'Leonardo' or not, it's a masterpiece
London's National Gallery to remove painting from relative obscurity in Madrid's Lázaro Galdiano museum; but who is it by?
It is not certain whether the art world is in the presence of another 'Leonardo' or not, but in any event, the painting known as El Salvador adolescente, which hangs at Madrid's most-overlooked gallery, the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, has all the ingredients of a fascinating story. And the climax is about to take place at the National Gallery in London.
Though no more than 25 centimeters tall and 18.5 wide, this little masterpiece takes pride of place at the museum, which is named after a turn-of-the-century financier and patron of the arts. The author of this androgynous figure has never been certain: "Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci," "Leonardese work," and "Leonardo da Vinci's circle" are just some of the descriptions stuck next to it over the years. Dated between 1490 and 1495, these days the painting is attributed to Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, a pupil of Leonardo's.
A Madrid antiques dealer bought the work in a village and offered it to the Prado
The widespread fascination with the young man depicted in El Salvador adolescente (or, The Adolescent Savior) reflects the mystery behind yet another masterpiece by a celebrated genius who has no more than 20 paintings to his name. Of these, none are held in Spanish collections. Now, London's National Gallery is including this painting in its top exhibition for next season: Leonardo da Vinci. Painter at the Court of Milan (from November 9), a display of work by Da Vinci and his followers that is being touted as "the most complete display of Leonardo's rare surviving paintings ever held."
The artwork loaned by the Lázaro Galdiano depicts the Christ at about the age of 12. Long blond hair parted in the middle falls over his shoulders, which are covered with a velvet tunic. A half-open mouth and a gaze that does not seem to focus on anything in particular create an expression that is every bit as ambiguous as La Gioconda.
Every artwork has its own story. The existence of this young Salvador was revealed by the poet Rubén Darío in an article he published in 1899. An antiques dealer from Madrid, José Domínguez Carrascal, bought it in a village in the province of Valladolid. It had hung in a convent before that and been sold to a private collector after religious communities were thrown out of Spain. Nobody knows how much the dealer paid for it, but it is a documented fact that he offered it to the director of the Prado Museum at the time for 1,500 pesetas. Back then, the Prado had no budget for acquisitions, so the dealer then turned to the private collector Lázaro Galdiano, offering it to him for 1,000 pesetas. The financier and patron of the arts finally purchased the painting for 850 pesetas, which he paid out in two installments.
Lázaro Galdiano was sure that it was a real Leonardo. But there have since been a series of variations in attribution, and the London exhibition will present it as a work of the school of Leonardo. What seems certain beyond a doubt is that El Salvador adolescente will not go by unnoticed in a world designed for visual confusion.
Eternal mystery
La Gioconda watches us from her spot inside the Louvre, steeped in legend and dazed by all the tourists and their avid gazes (photographs are restricted). Nobody is more popular yet more of a mystery than her; her undefined, indefinable face has forever dogged the experts, who grope their way blindly within the mystery of an androgynous character whom Walter Pater, the far-seeing art historian of late 19th-century England, aptly described as a vampire: "Like the vampire, who has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants"
It is true. There is something murky, something related to Oriental herbs, about the dull glow of a face that, just like Andy Warhol's Marilyn, contains much of its master in it: the Gioconda is a bit Leonardo himself, or at least one of the existing Leonardos, the one that made it to our times with the greatest intensity. As the 19th century wore on, the scientific side of Leonardo - the inventor of bridges and planes - and even the Leonardo who painted the states of the soul in The Last Supper, started giving way to the author of the Gioconda, Medusa and Saint John - works that adapted better to the fin-de-siècle tastes then so in vogue in France and originating in English Romanticism.
Leonardo's representation of androgyny is curious, and not just because of its implications in connection with the artist's alleged homosexuality. His figures captured the ideal that was cherished by end-of-the-century artists and established a prototype for beauty that is neither specifically masculine nor feminine. Thus, the Gioconda (boy? girl?) is the perfect dance partner for Saint John, her natural brother and a painting that some attribute to the master only with reservations, as is occasionally the case with other works of his, maybe because none of them achieves the rare mastery over substance and gesture that the portrait of Mona Lisa so seductively displays. Both paintings, seen side by side, adjust superbly to the multiple descriptions of characters of different gender, yet nearly identical nature, which flooded art and literature in turn-of-the-century Europe, beginning with the incestuous siblings of Elémir Bourges' The Twilight of the Gods. Even Sâr Péladan, author of the 1884 novel Le Vice suprême (or, The Supreme Vice), joined the fray with characters that represented the hermaphroditic ideal as a way to satisfy desire for those who cannot do so in their everyday lives. A Da Vinci fan, Péladan tried above all to underscore the yawning gap between the "pure value" of Leonardo and the subproducts of modern decadence, which was unable to replicate his perfection.
Who knows whether the perverse chastity that was so fashionable in late 19th-century literature is not what continues to drive today's fascination for the works of Leonardo, and even the works that might be Leonardo's, as our greedy eyes scour every painting for echoes of that historical moment that cemented the artist's legend even beyond the legend itself, and which turned the conscientious engineer and anatomist into one of the most enigmatic painters of the Renaissance. We seek him behind every attribution and we seek the Mona Lisa in every face that he painted, much as Freud said that Leonardo sought his mother's smile in every smile. He often comes across as barely visible. But beyond all discussions, the she-vampire Lisa remains incomparable.
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