THE PICTURE THAT HAVE SPLIT EXPERTS ON ITS AUTHENTICITY

Boltraffio in the Fifties to a Leonardo today? The transformation took place shortly after 2005, when New York art dealer Alexander Parish bought it for $10,000 at an American estate sale.

It was heavily cracked and badly over-painted, but Parish and a consortium paid for its restoration and had it authenticated as a Leonardo by a number of experts.

Two years later, Parish and his colleagues sold the Salvator Mundi to Swiss businessman and art dealer Yves Bouvier for a reported $75-80million. Just a few months later, Bouvier sold it for $127.5million to Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who made much of his fortune out of potash production.

In 2014, Mr Rybolovlev was ordered by a court to pay $4.5billion to his ex-wife, which was thought to be the most expensive divorce settlement in history. That may be why Mr Rybolovlev sold the painting on Wednesday night. He picked the right auction house: Christie’s exhibited the work in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London and New York to tempt buyers.

‘This was a thumping, epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality,’ Todd Levin, a New York art adviser, told the New York Times. In a sense, whether the painting is a Leonardo or not may not matter.

The art world is now so aggressively commercial that paintings are bought and sold merely as speculative gambles by billionaires.

The fact that Paris’s venerable Louvre museum is opening a sibling gallery in Abu Dhabi indicates the way European culture is being appropriated and repackaged. The chances are the mystery buyer only cares about the Salvator Mundi if it can turn a profit.

So long as the likes of Christie’s are happy to tout the painting as a Leonardo, they can sleep easy knowing that they should be able to sell those 468 square inches in a few years for a handsome profit.

Who knows? Perhaps the Saviour of the World will be the world’s first billion-dollar painting.