New found sketch of Christ likely by da Vinci

[Still Waters]

A newly discovered sketch of Jesus Christ that’s been gathering dust for centuries is likely an unknown masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, according to experts.

The previously unknown red-chalk drawing — which depicts the son of God with a vacant, Mona Lisa-like gaze — was held in a private collection at a bank in Lombardy, Italy, before it recently surfaced, according to the UK’s Telegraph.

“It is a remarkably beautiful and refined work and I’m absolutely convinced it is a sketch by Leonardo,” Annalisa Di Maria, an Italian art historian who studied the sketch, told the Telegraph.

https://nypost.com/2020/11/18/newly-found-sketch-of-christ-likely-unknown-da-vinci-masterpiece/

More here:

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/leonardo-da-vinci-salvator-mundi-new-drawing-1924671

[+Desertrat56]

It looks a lot like a self portrait of Da Vinci.  Why do people think it is a picture of Jesus?

[Wistman]

Certainly a beautiful drawing.  But needs more study before Di Maria's claims can be generally accepted.  She may possibly be right, but she's assuming a lot, IMHO.  I agree with Martin Kemp (Oxford emeritus, and Da Vinci authority) from the Artnet link in the OP:

Quote

“I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand, but I simply can’t tell without seeing the drawing and the scientific evidence,” Leonardo expert Martin Kemp told the Telegraph. “I would need to see if it is drawn left-handed. Leonardo drew everything with his left hand.”

The left side of the Salvator Mundi face (from viewer's point of view) was shaved off sometime in the past during a previous restoration, and heavily overpainted.  When the overpainting was recently removed, all that was left there was the white ground.  The recent restoration reimagined and repainted this area....in my opinion poorly, giving the expression and proportional alignment of the face a disjointed, cockeyed aspect.  The rest of the painting, especially the hands, is extremely finely done and looks authentic to me, also to Martin Kemp as he's stated elsewhere.  So the claims about the Salvator Mundi painting made by Di Maria in this article are a stretch and she'd have to present evidence to prove her point about it and about the newly discovered drawing.

It's really unfortunate that whoever now owns the Salvator Mundi has hidden it away and won't show it, which was feared by many when it was sold to a private party, and now cannot be further analyzed or compared with other autograph or disputed works.

 

Edited November 19, 2020 by The Wistman

[Dreamer screamer]

Why is his fingers pointing to the sky?

[+DanL]

Why is Jesus always painted as a rather effeminate pale European when he was known to be a Middle-eastern Jewish carpenter that worked for a living until he was called?

[SHaYap]

Leo was gay... or a "closet homosexual" if that makes the thought more comfortable. 

~

 

[Wepwawet]

9 hours ago, third_eye said:

Leo was gay... or a "closet homosexual" if that makes the thought more comfortable. 

~

 

Though it is difficult to ascribe being "gay" to anybody born or brought up in Florence or Florentine territory in those times. The term "sodomite" encompassed in their legal terms any sexual act not for the purposes of procreation, a legacy of the population collapse during the Black Death. Being called a "sodomite" was a casual and common insult, even Boticelli was accused, and there were aspertions against il Magnifico. To put this into context, we have the records of the "Office of the Night", which dealt with "policing sexuality" for a 70 year period during the 15th Century in Florence. Over that period about 40% of all Florentine males had faced a legal accusation of "sodomy". As these are just the cases brought to court, the actual number of "sodomites" will have been much higher. Does this mean that Florence, and Florentines wherever they lived, were all "gay", of course not, and the same conditions existed in Venice and many Italian cities. It's us projecting our modern culture onto them and coming to conclusions that are either false or warped. We like to put people into boxes in a way that would be alien to those times, in fact this mania for labelling is alien to many of us today.

[SHaYap]

3 hours ago, Wepwawet said:

Though it is difficult to ascribe being "gay" to anybody born or brought up in Florence or Florentine territory in those times.

