The History Blog

In August of last year, Bonhams’ Oxford office received a consignment of paintings by 19th century Buckingham Palace artist Matthew Shepperson. The seller is a descendant of Shepperson’s who had recently inherited the art and was hoping to sell the pieces for a few hundred dollars each. One of the paintings, a bust-length portrait of a gentleman wearing a black tunic and a white golilla collar (ie, a ruff), caught the experts’ eyes as significantly superior in quality to the rest of the consignment.

When Andrew McKenzie, director of Bonhams’ Old Master Paintings department in London examined it, he told Oxford to withdraw it from sale pending further investigation. “There’s a very specific modelling to the cheek,” McKenzie explains, “and it has a very cool pigment to it. As soon as I saw that, it was obvious to me that it was by the same hand as others I had seen.”

The Old Master department brought in consultant Brian Koetser to help research the portrait. They contacted Dr. Peter Cherry, Professor of Art History at Trinity College in Dublin and a leading expert on Velázquez. He immediately thought it was a previously unknown work by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez.

Bonhams next consulted Carmen Garrido, Head of Technical Services at the Prado Museum in Madrid, also a leading Velázquez expert and author of the definitive work on his painting technique, Velázquez: Technica y Evolución. She too identified it as a work by the master himself. Technical analysis of the paint and X-rays supported the attribution. When Dr. Cherry saw the X-rays, he confirmed his earlier tentative assessment. Velázquez’s portraits have a characteristic ghostly look in X-rays because of his painting technique.

Researchers think Velázquez painted it between 1632 and 1635, after his first trip to Italy. The sitter is unknown, but experts think it could be Juan Mateos, master of the hunt for Philip IV of Spain. It remains a mystery how Matthew Shepperson, a jobbing artist who made minor ducats copying famous paintings at Buckingham Palace, got his hands on a Velázquez. He made a hobby of collecting portraits, and the painting is in excellent condition so he probably had no idea it was even as old as it is. An invoice of seven shillings was found in his papers that could refer to his purchase of the unknown Velázquez portrait.

And so the painting Shepperson bought for shillings and that his descendant expected to sell for between $320 and $480 will now go on the block at Bonhams’ Old Master Paintings auction on December 7th as Portrait of a Gentleman by Diego Velázquez with an estimated sale price of $3.2 million to $4.8 million, 10,000 times the original estimate. There are only 98 other known Velázquez paintings in the world, four of them in private hands. They don’t come up for sale at public auction very often, needless to say, so no doubt that estimate will be blown away.

Leonardo da Vinci’s lost mural, The Battle of Anghiari, will be the subject of a heist caper movie written and directed by David Twohy, writer and director of the science fiction classics starring Vin Diesel Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick. It will be called, deplorably enough, The Leonardo Job which is so absurdly derivative I hope very much it will be changed at some point in the production process.

Even if it stays the same, I fear the name may be the best part.

An action thriller about the heist of the “lost” Leonardo da Vinci painting The Battle of Anghiari; the story involves two rival master thieves hired to go to Florence to track down the “mythical” painting. These experts use high tech and old tricks to prove the painting exists and pinpoint its location – hidden behind another masterpiece. They are forced to combine skills when their schemes to steal the painting get more complicated and dangerous after they discover they are not the only ones pursuing the hidden treasure.

I’m curious to see exactly how they plan to steal a mural. Murals are on walls, you see, from the Latin murus meaning wall. This particular wall is rather large, too. It will require some seriously impressive high tech gadgetry to excise it without anyone noticing.

They haven’t released a production schedule yet, so we don’t know when the movie will be released. Twohy has been working with Vin Diesel on the long-awaited third Riddick movie so Leonardo might have to get in line.

Cynicism aside, I hope somehow this seeming train wreck will turn out to be a rollicking good time that doesn’t annoy me at all. Pitch Black is a brilliant movie, and I love The Chronicles of Riddick with all its flaws. It never fails to draw me in when it’s on cable.

Ten years ago, three masked men broke into the Fine Arts Museum of Ghent in Belgium and tore two works by Flemish Old Master Peter Paul Rubens off the wall. While beating a hasty retreat, they dropped one of them, “The Flagellation of Christ,” but made away with “The Calydonian Boar Hunt.”

