Ferrari first

The painting’s rarity is difficult to overstate. For years it was presumed to have been destroyed. In 1958, it fetched US$60 and disappeared again for decades, emerging only in 2005 when it was purchased from a US estate. It was long believed to have been a copy, be- Christie’s has sought to emphasise Da Vinci’s inestimable contribution to art history by hanging Salvator Mundi next to Andy Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers - which depicts Da Vinci’s The Last Supper 60 times over, also on sale with a US$50mn estimate.

Pablo Picasso holds the world record for the most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction. His The Women of Algiers (Ver- sion O) fetched US$179.4mn at Christie’s in New York in 2015.

Other highlights being offered by the auction house are Contraste de Formes, a 1913 Fernand Leger valued at US$65mn and Laboureur dans un Champ by Van Gogh, painted from the window of a French asylum in 1889 valued at US$50mn.

Sotheby’s, whose May sales languished behind Christie’s, says it has more than 60 works making their auction debuts this week.

Chief among them is Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of George Dyer, valued at US$35-45mn, and which it says is appearing in public for the first time in 50 years. Painted in 1966 during his relationship with Dyer, two other such triptychs are in museums and two others have been offered at auction in recent years.