Leo likes the young lads with great affection, if that makes you feel any better... 

 

~

[Wepwawet]

1 hour ago, third_eye said:

Leo likes the young lads with great affection, if that makes you feel any better... 

 

~

When you describe him as "gay", what do you mean, like a caricature of John Waters in "The Simpsons", as that is how many view this, or maybe the Austrian sausage, another facet of a modern idea of what this should be.

In the terms of their culture, does "liking the lads" make a person "gay" in modern terms ?  I mentioned the records of the "Office of the Night", and these show that most offences reported to them were of activity between adolescents and young men. Think here in terms of the situation in Ancient Greece, and other places, some not so ancient. Florentine men married very late, not until into their thirties in many cases, and women were to a large extent off limits, except the brothels. Were all these men who engaged in pederasty "gay" in our modern terms, or was there something else going on here, something these days highly illegal of course.

What I'm trying to do is tease out if Leonardo was actually "gay" in our terms, or not, and that such labelling of him would not be seen as correct by people of the 15th and 16th Centuries. This is not to say that there were no men of that time who did not fit our modern terminology, as there certainly were, but that we are imposing our terminology on them, and, because of modern laws and morals, sidestepping a reality of sexuality in those times, a reality that they did not have a serious issue with, but with which we have a very serious issue, and so do not wanting to condemn great artists to Hell, we engage in semantics and obfuscations to avoid this reality. It's far easier to just call them all "gay" and not use terminology that will scare the horses and cause some people to faint, or explode with rage.

 

[SHaYap]

11 minutes ago, Wepwawet said:

In the terms of their culture, does "liking the lads" make a person "gay" in modern terms ?

Take your pick, pick your time... 

Quote

medium.com › dose › was-leon...

Was Leonardo Da Vinci Gay?. His only passionate involvement with ...

22 Mar 2017 — Jones says da Vinci's portraits were downright revolutionary and “showed them to be fully rounded human ...

 

 

 

www.nationalgeographic.com

What Made Leonardo da Vinci a Genius?

4 Nov 2017 — He was gay, illegitimate, left handed, a bit of a heretic, but the good thing about Florence was that it was a very ...

 

Place of birth: Italy

 

 

 

www.cbc.ca › radio › ideas › da...

Da Vinci's sex life reveals a complex understanding of male love | CBC ...

28 Jan 2020 — Humiliated into celibacy. Abbott describes da Vinci as homosexual — a term that would not have been understood in Renaissance Italy, where male love was accepted and celebrated. "His sort of male sexuality was understood and accepted," said Abbott.

~

[Wepwawet]

1 minute ago, third_eye said:

Take your pick, pick your time... 

~

Without reading any of them, I would choose the third by the short introductory description alone, as it makes my point in a far more succinct way than my, on reading again, too verbose and pompous post. So, we impose our terminolgy in a lazy way that does not reflect the nuances of Renaissance Italy.

[spartan max2]

What in the world does his sexuality have to do with anything? 

[Wepwawet]

5 minutes ago, spartan max2 said:

What in the world does his sexuality have to do with anything? 

Nothing at all, it is our modern obsession, not theirs. We should just accept them as who they were, though I think they would view us with horror. The Borgias would be hard pressed to compete in today's world. Anybody for a chestnut.

Edited November 20, 2020 by Wepwawet

[Rolltide]

17 hours ago, DanL said:

Why is Jesus always painted as a rather effeminate pale European when he was known to be a Middle-eastern Jewish carpenter that worked for a living until he was called?

 

[_Chez_]

Jesus.....what a mix up !!!!

[SHaYap]

6 hours ago, Wepwawet said:

So, we impose our terminolgy in a lazy way that does not reflect the nuances of Renaissance Italy.

The inescapable reality as dictated by the context of the aesthetics refined by Leo to be "desirable"

Michelangelo was as contemporary as also as homosexual as gay as Leo was Gay...

