The Bias of Superficiality

Salvator Mundi History –

The Bias of Superficiality

The Bias of Superficiality

Humans are flexible animals: they have a bias for everything. A confirmation bias (if you wish something to be true), a negativity bias (if you openly fear that something might happen to you, but secretly hope that it doesn’t), and a bias that I am now adding to that superficial anthropology: a superficiality bias. And this is the overarching structure of all biases: it is meant to help you to adapt your own biases and your own acting according to the situation.

The controversy over the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo does get on people’s nerves. But try to think of it in this way: it is not necessarily about the (rather unimportant) painting itself, but about many other, much more important issues that are now, due to the painting’s prominence, associated with that painting and exemplified by it. For example the general issue of superficiality. A virus that also has infected – perhaps because Leonardo issues are only seen as infotainment – various media of quality.

Let’s name and review the last three examples of rather absurd superficiality in Salvator Mundi History:

One) Three computer scientists from University of California have simulated the painting three-dimensionally and come to some conclusions as to the painting’s concept and accurateness of representing optical phenomena. This is also about superficiality in a very good sense, and the simulation might be superb. But the problem is that the three scholars based their simulation not on the state of the painting as it showed after cleaning, but as it showed after restoration. And no matter how you might criticize or not-criticize the restoration – the painting has, no doubt, been transformed due to the process of restoration. And the distortion of one garment fold that the scholars detected in the painting (which is important, because their hypotheses are built on that one distorted fold) cannot be detected in the cleaned-state photograph as shown here. Nonetheless, conclusions have been drawn, the research is published in Nature, and the topic went viral (also in various media of quality).

This is what I am calling excessive superficiality. And more than that: it is simply humbug. Because it is based on ignoring the process of restoration and the way the painting was transformed by it. The simulation was based on what the restorer has made of the painting. But nonetheless we hear conclusions and interpretations as to what the painting’s actual author had attempted and managed to to, and about how accurately he might have managed to do that. The good side of all this humbug might be that attention is drawn to the very, very problematic process of restoration and transformation the painting went through. A process that seems to be completely unknown to all-too-many people. And especially to gatekeeping journalists.

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Two) And another matter is haunting us like a ghost: the painting’s commercial history. Had it been on the market or not before the National Gallery’s 2011/2012 Leonardo exhibtion? Who cares?, you might say. But this is exactly the gist of the matter. Apart from the fact that this is about the credibility of the consort of owners (then then owners, who were more than willing to sell the painting to a top museum), this is also about the credibility of all those who were in responsibility then. Scholars and museum officials. Not only did they have to handle the question of authenticity, but also to protect the integrity of scholarship and the integrity of a public museum. But happily they accepted the claim of the owners (represented by Robert Simon), that the painting was not ›actively‹ on the market (see Martin Kemp, Living with Leonardo, p. 163). This at a time that the exhibition was still in preparation and, as it seems, a very active seeking for institutional buyers went on. Be it as it may, but it is – again – about the question of how much superficiality is to be tolerated. Is it to be tolerated that not only the Leonardo-label has become as malleable as it can be, but also the integrity of scholarship and museums, only because this is about Leonardo?

Three) Martin Kemp, one of the scholars involved, has now recently lamented in The Art Newspaper that the painting is »doubly lost«, since it was not included in the still ongoing Louvre Leonardo-show, and since it has become impossible (he claims) to still see the painting which, on some level, might have become invisible, like the Mona Lisa, behind its own myth.
But is this true at all? Since, firstly, seeing the painting in its present (or recent) state, means looking at a restored painting (see again point one). To understand what we see, means to compare with photographs anyway, and to discuss what the author of the painting might have wanted, means to interpret verbally things represented visually.
Secondly, Martin Kemp is one of the scholars who were involved in the process of authenticating the painting and in the process of shaping interpretations of the painting, and he is the one scholar who acts as if the matter of attribution had been settled. But neither has this question been settled, nor do we have to accept his or others’ interpretations, nor do we have to follow him in his interpretations as to what is, in a more metaphorical sense, still visible and what it is not. Because here we enter the field of discourse, shaped by discursive powers of ›opinion leaders‹, whose use of power has to be scrutinized as well.

And it would be the most excessive superficiality to just ignore who speaks, and to forget that we have to use our own eyes and our own brains. Also as to the question of what might be invisible. And also as to the not-always ostensibly visible powers that shape – and keep shaping – a Salvator Mundi discourse.

(3.2.2020)

See also: A Salvator Mundi Provenance

Some Salvator Mundi Microstories

Some Salvator Mundi Afterthoughts

Some Salvator Mundi Variations

Some Salvator Mundi Revisions

Leonardeschi Gold Rush

A Salvator Mundi Geography

A Salvator Mundi Atlas

Index of Leonardiana

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