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(Image Credit: NPR)

A couple of weeks ago I posted on the lost and recently rediscovered Leonardo da Vinci painting Salvador Mundi. Thus, it’s only fitting that this week I write about the lost and recently discovered copy of Mona Lisa, unveiled by the Prado in Madrid one week ago today. Its discovery represents a compelling moment in the history of Western art. The Mona Lisa is iconic: its picture is replicated everywhere, art historians and non-art historians alike debate the ambiguity of her smile, and throngs of viewers everyday fill her gallery in the Louvre. It’s hard to overstate the importance of da Vinci’s painting. Mona Lisa is probably worth upwards of $720 million (the painting was insured for $100 million in 1962, and adjusting that value for inflation bumps it up to around $720 million). Nevertheless, despite all of its fame, modern viewers are probably not seeing the Mona Lisa in its original grandeur. The Prado copy shows us what we might have been missing.

(Image Credit: Robert Simon, Tim Nighswander)

While away on my Christmas holidays I had the very lucky opportunity of viewing the Salvator Mundi painting that has just recently been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. The possibility that a lost da Vinci painting could be rediscovered in the opening decades of the twenty-first century has left much of the international press swooning (The Telegraph, Daily Mail, LA Times), and rightly so. The image is at once perfect and effortless: its symbolism is compelling and its technique is masterful. Here, Christ doesn’t just look out at us from a boring blackish-brown interior: He subtly gazes at us through layers of sufamato that belie eternity. And yet questions are sure to abound. Modern viewers unfamiliar with Christian iconography are sure to question the significance of the crystal globe in Christ’s left hand. Similarly, on a lazy afternoon, it’s fun to ponder whom Christ might be blessing in the image. The world? The viewer? One of da Vinci’s patrons? Who could have been da Vinci’s patron when this painting was made? Was it Charles I? Eclipsing all these minor issues is the fact that the artist who had such a complicated relationship with organized Christianity appears to have composed a lovely portrait of Christ.