They picked the wrong piece to be clumsy with because as it happens, “The Flagellation of Christ” is a 1614 preparatory oil sketch for a painting that is part of an important series made by 11 luminaries of 17th century Flemish art like Rubens and Antony van Dyck. The completed painting is in St. Paul’s Church in Antwerp, but even the sketch is extremely significant because it shows Rubens’ process and because he himself gave great importance to his sketches, keeping them until his death. It’s far more valuable that “The Calydonian Boar Hunt” which is a common theme that Rubens returned to often.

Still, they managed to steal at least one Rubens and even if it only garnered them a few hundred thousand dollars rather the millions “The Flagellation of Christ” is worth, that’s an entirely respectable payday for butterfingered burglars. Of course, you actually need to sell it to make any money at all. Fast-forward ten years and Athens police get a tip that two people are trying to sell a Rubens stolen from a Belgian museum 10 years ago. On Thursday, September 1, police set up a sting operation during which one women — a 40-year-old Greek TV host — and one man, a 65-year-old former antique store owner — attempt sell the painting to undercover officers for six million euros ($8.4 million).

The couple are arrested, loudly declaiming their innocence. The woman received it from an Italian lover in 2003, she says. He told her it was a copy, she says. She insists neither she nor her antiquarian accomplice had any idea it was a real Rubens or any idea that it was stolen. There’s a wee problem with this story, though. These doofuses left the “SKETCH BY RUBENS – PROPERTY OF FINE ART MUSEUM OF GHENT” label on the back of the painting. Greek National Art Gallery director Marina Lambraki-Plaka described this crack crew best: “amateurs — unless they had some other reason for keeping the identification details on the back of the painting.”

But wait! There’s more! It turns out the painting probably isn’t a Rubens at all. Since its theft, museum experts have reevaluated its provenance and think it’s more likely a copy, the handiwork of one of his students based on the master’s design. It’s like a Guy de Maupassant story, I swear.

The couple have been arrested and charged with attempted money-laundering. Authorities don’t think they were involved with the theft at this point and they’ve released them on bail with a travel ban. Belgium hasn’t filed the official reclamation paperwork yet, but the Belgian ambassador to Greece announced that the Ghent museum will be delighted to have their Rubens-ish painting back and that they will proceed with the business through normal diplomatic channels.

Oxford marine archaeologist Mensun Bound has purchased a bust that once stared, mouth agape, at people outside the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford University’s ceremonial hall designed by Christopher Wren in the late 1660s. It was only his second public building (the first was the chapel of Pembroke College in Cambridge), designed when he was Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. (Yes, in addition to being a pioneer and luminary of English architecture, Wren was also a math and science genius.) The D-shape of the building was inspired by Rome’s Theater of Marcellus.

Once the building was close to done, Wren commissioned local stonemason William Byrd to carve busts of 13 figures to glare at passersby from the Broad Street boundary wall. Known alternately as “emperors,” “caesar’s heads,” and “philosophers,” the sculptures’ real identities are something of a mystery.

They took a lot of punishment over the centuries. Byrd’s originals were replaced with copies in 1868 after 200 years. The Victorian copies were then treated to the drunken exuberance of the students who splashed paint on them. The cleaning did more damage than the paint, leaving the replacements already in need of restoration by the end of the century. They were finally replaced again with copies carved by Michael Black in 1970 – 1972. Those are the ones you see outside the Sheldonian now.

The auctioneers estimate that it was made in the 1860s, so that would make it one of the Victorian copies. An unnamed source has told Bound that it might actually be one of the 17th century originals and it certainly looks beat up from the picture. Bound spent £3,000 to secure the piece.

[Bound] said: “They are known as the emperors, but I have seen them referred to as philosophers and even the apostles. I thought it would be good for the bust to remain near Oxford.

“I am, of course, interested in busts and archaeology and the courtyard here is an ideal place to put it. The Worcester College choir will be here singing at the unveiling, which will hopefully raise money for the village church.”

The unveiling will be carried out by the poet and dramatist Francis Warner, of St Peter’s College.

Mr Bound said he was hoping eventually to discover which of the emperors he had acquired.

The three-ton hunk of limestone has already been hoisted onto a pedestal, thanks to a local farmer’s forklift, in its new location, a courtyard on Bound’s estate, historic Horspath Manor.

In 1504, the Gonfalionere of Justice, leader of the Florentine Republic, Piero Soderini commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to decorate a wall in the newly built Hall of Five Hundred, the room where Florence’s Great Council met in the Palazzo Vecchio.

