![Das Firmenschild des Kunsthändlers Gersaint by Antoine Watteau: 'A definitive answer to Bénédicte Savoy’s question might be: money owns beauty; as the creators or everyday audiences are largely left out in favour of the fates of those with the means to commission or buy [art].' Image: bpk/Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg/Jörg P Anders](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/QPVY7KLWVNBL7NVK65DO556NYE.jpg?auth=c12c6930e3641a41a10c20d98c22a4f10552a78fb14cca7d065352da8f00cc26&smart=true&width=1024&height=547)
In September, The Irish Times reported that plans for the National Museum to remove objects “with a violent, colonial past” had slowed, with more than 15,000 items requiring investigation. Back in 2023, the then minister for culture and arts, Catherine Martin, had announced an expert committee to deal with guidelines for display, and in some cases for the return of objects to their countries of origin. Two years on, an interim report has gone unpublished, and very little appears to have changed.
But what has been so difficult? How hard can it be to determine whether something was wrested from its owners without consent, and what is stopping such items, quite simply, from going home? As two recent publications demonstrate, creating a museum with a clear conscience isn’t always straightforward. Exploring the role and meaning of art and other objects in national collections, US-based political science professor, Jelena Subotić, suggests that it is status, rather than the items themselves, that is at stake.
Objects, she writes, have no intrinsic symbolic value. Instead, artefacts become valuable when stories are created to “discursively link their possession with desirable high status”. This, she argues, changes over time. Just as once, a well-stocked museum, stuffed with the plunder of colonial expansion, demonstrated the might of an empire, today it has increasingly become an emblem of national shame.
Some states have decided that restoring plundered art raises their international stature – others have not. Subotić contrasts Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 announcement that France should return its looted African art with the continuing arguments in the United Kingdom for hanging on to the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles. These, she argues, have played a foundational role in shaping British identity. This process is not unique to Britain. Through the pages of The Art of Status, and throughout history, art and artefacts are acquired, and museums established, to demonstrate international standing.
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There are some hiccups in her otherwise persuasive arguments. For example, she notes how Napoleon took the four bronze horses from St Mark’s in Venice to France in 1797 (they were later returned), without mentioning they had originally been looted from Constantinople some 500 years previously. Arguments for keeping looted items have included the idea of the “universal museum”, an educational nirvana, where one can go to experience the treasures of the world, although as Subotić notes, this also involves an ownership of the idea of what has cultural value in the first place, and control over how it is presented and described.
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Another argument involves care – a paternalistic approach that declares: we can look after artefacts better than them; although those making it tend to ignore the fact it was their own empire-building that destroyed the political and social systems of those dispossessed. Teasing out these themes makes for particularly bloody reading when it comes to the plundering of the Benin Bronzes during what is chillingly known as “The Punitive Expedition” by British forces in 1897. Through it, Subotić notes the paradoxical argument – that the original owners and creators of such beautiful objects were both savage and ignorant.
Subotić cites the work of art historian Bénédicte Savoy in drawing up terms for a new understanding of looted art. Savoy is an expert in the field of restitution, and her co-authored 2018 report for the French government assessed that 90 per cent of all African cultural property is in museums and private collections outside of Africa.
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Savoy’s own book, Who Owns Beauty, is based on a course of lectures at the Còllege de France, and her explorations are consequently discursive rather than conclusive. Through her pages, she returns to the idea of the impossibility of “owning” beauty, painstakingly tracing lineages from often-unknown artisans to “discoverers”, to restorers, to a series of owners; through greed, war and shifting axes of power. Each chapter uses a different object (the Bust of Nefertiti, Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer) and a different prism to explore her theme, and there are many echoes with Subotić’s work.
There is colonial expansion, Nazi looting, and a whole host of human atrocity, which is all the more depressing for its cyclical repetition. For example, back in 1806, Louvre director Dominique-Vivant Denon “was preparing to make Germany yield an ‘ample harvest of superb things’”. And each time, as the narrative skews from the object to ownership, it becomes a series of tales about the role of the legitimising nature of money and power. “The history of taste,” writes Savoy, “is inextricably linked to that of economic conditions.”
A definitive answer to Savoy’s question might therefore be: money owns beauty; as the creators or everyday audiences are largely left out in favour of the fates of those with the means to commission or buy. Despite the best attempts of both authors, there is a European/American bias to the narratives. We want to believe that art is about more than power and status, and yet, as both these intriguing and yet occasionally frustrating books demonstrate, we value objects more than people. Having said that, it is people with money who create the systems of value, and art objects become props in the theatre of their wealth.
