WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY A FAKE LEONARDO?
A new exhibition of digitised artworks asks us to admire electronic copies of great historical paintings. Is this the future? Or is the art world pulling a fast one?
Painting was not Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest talent. This isn’t my hot take: it was his. The pre-eminent genius of the later Middle Ages said so in a letter advertising his services to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan in 1482.
Leonardo was looking for a job, and in his letter to the duke he laid out his qualifications. He boasted that he could build portable bridges, naval weapons, mines and tunnels, guns, catapults and armed chariots that described like early twentieth-century tanks. He claimed to be a master of architecture and civic planning, who could design buildings and water-courses. He talked up his talent as a sculptor. Only as an after-thought did he tell Sforza he was a splendid painter, who could do ‘everything possible, as well as any man, whoever he may be.’
It is ironic, then, that when we think about Leonardo today, we get him the opposite way round. To us Leonardo was not primarily an engineer and sculptor, but the man who painted The Virgin of the Rocks, Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Lady with an Ermine and all the rest. Art first. Everything else second. Whenever his drawings, notebooks and other works are displayed by museums and galleries, they are typically introduced as examples of Leonardo’s surprising range of skills outside painting.
Whether this is fair or not is somewhat beside the point. The fact is, Leonardo has come to be regarded as one of the greatest artists in western history - perhaps the greatest of all. That means his artworks are all-but priceless, and the relatively small number that survive are jealously guarded by the institutions that hold them.
Indeed, securely identified Leonardos are so scarce, and their cultural cachet so high, that people have been driven to the point of madness or criminality by the fantasy of owning one. Leonardo’s paintings have been stolen. They have been mis-sold. And now they are being hawked as digital limited editions, as galleries jump on the craze for single-owner virtual assets and NFTs.
Theft and fraud are as old as the hills. But NFTs of medieval masters are new - and potentially interesting. With that in mind, this afternoon I got up from my desk and went to see a couple of them, at a gallery in London. I’d like to share some of my thoughts with you.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to History, Etc to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.