Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci

The Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, depicts Christ as the savior of the world, an image of profound symbolic meaning that fuses the divine and the human. With his right hand raised in blessing and his left holding a crystal orb. Christ’s gaze is not directed outward but seems to penetrate the viewer.

The Salvator Mundi masterfully reflects Leonardo da Vinci’s experimentation with sfumato, a technique that allowed him to dissolve contours and model Christ’s face with imperceptible transitions between light and shadow, creating an almost ethereal sense of three-dimensionality. The choice of a walnut panel as support offered a firm, fine-grained surface, ideal for precise oil layers. The painter applied successive glazes that gave the skin a living and enigmatic transparency, while in the crystal orb he introduced a unique technical challenge: representing the purity of a translucent object at a time when optics was still developing.

The drapery of the garments combines chromatic richness with a detailed study of how fabric falls under light, revealing not only his artistic interest but also his scientific drive to understand visual effects. The dark atmosphere surrounding the figure intensifies the volume and monumentality of Christ, isolating him in a timeless space and reinforcing the deep spirituality that emanates from the work.

Christ appears with his right hand raised, two fingers extended in a sign of blessing. This gesture comes from Christian tradition and was widely recognized during the Renaissance. In this painting, the gesture is not decorative but defines the function of the image as a representation of Christ’s spiritual power over the world.

In his left hand he holds a transparent orb, symbol of the earth and universal dominion. Depicting a transparent object was a technical challenge at the time. Leonardo chose not to depict the refraction or visual distortion that a real sphere would create, which has generated debates among scholars. For some, it was a deliberate simplification to focus attention on the religious meaning rather than on the optical effect.