Artibus et Historiae no. 90 (XLV)
2024, ISSN 0391-9064Up
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PHILIPP ZITZLSPERGER - The Meaning of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, pp. 57–76
The following article is about the Salvator Mundi painting controversially hailed as Leonardo da Vinci’s original and sold to Saudi Arabia in 2017. Rather than concerning itself with questions of attribution, however, the article attempts, for the first time, to decipher the painting’s iconography. This is especially idiosyncratic insofar as Christ is shown wearing women’s garb. The depiction of Christ as a transvestite points to a cultural history of fluid gender boundaries in the premodern veneration of Christ. Cultural and religious history and the history of aesthetics all provide models with which to shed light on this little heeded line of inquiry on the fringes of art history.
