was roundly ignored by P

Copy by an unknown artist of Raphaels Portrait of Giuliano de Medici , ca. 1515

After spending several frustrating years on the periphery of the papal orbit in Rome, hoping for a major commission that never materialized, Leonardo realized that his cause was lost. The Medicis never had much love for Leonardo, even when he was a young prodigy at the studio of his master Andrea del Verrocchio. For this, Leonardo blamed his lack of a formal education; as everyone knew, Lorenzo de Medici was a notorious snob. Now that the Medicis had captured the throne of St. Peter, Leonardos chance of matching the fame and glory of his competitors was receding by the day.

When his only patron, Giuliano de Medici, died in March of 1516, after a long battle with tuberculosis, Leonardo knew that the writing was on the wall. His last patron in Italy was gone. He would have died a pauper, unmourned and unloved, if a king from another country, Franois I, had not come to his rescue. The French king was kind enough to offer the ailing artist a comfortable place of retirement, not far from his own palace of Amboise on the Loire River. And so Leonardo removed himself from the beating heart of the Renaissance, the papal court in Rome. As it happened, it was the same summer of 1516 when Raphael reached the apex of his fame with Woman with a Veil (its pose slyly copied from Leonardos Mona Lisa ), and Michelangelo carved the first figures for his monumental Tomb of Pope Julius II .