According to Giorgio Vasari’s biography of Leonardo in the Lives of the Artists, the people of Florence clamored for a memento of the great artist’s presence among them. They decided on a large-scale mural depicting the 1440 Battle of Anghiari in which greatly outnumbered Florentine armies held a bridge against the Duke of Milan’s mercenaries, thereby keeping central Italy’s free from Milanese control.

Vasari glowingly describes Leonardo’s design:

Whereupon Leonardo, determining to execute this work, began a cartoon in the Sala del Papa, an apartment in S. Maria Novella, representing the story of Niccolò Piccinino, Captain of Duke Filippo of Milan; wherein he designed a group of horsemen who were fighting for a standard, a work that was held to be very excellent and of great mastery, by reason of the marvellous ideas that he had in composing that battle; seeing that in it rage, fury, and revenge are perceived as much in the men as in the horses, among which two with the forelegs interlocked are fighting no less fiercely with their teeth than those who are riding them do in fighting for that standard, which has been grasped by a soldier, who seeks by the strength of his shoulders, as he spurs his horse to flight, having turned his body backwards and seized the staff of the standard, to wrest it by force from the hands of four others, of whom two are defending it, each with one hand, and, raising their swords in the other, are trying to sever the staff; while an old soldier in a red cap, crying out, grips the staff with one hand, and, raising a scimitar with the other, furiously aims a blow in order to cut off both the hands of those who, gnashing their teeth in the struggle, are striving in attitudes of the utmost fierceness to defend their banner; besides which, on the ground, between the legs of the horses, there are two figures in foreshortening that are fighting together, and the one on the ground has over him a soldier who has raised his arm as high as possible, that thus with greater force he may plunge a dagger into his throat, in order to end his life; while the other, struggling with his legs and arms, is doing what he can to escape death.

It is not possible to describe the invention that Leonardo showed in the garments of the soldiers, all varied by him in different ways, and likewise in the helmet crests and other ornaments; not to mention the incredible mastery that he displayed in the forms and lineaments of the horses, which Leonardo, with their fiery spirit, muscles, and shapely beauty, drew better than any other master.

In classic Leonardo style, he invented an accordion-folding scaffold to reach the top of his immense canvas. Also in a classic but less fortunate Leonardo style, he invented a new undercoat to apply to the wall under his oil painting. He didn’t want to use fresco because it had failed rather spectacularly in The Last Supper, so he scared up some weird mixture that in tests worked quite well. On the huge scale of the wall, though, where it was virtually impossibly to keep the environment evenly warm, the primer didn’t dry quickly enough and before his very eyes the paint started dripping. Leonardo brought in braziers to heat the wall and try to preserve what he could, but only the bottom of the painting managed to dry on time. The paints on the top were hopelessly intermingled. Bummed, Leonardo abandoned the project.

Even incomplete, the mural was widely revered. Many copies were made of it over the years, most notably by Peter Paul Rubens in 1603, based on a 1553 engraving by Lorenzo Zacchia. By the time Rubens made his version, Leonardo’s original was long gone. The Hall of the Five Hundred was enlarged between 1555 and 1572, and in the process The Battle of Anghieri and the incomplete work by Michelangelo that was across from it were both lost.

It was none other than Giorgio Vasari who was in charge of the restructuring of the hall. He and his associates painted vast battle murals on the walls, including over the wall that had once held Leonardo’s lost masterpiece. On one of those murals, way up high, Vasari left a curious note. There’s no lettering anywhere else on this intricate scene of army against army, but in one green standard Vasari painted two words: “Cerca Trova,” seek and find.

Florentine art historian and University of California, San Diego, professor Maurizio Seracini found Vasari’s note in the 1970s. Ever since then, he’s tried to find out more about the wall and might be behind it. Ultrasounds taken in 1976 detected no painting behind the current one. In 2000, Seracini used radar scanning to discover that Vasari had painted his work on a new brick wall, not directly on Leonardo’s surface. Could Vasari, who we know held Anghiari in the highest of esteem, had built a brick surface to keep Leonardo’s work, whatever was left of it, intact? Is that what seekers would find if they looked?

The problem is how do we find out what, if anything, is behind the bricks without dismantling the 16th century works. Enter freelance photographer Dave Yoder. In 2007, Yoder was assigned by National Geographic to do a story about Seracini’s decades-long investigation, and in 2010, National Geographic inked a deal with Florence to pay the city $250,000 for exclusive rights to publish the results of Mr. Seracini’s research.