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If ever we needed an object lesson in all the things that art is about that have little to do with the intrinsic qualities of the art itself, we need look no further than the enigmatic figure that is Leonardo da Vinci. We do love a good historical mystery and, as far as art goes, the sweet spot lies in having a legacy of extraordinary work, coupled with scant biographical detail. In the centuries since his death in 1589, Leonardo has out-Shakespeared Shakespeare to be top of the mythologised heap. And, as Stephen J Campbell writes, we certainly aren’t short of stories and theories about the life of the Renaissance master.
Professor of art history at Johns Hopkins University, Campbell knows his Leonardo, but even he, with his evident erudition, confesses that he has not read the 250-plus books on the artist – and those are just the ones published at the time of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death in 1519. From art history to stories for children, corporate strategy manuals to self-help guides, Leonardo has been a gold mine in more ways than merely at auction. “Merely” here is an interesting word, given that Salvator Mundi, heavily restored and attributed, at least in parts, to Leonardo, sold for $450.3 million at auction in 2017. Having been bought on behalf of Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, it satisfied conspiracy theorists everywhere by vanishing from sight. Less satisfyingly, it currently resides in a Geneva warehouse, according to BBC reports.
Writing on the circus of authentications, denunciations, restorations, publications, reports and the machinations of various stakeholders, the sale and subsequent disappearing act of the work, Campbell describes Salvator Mundi as “less like a Holy Grail than a poisoned chalice”. He weaves a narrative that might have inspired a pot-boiling novelist.
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But wait! That already happened with Dan Brown, who leveraged a host of Leonardo myths, and created a truckload of others to dream up the awful but page-turning The Da Vinci Code, in which (spoiler alert), Leonardo’s artworks hold the key to discovering the secret descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Published in 2003, that book went on to become one of the bestselling American novels of all time. It also became, anecdotally, the most donated to charity shops in the UK. Intrigued by this, in 2023, Turner-Prize-nominated artist David Shrigley acquired and pulped 6,000 copies, republishing them as a limited edition of George Orwell’s 1984.
All this demonstrates the byways and rabbit holes one can fall down when exploring the legacies of Leonardo. Why add to the noise? In fact, Campbell has done something different. Framing his absorbing book as an “anti-biography”, he explores instead the fictions we create about the lives of artists, about genius, and ultimately about ourselves. Diving deeper, he goes on to expose some of our most self-evident truths about who we are as being relatively recent fabrications, opening up ideas about how things could be different. “We were not always as we are now,” he writes. “There were other possibilities.”
How then do we get to grips with past lives, while acknowledging their remote unknowability: “how should we rise above the deadening presumption of the claim to know?” A fascinating chapter on Leonardo and the Biographers explores how despite (or possibly because of) incredibly flimsy biographical information, reams have been written on the artist’s life, extrapolating “facts”, such as Leonardo’s supposed vegetarianism, on the scantest of asides. While the Leonardo “facts” may be flimsy, he did leave thousands of pages of notes in his famous backwards writing. These often included sketches of astonishing complexity. They included shopping lists, observations on life and nature, and his own inventions for gruesome instruments of war – for Leonardo lived in interesting times.
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Some of his writings have been lost to time, although most biographers prefer to see biographical gaps as deliberate mysteries. A more genuine approach, quoted by Campbell, is that of poet and philosopher Paul Valéry who, having being commissioned to expound on the artist in 1894, wrote that “greatly bothered by my own totally hidden future and living without any justification in the eyes of my family [and] knowing very little about Leonardo […] I imagined a Leonardo of my own”. If only all biographers were so honest.
Campbell is thorough, and while in some places his dedicated scholarship can be deep going for the casual reader, his section on Da Vinci Worlds would alone make this book worthwhile. He unpicks how commerce and capitalism get between us and our relationships with art, the world and each other, while also exploring the hold that stories currently have over truth, and speculation over science. Returning to Salvator Mundi, he writes on how “the frenzy around the hapless painting has become a blight to art historical scholarship […] and to the principle of a public culture independent of market forces”.
Once again, art becomes subsumed by money and power, and distorted in the process. Millions are poured into Leonardo exhibitions based on projections and graphics, reconstructions and blockbuster hyperbole, and millions more into attempted authentications. Meanwhile, the relatively small sums needed to digitise the artist’s writings go unallocated, because, notes Campbell, these are “lacking in the glamour”. As cultural heritage is treated like a resource to leverage on the international market, we are dealing, underlines Campbell, with “the saturation of reality by capital”. Values shift and value changes. No wonder, when you finally get to that room in the Louvre, the Mona Lisa seems so small.
