LEONAR-DOUGH
Portrait by da Vinci sold for €50 in 1958 goes for €382million
A PORTRAIT by Leonardo Da Vinci has become the most expensive artwork ever sold, after fetching €382million at auction.
Salvator Mundi, which was once owned by King Charles I, is one of less than 20 remaining paintings by the Italian master.
In 1958 it was sold for just €50 after being lost for decades.
This time it went to an anonymous buyer after 19 minutes of bidding at Christie’s in New York on Wednesday. It is the last remaining privately owned Da Vinci painting.
The colossal price tag came despite some experts questioning the piece’s authenticity and condition.
It was sold by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who bought it in 2013 for €108million in a private sale.
Four telephone bidders and one in the packed auction room battled it out for the masterpiece, which had a guaranteed presale bid of at least €85million.
Once bidding reached €254million, the auctioneer, Jussi Pylkkanen, asked: “Are we all done? Maybe not.” He paused, saying: “It’s a historic moment. We’ll wait.”
The bids continued to come in and he finally brought the hammer down to applause from the onlookers.
Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti said of the bidder: “I cannot say if he or she will want to be public.” The price dwarfs the previous record, for Willem de Kooning’s 1955 work Interchange, which went for €254million in a private sale in 2015.
Salvator Mundi, which means Saviour of the World, shows Christ in a blue robe holding an orb, which represents the Earth. The 26in painting dates from around 1500. After being owned by Charles I in the early 17th century, the piece was auctioned in 1763 before disappearing in 1900.
It was found abandoned in a home in London in 1940. By 1958 its origins had become so unclear that it was sold for €50 to a collector from Louisiana.
In 2005 a consortium of art dealers bought it, badly damaged and partly painted over, for around €8,500. They restored it and authenticated it as a work by Da Vinci.
Christie’s took Salvator Mundi on a presale tour, with around 27,000 people viewing it at events across the globe. Artist Leonardo da Vinci