Masterwork Completed In 1499
Michele Firmasyah
Masterwork completed in 1499 NYT Crossword Clue Answers are listed below. Did you came up with a solution that did not solve the clue? No worries we keep a close eye on all the clues and update them regularly with the correct answers.
I needed a novel for the European Reading Challenge. I also wanted to read something about men for a change, other than historical mystery/thrillers. So I picked Oil and Marble: A Novel of Leonardo and Michelangelo by Stephanie Storey.
The novel covers the years 1499 through 1505 and is mainly set in Florence, Italy. Chapters alternate between the viewpoints of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. During this time period, each completes a masterwork. For Leonardo, it is the Mona Lisa. For Michelangelo, it is his David.
The author knows the subject matter well and is able to make the historical events and the rivalry between the two great masters come alive. In addition, she guides the reader step-by-step through the creation of these two masterpieces so that they are almost visible on the page. This is engrossing historical fiction.
If you are a new reader please go here to orient yourself, as this is the second to last newsletter for my MFA thesis project, Welcome to Business School. You can also just read on since this essay can stand on its own. I will continue to write about art and business after I graduate in August, but the simulation part is almost over.
Bouvier made the purchase, and Rybolovlev was very happy with it until some interesting information got back to him. He bought the painting for $127.5 million dollars but learned that Parish, Simon, and Adelson only received $80 million. What happened?
Rybolovlev assumed Bouvier had negotiated the sale himself, but he had in fact sent an intermediary. The reason Rybolovlev thought Bouvier was there was because Bouvier kept sending texts about how the negotiations were going and then stated he had bought the painting for $127.5.
QUESTION 2: Rybolovlev was PISSED because he believed Bouvier had ripped him off. Who do you think is at fault here? Bouvier for trying to maximize his profit by not making it clear that he had bought the painting and then hiked up the price. Or Rybolovlev for not doing due diligence when buying something for this amount of money. It turns out this was the standard operating procedure for Bouvier, and he had sold several pieces to Rybolovlev for much more than he had paid.
QUESTION 4: I guess in the end, I wonder if this painting is a masterwork by Leonardo or if it is the idea of a masterwork made real by the concerted efforts of all the folks that have money or reputation on the line. I have thoughts and feelings about this, but you might feel like you need more information before you can make a decision. I have included footnotes with my sources, but there are tons of other articles on the internet if you are interested in going down this particular rabbit hole.
If you want to take a stab at actually answering one or more of these questions in a forum outside of your own head, there are two ways you can do so with the group. One is to use the comment section on Substack.
I\u2019m doing something a little different in this issue. One of my favorite parts of getting an MBA was reading and discussing case studies. Sometimes we tried to unravel duplicitous accounting, other times we analyzed marketing problems. My favorite case studies, though, involved ethical questions. Since I don\u2019t think you can truly have a business school simulation without at least one case study, here you go! At the end of the newsletter, I will include two opportunities for newsletter subscribers to participate beyond just reading if they are so inclined.
In this case study I will be discussing the Salvator Mundi, a painting with a heavily disputed Leonardo da Vinci attribution and the honor of being the most expensive piece of art to be sold at auction at $450 million. This is not a contemporary piece of art, so why am I writing about it? Well, older art is not immune from the machinations of the art market, and, for reasons I will discuss later, the last public sale of the piece took place during one of Christie\u2019s contemporary art auctions. The Salvator Mundi has a very convoluted (one might say batshit) history, and while I will try to convey as much of it as I can, I will mainly be focusing on three points of ethical slipperiness. There is a lot I can\u2019t cover because then this would be a book, and some other guy already wrote it.
