The $450m QUESTION: What HAS happened to the most expensive painting in the world?
It was set to be the star of a dazzling new ‘Louvre in the desert’, but now this da Vinci has vanished... and experts now doubt it’s even by Leonardo
supposedly painted Salvator Mundi after the Mona Lisa and before his painting of St John,’ says Daley. ‘But it doesn’t have the quality of either, and both the Mona Lisa and St John are much more cracked.
‘Just look at the painting of Christ’s ringlets in Salvator Mundi. It’s so much more mechanical than in the Mona Lisa. St John’s hair is much more substantial, lustrous and sensuous than Christ’s ringlets.’
Further doubts have been cast on the skill of the hand that painted the glass orb in Christ’s palm. Glass usually refracts, or bends, light, but in the Salvator Mundi picture there is little ‘bending’, which would be illustrated by distortion of what is behind the orb — which, given that Leonardo was also a scientist and engineer, is unusual.
So is the painting now believed to be in Abu Dhabi a different and inferior version of a Leonardo original? There are in fact some 20 copies of the Salvator Mundi in existence by various artists.
There’s a problem, too, with the picture’s provenance. The original painting passed from King Louis XII by descent to Queen Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669), wife of Charles I. After Charles I was executed in 1649, the painting was sold in 1651, before being retrieved by his son, Charles II, in 1660.
It was then removed from James II’s collection by the Countess of Dorchester, and passed through the hands of several aristocratic owners, including Sir Charles Sheffield, 1st Baronet, an ancestor of Samantha Cameron. He sold it in 1763 to Sir Charles Robinson for a mere £2.10.
But proper documentation only goes back as far as 1900, when it was sold to a British collector, Sir Francis Cook. It was Cook’s descendant, also Sir Francis Cook, who sold the picture for £45 in 1958.
And so we are left in art world limbo. A picture with flashes of genius that has knocked around the palaces of Europe and British country houses for years, and has had paint added to it, removed and once more added, before undergoing restoration.
Maybe, just maybe, all of that did hide the greatest hand of all at work. The question now is whether the two Louvres, in Paris and Abu Dhabi, will dare to put the ‘Dodgy’ Leonardo on show and let the public make up their own minds.