It was Yoder who found a possible solution to the conundrum. Googling, he found nuclear physicist Robert Smither who was creating a gamma ray camera that would be able to take high-resolution pictures of cancer inside of a patient without invasive exploration.

Mr. Smither figured that his camera, which essentially uses copper crystals in place of lens glass to focus the gamma rays that bounce back when an object is sprayed with neutrons, could provide a definitive answer. It could not only determine whether the Leonardo painting was there by identifying the chemicals in the paint but could also capture an image of the hidden work — without damaging the Vasari fresco on top.

Thus ensued an unlikely and somewhat surreal turn of events in which Mr. Yoder, between glossy-magazine assignments, found himself borrowing time at a facility of Italy’s energy research agency in Frascati, outside Rome. The testing, in June 2010, went well. The team took pigments similar to those used by Leonardo and original bricks from Leonardo’s era that Mr. Seracini found at the Palazzo Vecchio and sprayed them with neutrons. The gamma rays that bounced back were strong enough for Mr. Smither to collect and read.

That convinced Mr. Smither that if they exposed the wall in the Hall of Five Hundred to neutrons, they could tell from the gamma rays that bounced back whether Leonardo’s painting was still there. And, at that point, they could build a special camera that would create an image from those particular gamma rays.

It’s the best of both worlds: we get to see what’s left of Leonardo’s painting without damaging the wall on top of it. The only problem is money. In order to develop and test the gamma camera, the researchers need $265,000. Since everyone is broke, they’ve taken it to Kickstarter where people can donate a dollar or a hundred thousand of them to see this plan come to fruition.

I think Leonardo, compulsive inventor that he was, would be absolutely thrilled to have a new gamma ray camera built so that we can see his art.

Divers have found a 16th century shipwreck in the Baltic 11 miles north of the Swedish island of Oland. Although detailed exploration is necessary before they can confirm it, preliminary examination indicates that it is the wreck of the warship Mars, flagship of King Erik XIV’s fleet which sank during a battle with Denmark in 1564. That would make this ship 64 years older than the Vasa, Sweden’s famously intact wreck salvaged from Stockholm Bay 50 years ago, and just 19 years older than Tudor England’s Mary Rose.

The Mars was even bigger than the Vasa. It carried 107 guns and a crew of 800, and unlike the Vasa which was poorly constructed and sank on its maiden voyage, Mars actually took those cannon and sailors to war. King Eric, of tenuous sanity but substantial ambition, sought to expand Sweden’s territories in the eastern Baltic, dominated at that time by his cousin Frederick II of Denmark. In 1563 tensions exploded into the Northern Seven Years’ War between Sweden on one side and Denmark–Norway, Lübeck and the Polish–Lithuanian union on the other.

The shipwreck was discovered at a depth of 75 metres [246 feet], near the northern promontory of the Baltic island of Öland off of Sweden’s east coast. The wreckage is reportedly solid oak and the seabed is strewn with bronze cannons.

The Mars was the largest ship in the Baltic in its heyday and was sunk, only a year after its maiden voyage, during a sea battle with the Danish-Lübeckian navy in 1564.

After two days of ferocious fighting, Mars was hit by cannon fire and went up in smoke. In the ensuing kerfuffle the vessel went down and has been resting untouched in its watery grave for 447 years.

The wreck is the proper size and age to be the Mars, and no other ships of its kind went down between Gotland and Oland at that time. Divers also found a sheaf of corn engraved on one of the cannons, the emblem of the House of Vasa, the Swedish royal family in the 16th and 17th centuries. That same emblem can be found on the lower stern of the warship Vasa, embraced by two putti.

The wreck appears to be well-preserved, divers say, with a hole in its side but otherwise in good condition thanks to the cold waters of the Baltic. Swedish divers have been looking for the Mars for decades, so the team is in seventh heaven.

For wreck-diver Lundgren, finding the lost Mars would be like a boyhood dream come true.

“To discover a shipwreck is the dream of all divers, but to find Mars, which people have been searching for so long – it couldn’t get bigger than that. I am happy to be Swedish today!” he told The Local.