~

 

 

[Wepwawet]

8 hours ago, third_eye said:

The inescapable reality as dictated by the context of the aesthetics refined by Leo to be "desirable"

Michelangelo was as contemporary as also as homosexual as gay as Leo was Gay...

~

 

 

How would they have defined themselves, and how would their contempories have defined them. The reason why I press this is because we live in an age of irrational madness when it comes to defining people by their sexuality, and I see no reason to impose this on anybody, living or long dead.

[SHaYap]

15 minutes ago, Wepwawet said:

How would they have defined themselves, and how would their contempories have defined them. The reason why I press this is because we live in an age of irrational madness when it comes to defining people by their sexuality, and I see no reason to impose this on anybody, living or long dead.

You're forgetting what the thread is about, this is not about what or how you believe "gay" or "homosexuality" is defined or means, Leo was just being Leo, and what Jesus meant to him, and how Leo envisioning the beauty of Jesus. 

Apart from that, nobody cares as much as you're stressing that they should or don't. 

Leo's days wasn't called the "renaissance" for nothing... though to those living then it was just another day closer to the end of days... 

~

 

[Wepwawet]

38 minutes ago, third_eye said:

You're forgetting what the thread is about, this is not about what or how you believe "gay" or "homosexuality" is defined or means, Leo was just being Leo, and what Jesus meant to him, and how Leo envisioning the beauty of Jesus. 

Apart from that, nobody cares as much as you're stressing that they should or don't. 

Leo's days wasn't called the "renaissance" for nothing... though to those living then it was just another day closer to the end of days... 

~

 

It takes two to tango so trying to lay blame on me for going offtopic is a bit rich. You decided to give him a modern label that does not fit his times, I simply pointed this out, and you clearly don't like this.

I'm sure nobody cares about this, but that is no bar to me pointing out some facts of life in those times. Others can read or ignore my posts as they choose, including you. I hope you're not implying that I should have kept quiet, as that would sound like censorship, quite a thing with gender politics these days.

The Renaissance was nothing to do with modern gender politics and labelling people, and to try to imply this is a further imposition of our labelling mania on the past.

Edited November 21, 2020 by Wepwawet

[SHaYap]

3 minutes ago, Wepwawet said:

It takes two to tango so trying to lay blame on me for going offtopic is a bit rich. You decided to give him a modern label that does not fit his times, I simply pointed this out, and you clearly don't like this.

I don't tango with two left feet, I didn't label anything, I just pointed out that it helps to better understand how Leo defines aesthetics based on his penchant for leaning towards the beauty of boys. You fell off the tangent at that line of reasoning, your book ends didn't prepared you for that. Clearly your nose was turned up with the twist in your panties. 

~

3 minutes ago, Wepwawet said:

I'm sure nobody cares about this, but that is no bar to me pointing out some facts of life in those times. Others can read or ignore my posts as they choose, including you. I hope you're not implying that I should have kept quiet, as that would sound like censorship, quite a thing with gender politics these days.

You quoted me o'self styled genius of the interwebz, or as Leo would say, "you imbecile... "

~

3 minutes ago, Wepwawet said:

The Renaissance was nothing to do with modern gender politics and labelling people, and to try to imply this is a further imposition of our labelling mania on the past.

You just exposed your ignorance about what the thread is all about, you gotta pull your nose out of people's sexual orientation. 

~

[Scholar4Truth]

While I see Jesus being depicted as more of a Middle Eastern complexion. I simply see his rendition of Jesus as more of a reflection of the culture of that time. Its no different when one goes to Asia where you find pictures of him having those features. Its just simple artistic expression.

[Wepwawet]

9 minutes ago, third_eye said:

I don't tango with two left feet, I didn't label anything, I just pointed out that it helps to better understand how Leo defines aesthetics based on his penchant for leaning towards the beauty of boys. You fell off the tangent at that line of reasoning, your book ends didn't prepared you for that. Clearly your nose was turned up with the twist in your panties. 