Painted sometime between 1499 and 1510 and currently (and contestedly) attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and/or his workshop, the Salvator Mundi shows Christ wearing blue and brown Renaissance garb and facing the viewer head-on. His right hand is raised with two fingers pointing up, and he is holding a clear orb in his left. (Image below.) In 2005 it was purchased from a New Orleans estate auction by art dealers Robert Simon and Alexander Parish. Both men specialized in Old Master paintings, and while they suspected this might be an interesting historical piece, they really weren\u2019t sure what they had on their hands. Part of Parish\u2019s job was to look through online auction listings and pull any paintings that might be of interest, and when his employer passed on the Salvator Mundi, he and Simon bought it for themselves for $1,175. Parish was looking for things he thought might be unrecognized or undervalued so he could sell them to people who would pay a lot for an ever-decreasing supply of older artworks.[1]
Two weeks after purchasing the Salvator Mundi, Robert Simon took the painting to restorer Dianne Modestini to see if she and her husband, Mario, would take a look at it. According to Ben Lewis in his book about the Salvator Mundi, The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World\u2019s Most Expensive Painting,
\u201CDianne and Mario examined the painting in front of them\u2026 it had clearly been restored at some point\u2026 Christ\u2019s face had a reddish tinge. There were crude outlines around his tired and empty eyes. The shadow underneath his chin looked like splodges of coffee stain. The chest and forehead were streaked with crumbly white deposits.\u201D[2]
Dianne Modestini agreed to restore the painting and details the process on her website - and it was extensive.[4] She had to clean previous restoration efforts, including a lot of overpainting, as well as deal with worm tunneling and a faulty support. Paint had been removed, especially in the background. The face was muddy, and there were large scrapes down the right side. After cleaning and reassembling the panel, she proceeded to create what one of the painting\u2019s co-owners, Robert Simon, referred to as a \u201Cviable work of art.\u201D[5] It was during this process, when she was looking at the lips of the figure in the painting and comparing them to those in the Mona Lisa, that she became convinced the painting was by Leonardo.[6] Had she not continued her restoration, we would simply have what was left of the original piece, a damaged painting from the early 1500s, possibly by Leonardo Da Vinci. But Modestini - at Simon\u2019s request - did not stop there, and much opining has gone on about that decision.
That not much of the damage is visible anymore is a problem for many people. Art critic Jerry Saltz tells an amusing anecdote about seeing the painting at Christie\u2019s before its last sale \u201C... a well-known expert in the field leaned over and asked me a question. \u2018Why is a Leonardo in a Modern and Contemporary auction?\u2019 Before I could say, \u2018Yeah! Why?\u2019 he answered, \u2018Because 90 percent of it was painted in the last 50 years.\u2019\u201D[7] Saltz\u2019s buddy was not the only one who felt this way. In the film The Savior for Sale, Leonardo scholar Matthew Landrus states \u201CMuch of what we see now, of course, is repainted. Even if one calls that restoration, we also call it overpainting.\u201D[8] (It is important here to state that overpainting can mean both painting over something and painting too much. In this instance, I believe he means both.) While many people balk at the level of restoration, others do not. Neither Sotheby\u2019s nor Christie's nor any of the buyers thought to take issue with it. Even noted Leonardo expert Martin Kemp has no problem with the restoration as a whole.[9]
QUESTION 1: Do you think Modestini went too far in her restoration? What might have motivated Simon and Parish to encourage her to do as much as she did? What is the purpose of art restoration? To preserve the past? To create a record of what happens over time? To capture the magic of the original artist\u2019s touch? To prepare something for sale?
After Dianne Modestini finished her initial restoration in 2008, Robert Simon attempted to get the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo, only to start a firestorm of arguments that continues to this day. Art historian Martin Kemp believed his expertise in Leonardo gave him the ability to use \u201Cjudgment by eye\u201D to determine its origins and that it is by the master.[10] Fellow scholar Matthew Landrus disagreed. He asserted in 2018 that the majority of work on the painting was done by Leonardo\u2019s studio assistant Bernardino Luini.[11] Expert Frank Z\u00F6llner had doubts about Leonardo\u2019s involvement at all, suggesting that one of his students might have been responsible.[12] In 2011, Simon decided that enough people had signed off on the Leonardo attribution - even though it was still highly contested - that he could start advertising it as such. He and Parish had brought in another dealer, Warren Adelson, to help sell the piece, but even though it had been exhibited at a Leonardo show at the National Gallery in London and credited to the master, they had trouble getting anyone to make a serious offer, probably because of remaining doubts about the attribution and concerns regarding the aggressive restoration. Enter Dmitry Rybolovlev.
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