The drapery of a sleeve

A study of an arm bent at the elbow, pointing upwards, the wrist just indicated with a light band and sleeve. From it falls a large loop of drapery as of the loose sleeve of an outer robe. Melzi's number 218. RCIN 912524 and 912524 are studies for the drapery of the chest and right arm of Leonardo’s recently rediscovered painting of Christ as saviour of the world, Salvator Mundi. The subject would have been uncongenial to Leonardo, a standard iconic formula that presented little formal challenge or psychological tension. This may be apparent in the unusually coarse handling of the chalk, and the stiff lower drawing in RCIN 912525 is probably by an assistant, with white highlighting clearly by a right-handed artist. But the areas of the painting that survive in good condition are plainly by Leonardo, not delegated to an assistant as in the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, suggesting that the patron was both important and discerning. In 1504 the avid collector Isabella d’Este, Duchess of Milan, wished to commission from Leonardo a ‘youthful Christ of around twelve years, of that age that he had when he disputed in the Temple’, but the Salvator Mundi shows a mature, bearded Christ. Several copies of the Salvator Mundi (and possibly the original) have an early French provenance, and a commission from Louis XII or his consort Anne of Brittany – who seem to have had a particular devotion to Christ as Salvator Mundi – is not improbable. The rich technique of the drawings suggests a date around the middle of the first decade of the sixteenth century, and the painting was perhaps executed soon after Leonardo’s return to French occupied Milan in 1506. Text adapted from Leonardo da Vinci: A life in drawing, London, 2018