Sold for $450m – is this the Da Vinci con job?

Sold for £45 by an English baronet 60 years ago, it’s now gone under the hammer for $450m. One problem: some experts say it’s not a Leonardo at all ...

NEARLY 60 years ago, a fine collection of Old Masters was put on sale in London by the auction house Sotheby’s. The works were from the Cook Collection, assembled by the forebears of the aristocratic seller, Sir Francis Cook, a baronet and himself an accomplished painter.

The 136 works went under the hammer for a total of £64,668 — worth some £1.4 million (€1.56million) today. The star of the show was a painting by Dutch artist Caspar Netscher, which sold for the modern equivalent of around £120,000.

One work that did not stir any excitement that Wednesday in June 1958 was lot 40 — a small portrait of Christ called Salvator Mundi, or ‘Saviour of the World’.

Painted in oil on a wooden board measuring 18 by 26 inches, the portrait shows its subject gazing dreamily at the viewer, his right hand raised in benediction, while his left clutches a crystal orb.

Sotheby’s said the artist was Italian painter Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, who worked in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

It sold for just £45 — the equivalent today of about £925 (€1,000). The buyer was a man called ‘Kuntz’, of whom little is known, and the painting appears to have made its way across the Atlantic.

On Wednesday night in New York, it was auctioned again, this time by Sotheby’s rivals, Christie’s.

It sold for a lot more than £45. In fact, with fees, the painting went for a staggering $450.3 million, or €480million, which means its value has multiplied by over 7.5million times since 1958. It was secured by an unknown buyer, via phone, at Christie’s auction room in Manhattan in a tense bidding contest that lasted 19 minutes.

As a result, the Salvator Mundi now has the honour of being the most expensive painting ever sold. This single rectangle of wood and paint is worth about the same as the personal fortune of Queen Elizabeth. The reason for that extraordinary price — outstripping the previous record holder, by expressionist Willem de Kooning, by over $150million (€127million) — is simple. The piece is no longer thought to be by the relatively obscure Boltraffio. It is now considered to be by a man seen as the greatest artist of all time — Leonardo da Vinci.

While the cleaners at Christie’s sweep up the champagne corks, many in the art world are asking questions about a painting worth almost $1million per square inch.

Who has bought the picture? How can he or she be sure they’ve bought a genuine Leonardo? What about the painting’s history? And what does the sale tell us about the balance of power in the art market?

We can be sure the Salvator Mundi has not been acquired by a gallery — few, if any, can afford to spend the best part of half a billion dollars on a single work. So it remains the only Leonardo in private hands.

THE likelihood is that it has gone to an individual — perhaps a Russian, Chinese or Arab billionaire looking for the ultimate decorative bauble to hang in a stateroom, or on a superyacht.

One likely candidate who we know has bought the painting is Liu Yiqian, a Chinese former cabbie turned billionaire investor, who paid $170.4million with fees for a Modigliani painting in 2015. Judging by a posting he made on social media, it looks as if he may have been an under-bidder.

If the buyer is a mystery, so, too, are the precise origins of the painting, which, disturbingly, some believe not to be a Leonardo, or at best, only partly by him.

Dr Carmen Bambach, a specialist in Italian Renaissance art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, wrote in 2012: ‘Having studied and followed the picture during its conservation treatment, and seeing it in context in [the London National Gallery’s 2011 Leonardo] exhibition, much of the original surface may be by Boltraffio, but with passages done by Leonardo himself.’

‘I’m not a believer that this is a real Leonardo,’ says Professor Charles Hope, an expert on Renaissance painting. ‘I think it’s exceptionally boring, and when you see it hanging next to some real Leonardos, it doesn’t look good.

‘I wouldn’t want to hang it on my wall! Frankly, I think the claim that it’s a Leonardo is ridiculous. Nobody in their right mind would think it was. The world is filled with near-Leonardos.’

More troubling still, there is a lack of contemporary evidence that Leonardo was responsible for Salvator Mundi.

‘There is no record Leonardo ever painted it,’ says artist Michael Daley, of ArtWatch UK, which campaigns to protect the integrity of works of art. ‘You have to remember he was very famous, and there are lots of records of what he did. There is nothing on this painting.’

Despite such doubts, experts at Christie’s are adamant the painting is the real thing. Among them is Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at Oxford University, who strongly defends its authenticity.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday: ‘There have been a few self-publicising critics who have jumped on the bandwagon and said, “It can’t be Leonardo”, but almost all of the major Leonardo scholars — to whom it was shown systematically before it was shown in the National Gallery [in 2011] — accept that it is a Leonardo.’

When asked whether he was sure the painting was a Leonardo, Professor Kemp replied: ‘It speaks of Leonardo throughout...it’s got that extraordinary presence that Leonardo has.’

So how did the painting turn from being thought of as a