There's Something Odd About $100M Da Vinci

By Arden Dier

October 19, 2017

The world's foremost art experts have authenticated "Salvator Mundi," or "savior of the world," as the first painting by Leonardo da Vinci discovered in more than a century. 

Even so, some eyeing the right corner of the painting wonder if the masterwork might actually be a copy. As Walter Isaacson explains in his new biography of da Vinci, the artist appears to have uncharacteristically omitted the distortion of light that would cause Jesus Christ's robes and arm to appear a certain way inside an orb held in his left hand. 

The orb itself is "rendered with beautiful scientific precision," but "solid glass or crystal ... produces magnified, inverted, and reversed images," Isaacson writes, per the Guardian. "Leonardo painted the orb as if it were a hollow glass bubble that does not refract or distort the light passing through it."

Read the full story on Newser.com

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