A dive survey of a shipwreck discovered in the shallow waters of Burtonport harbor off the coast of Donegal, Ireland, has discovered evidence that the ship was once part of the mighty Spanish Armada that so spectacularly failed to invade England in 1588. The divers found lead shot balls, tunic buttons and Spanish pottery in the hull of the ship. The timbers and copper pins date the ship wreck to the 16th century.

The ship was discovered by Donegal divers Liam Miller, Oscar Duffy and Michael Early almost three years ago but was not publicized to give the underwater archaeologists time to survey the area without interference. There is still a great deal of work to be done in order to identify the vessel as an Armada warship, but the archaeologists surveying the find and the Heritage Ministry believe the find is a major historical significance.

Heritage minister Jimmy Deenihan has granted 50,000 euro for the excavation by the underwater archaeology unit from his department’s National Monuments Service.

He said the discovery was a major find of significance not only to Ireland but also to the international archaeological, historical and maritime communities.

“If, in fact, it proves to be an Armada vessel, it could constitute one of the most intact of these wrecks discovered to date,” he said.

“It could provide huge insight into life on board and the reality of the military and naval resources available to the Armada campaign.”

The 130-ship strong Spanish Armada was defeated by the wee English navy of 60 ships and the treacherous waters of the North Sea. After the English sent fireships into the Spanish fleet, the wind forced the Armada to flee north. The rocky coasts of Ireland and Scotland and the reliably abysmal weather did far more damage than the fireships. Less than 75% of the Spanish Armada made it home.

Between 24 and 26 Spanish Armada ships are thought to have gone down off the Irish coast. Fourteen of them have been found and mapped thus far, five of them off the coast of Donegal.

A team of U.S. researchers and marine archaeologists from Mexico’s National Anthropology and History Institute (INAH) found a Chinese bronze sculpture from the 16th century on the Pacific coast of Baja California, a peninsula south of the US state of California. At just under five inches square, the statue is either a censer or a candlestick. It is decorated with a Chinese “Dog of Fo,” a lion figure that protected Buddhist temples.

It was discovered under water using a metal detector two weeks ago as part of the ongoing 12-year Manila Galleon Project which surveys 7 miles along the Baja coast for the remains of Spanish ships known as the Manila Galleons, ships that carried trade cargo from the Philippines to Acapulco. The trade began in 1565 when Andrés de Urdaneta, explorer, Augustinian friar and the second man to circumnavigate the globe, discovered that if ships departing from Cebu City went north first, the Pacific trade winds would carry them east to the coast of California.

It was a punishingly long trip. Urdaneta lost most of his crew the first time, and even once the trade got going in earnest, the galleons took four months to sail from Manila to Acapulco. From there the cargo of spices, porcelain, ivory, silk and bronze devotional statues, etc., was transported overland to the Gulf of Mexico where it was added to the Spanish treasure ships heading back to the motherland. Tedious, long and dangerous as it was, this trip allowed Spanish ships to avoid using unfriendly foreign ports and the Portuguese routes in the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope.

The find comes from one of the first galleons of the 16th century to set sail from Manila in the Philippines en route to Acapulco in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, INAH marine archaeology unit member Roberto Junco said.

The route “was the longest on the high seas…in this case the ship could have been carried off by the various currents along the coast of the Californias, with no survivors to continue the crossing,” Junco said.

The remains of the goods found probably belonged to the San Felipe galleon, which sailed carrying a large cargo of Chinese porcelain from the Ming Dynasty and which disappeared without a trace in 1576, maritime historian Edward Von der Porten said.

The Manila Galleon Project began when some of that Ming porcelain was discovered on a Baja beach in 1999. The surveys have found thousands of pieces of porcelain, chunks of beeswax, lead sheathing from the ship and other artifacts, but this is the first bronze “Dog of Fo” sculpture they’ve discovered. Jesuit missionary chronicles from the 18th century note on more than one occasion Indians having bronze candlesticks shaped like dogs. Perhaps they were describing something like this object traded from China off a Manila galleon.

It was an enormous market, starting with American silver which the Spanish shipped to the Far East. Historians estimate that as much as a third of all the silver mined in the Spanish colonies of America ended up in Asia. With that silver the traders bought goods to fill up their huge ships — the Manila galleons were built particularly large for cargo and so the crew could actually survive once in a while — and headed back to Mexico. On its way from Baja to the Gulf, some of the cargo would be sold and traded locally. You can see the influence of Asian porcelain and ivory in Mexican ceramics.

