Two wholly unrelated events in the realm of the visual arts marked this winter season. Impossible not to have noticed one—the sale of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi for nearly half a billion dollars. The oily, slug-like features of the Pantocrator even found their way onto T-shirts, a sure sign of success in the one process elevated to an art form by our consumer society: branding.
The other event, in sharp counterpoint to the da Vinci media circus, was the death of Eugene Victor Thaw. Though hardly front-page news, it nonetheless elicited universal sadness and reflection in those who were fortunate to have known and worked with him. A comprehensive New York Times obituary detailed how the ninety-year-old Thaw, from modest beginnings, became one of the last century’s greatest art dealers and collectors. How he might have judged the Salvator Mundi phenomenon is unrecorded, though his aversion to chasing “names” was well known: an attitude evident from the astonishing diversity, in value and significance, of the material he sold or collected.
Thaw’s aversion to chasing “names” was well known.
Though not a scholar himself, Thaw thoroughly understood the value of academic art history in resolving issues of attribution, provenance, and iconography. He maintained a close personal and working relationship with most leading specialists but, ultimately, his decisions remained true to his remarkably perceptive instinct or “eye”: that god-given gift of intuition that needs to be nurtured, cultivated, and continually tested vis-à-vis the art object itself. That Thaw
