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Summary

This “Point of View” focuses on a painting long believed to have been produced
in Titian’s workshop: his Christ with an Orb ‒ also known as Salvator Mundi
(“Saviour of the World”), a subject Titian painted repeatedly. Titian (c. 1488‒1576),
one of the leading painters in sixteenth-century Venice, is renowned for his unconventional
 approach to conventional compositions: here he discards traditional
 elements of the Salvator Mundi iconography like the cross surmounting the
orb and Christ raising his hand in blessing, reducing the orb to a plain sphere and
dispensing with the blessing. The Hebrew inscription suggests a learned patron
familiar with the ideas of the Christian Kabbalah who belonged to this exclusive
circle of Christians interested in esoteric Judaism, which may help explain the
deviations from the traditional Salvator Mundi iconography. Taking certain Kabbalistic
 currents into account, the painting was probably produced in the 1520s
– until now, most art historians dated it to the 1530s.

We owe this revived interest in the picture to a research project that examined
all the works by Titian in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, during which
this painting was analysed using X-rays and infrared-reflectography. Under this
Christ we discovered a totally different composition – a Virgin and Child – parts
of which are similar to other works by Titian. This “Point of View” presents these
and other findings of the technological analyses that support the attribution of
this painting to Titian.