The Manila galleons finally stopped sailing in 1815 when the Mexican War of Independence against Spain broke the cycle.

There are a grand total of 14 oil paintings in the world known to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, or rather there were 14. Now there are 15 because a Leonardo that was lost centuries ago has been authenticated by experts from the US and UK. The painting depicts Christ as the Salvator Mundi, the Savior of the World, facing forwards with two fingers of his right hand raised in blessing and a crystal globe in his left hand. It’s oil on a walnut panel and is 2 x 1.5 feet (26 x 18 inches, 66 x 45 cm) in size.

The Salvator Mundi was a well-known painting when Leonardo first made it around 1500. That’s why we still know of it despite its having dropped out of circulation for hundreds of years, because there are multiple copies made by his students and other artists in his style. Several of these copies have been put forth as the lost original, but scholars disagreed and none of them was widely accepted. There are also two preparatory drawings by Leonardo in the Royal Library at Windsor which show the drapery of Christ’s robe and raised arm just as seen in the painting.

Our best historical reference is a detailed etching made in 1650 by Wenceslaus Hollar, who was commissioned to make the copy by Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, widow of the freshly decapitated English King Charles I. Hollar captioned the etching “Leonardus da Vinci pinxit. Wenceslaus Hollar fecit Aqua forti, secundum originale. Ao 1650.” (Translation: “Leonardo da Vinci painted it. Wenceslaus Hollar made it out of strong water [ie, nitric acid used for the etching], according to the original. Year 1650.”) There’s a record of the painting in Charles I’s collection in 1649, so it seems Hollar made his drawing from Leonardo’s completed original.

It was sold after the King’s execution but returned to the crown when he son, Charles II, was restored to the monarchy in 1660. From there it went into the Duke of Buckingham’s collection and then dropped out of sight after his son sold it in 1763. The painting cropped up again in 1900 but was very much the worse for wear. It had been overpainted, varnished, poorly restored and damaged past the point of recognition. You can see the repainting in the black and white picture (right) taken after 1900 but before 1912.

When British collector Sir Frederick Cook purchased it that year, he didn’t know it was a Leonardo. It was exhibited as a “Milanese School” painting from ca. 1500 when Sir Frederick put his collection of old masters on display in the 40s. It was attributed to Leonardo’s talented student Boltraffio when the trustees of the Cook collection put the painting up for auction at Sotheby’s London in 1958 after Sir Frederick’s death. It earned them 45 shiny pounds. (You know they are collectively beating themselves in the face right about now.)

Salvator Mundi was in an American private collection from that point until 2005, when it was purchased from what appears to be a consortium of art dealers, but the owners are keeping fairly mum about it. They commissioned New York art historian and dealer Robert Simon to study the piece and he saw through the repaint, dirt, varnish and tragic cleanings past to the details of Leonardo-level quality like the pattern of the stole and the bubbles in the crystal orb.

They still didn’t think it was an actual Leonardo original at that point. It was only after years of cleaning and restoration that the full beauty of the painting gradually revealed itself. In the fall of 2007, they called in the big Leonardo guns.

At that time, the painting was viewed by Mina Gregori (University of Florence) and Nicholas Penny (Director, National Gallery, London; then Curator of Sculpture, National Gallery of Art, Washington). In 2008, the painting was studied at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by museum curators Carmen Bambach, Andrea Bayer, Keith Christiansen, and Everett Fahy, and by Michael Gallagher, head of the Department of Paintings Conservation. In late May 2008, the painting was taken to the National Gallery in London, where it could be directly compared with Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks of approximately the same date. Several specialist Leonardo scholars were also invited to study the two paintings together. These included Carmen Bambach, David Alan Brown (Curator of Italian Painting, National Gallery of Art, Washington), Maria Teresa Fiorio (Raccolta Vinciana, Milan), Martin Kemp (University of Oxford), Pietro C. Marani (Professor of Art History at the Politecnico di Milano), and the gallery’s Curator of Italian paintings Luke Syson. More recently, following the completion of conservation treatment in 2010, the painting has again been studied in New York by several of the above, as well as by David Ekserdjian (University of Leicester).

The study and examination of the painting by these scholars resulted in an unequivocal consensus that the Salvator Mundi was painted by Leonardo da Vinci, and that it is the single original painting from which the many copies and versions depend. Individual opinions vary slightly in the matter of dating. Most place the painting at the end of Leonardo’s Milanese period in the late 1490s, contemporary with the completion of the Last Supper. Others believe it to be slightly later, painted in Florence (where Leonardo moved in 1500), contemporary with the Mona Lisa.