~

You quoted me o'self styled genius of the interwebz, or as Leo would say, "you imbecile... "

~

You just exposed your ignorance about what the thread is all about, you gotta pull your nose out of people's sexual orientation. 

~

You called him gay, that is a modern label. The rest of that parargraph was just insults that demeen you, not me.

Hm, quoting you, no, I was actually agreeing with you that nobody cares, but you turn this into an insult by calling me an imbecile.

Again, it is you who labelled da Vinci as gay, not me, I haven't labelled him or anybody, so have not stuck my nose into anybodies sexual orientatioin at all. I don't care what anybody is, and have made it clear that I do not like labels, a modern mania, so why misrepresent and insult me. Have I insulted you? have I even been impolite in any way or form ?

[SHaYap]

38 minutes ago, Wepwawet said:

You called him gay, that is a modern label. The rest of that parargraph was just insults that demeen you, not me.

By today's standards, yes, an honorary gay at least.

Don't start flaking the snow, it's not insults if you grow some sense of humor, you're made of sterner stuff, I've certainly seen you shovel out much worse, and that's not trying to "demean" you in any way, shape or form. 

~

38 minutes ago, Wepwawet said:

Hm, quoting you, no, I was actually agreeing with you that nobody cares, but you turn this into an insult by calling me an imbecile.

Nope, I called you a "self styled genius"

Leo would have been much kinder than I, imbecile is actually a term of endearment in such a context. 

~

38 minutes ago, Wepwawet said:

Again, it is you who labelled da Vinci as gay, not me, I haven't labelled him or anybody, so have not stuck my nose into anybodies sexual orientatioin at all. I don't care what anybody is, and have made it clear that I do not like labels, a modern mania, so why misrepresent and insult me.

Well I'm sorry you took it that way, anyhow, Leo was gay, like it or not, Leo certainly liked it that way. 

~

38 minutes ago, Wepwawet said:

Have I insulted you? have I even been impolite in any way or form ?

Now you're just hurting my feelings... 

~

[Wepwawet]

3 minutes ago, third_eye said:

By today's standards, yes, an honorary gay at least.

Don't start flaking the snow, it's not insults if you grow some sense of humor, you're made of sterner stuff, I've certainly seen you shovel out much worse, and that's not trying to "demean" you in any way, shape or form. 

~

Nope, I called you a "self styled genius"

Leo would have been much kinder than I, imbecile is actually a term of endearment in such a context. 

~

Well I'm sorry you took it that way, anyhow, Leo was gay, like it or not, Leo certainly liked it that way. 

~

Now you're just hurting my feelings... 

~

There's some bluster there to try and excuse an out of the blue attack on me, and here's me thinking you were one of the more polite and rational members of this forum. Seems that you have been triggered by something I wrote. Perhaps you could clear this up, without being so gnomic in your replies, or, PM me and so remove this totaly uneeded unpleasantness from the thread.

[SHaYap]

55 minutes ago, Wepwawet said:

There's some bluster there to try and excuse an out of the blue attack on me, and here's me thinking you were one of the more polite and rational members of this forum.

Attack? Wow, that there is where your thoughts went awry and too quick to abandon your trust in your better judgement. Frankly, I care very little of what you think of me, just what you think to add to the conversation, this is merely and engagement, not a relationship. Hardly even a commitment. 

~

Quote

Seems that you have been triggered by something I wrote. Perhaps you could clear this up, without being so gnomic in your replies, or, PM me and so remove this totaly uneeded unpleasantness from the thread.

Gnomic... That's a good one, no need to be so dwarfish to resort to PM, the trigger was entirely you shooting from the clip, whatever the unpleasantness you're so keen to conjure up too is entirely relative to your need to exacerbate on the irrelevant twist to the exchanges currently, don't know about you but I'm quite clear on the pleasantries thus far, or to quote Leo.... 

Quote

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Have fun... Y'hear... 

~