The experts were convinced this was the real Salvator Mundi because of its stylistic adherence to Leonardo’s known work, the high quality execution, its matching the Windsor preparatory drawings and Hollar’s etching, how much better it is than the 20 known copies, plus the discovery of pentimenti, first ideas for the work that were painted over but not seen in the etching or in the copies. The science — chemical analysis of the paint, colors and wood — confirms that the materials are consistent with those used in other works known to be Leonardo’s.

They were so decisively persuaded, in fact, that Salvator Mundi will be shown for the first time at London’s National Gallery Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan show, an unprecedented exhibition of work from Leonardo’s years at the court of Ludovico Sforza, ruler of Milan. Seven of the now 15 known Leonardo paintings will be on display in this show. To say that is unprecedented is an understatement. That’s half of all the remaining Leonardos in one place, one of them the first new Leonardo painting found since 1909, when the Benois Madonna was discovered.

Archaeologists from the regional Archaeological Superintendency of Emilia Romagna restoring the fortress-turned-parish church of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle in the small and chilly Apennine mountain town of Roccapelago have discovered 281 bodies piled in a pyramid shape under the church floor. One hundred of the bodies were naturally mummified with skin, tendons, hair, and clothes intact. The people weren’t the only creatures in that crypt to find themselves unexpectedly preserved; rats and larvae were too.

The unusual preservation was due to a confluence of the consistently cold temperature and two slots in the church wall that kept the air constantly circulating. The vaulted crypt — used as an armory when the church was a fortress in the Middle Ages — was first used for traditional inhumation under ground, but the practice later changed to corpses being dropped from a trap door in the church.

There are several initial layers of bodies which were not well-preserved, probably due to the weight of later burials. The final stack of bodies was covered with a thin coating of pebbles then covered, at the apex of the pyramid, with large boulders. The remains must have already been mummified by then because they were not squashed by the closure of the crypt in the 18th century.

The 300 bodies were buried in the crypt between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and probably form the bulk of the population of Roccapelago. Although they were dropped into a mass grave, they weren’t treated disrespectfully. The bodies were all clothed in tunics, hats and heavy socks, some of them wrapped in shrouds, some of them placed in bags. Their heads were wrapped so the jaws wouldn’t gape open, their clothes tied between their legs so their genitals wouldn’t be exposed for all eternity, and their hands folded together as in prayer. Some of them still landed kinda funny, including one fellow who was found doing a headstand with his legs open.

Mass graves don’t usually survive complete with mummified human remains, clothes, and artifacts like lockets and crosses, even a letter; this discovery will allow archaeologists to trace 300 years of social history in the tiny burg. The human remains will reveal infant and child mortality proportions, what kinds of illnesses were endemic, how they ate, how they worked. Researchers are also hoping to be able to determine degrees of consanguinity, a particular interest with such a small community, and how closely related they are to the modern inhabitants.

Analysis of the body bags, shrouds, clothing fabrics and weaves, plus devotional objects like saint medallions, rosaries and crosses, pollen, animal and vegetable remains will provide an incredibly detailed snapshot of peasant life in the town, their beliefs and traditions, their daily habits, even what the animals ate.

Archaeologists are particularly excited to have recovered a rare “lettera componenda” or “Rivelazione” (aka Revelation), a letter written to God that is basically a contract or deal. They promised prayer in exchange for God’s granting the deceased, in this case a woman, the five graces. These letters were thought to bless the person carrying them in life and when buried with them after death, usually in their hands or in their pockets. This one was found in the false floor of the room, however, so it may have been placed over the lady then covered with earth.

The letter is in need of restoration, but parts of it are already legible. A selection of the readable snippets:

Those who say three Our Fathers and if (…) two Hail Marys every day over the space of 15 years until they finish said number, I will grant them five Graces.

The first I concede them (…) remission of all sins. Second I will not make them submit to the pains of Purgatory.

If the present letter (…) goes to the Holy … Sepulchre in Jerusalem … and he who carries it on him will be free from the Devil and will not die in substance … bad death. Carried it on her the pregnant woman will give birth without danger. In the house where this Revelation lives there will be no illusion of bad things (….) before her death will see the Glorious Virgin Mary Amen.