Record price for Da Vinci work
A 500-YEAR-OLD painting believed to be by Leonardo da Vinci sold for $450.3-million (about R6.4-billion) in New York on Wednesday, blazing a new world record for the most expensive work of art sold at auction, Christie’s said.
Salvator Mundi or Saviour of the World, which depicts Jesus Christ, more than doubled the previous record of $179.4-million (about R2.6-billion) paid for Pablo Picasso’s The Women of Algiers (Version O) in New York in 2015.
Lost for years only to resurface at a regional auction in 2005, it is one of fewer than 20 Da Vinci paintings generally accepted as being from the Renaissance master’s own hand, according to Christie’s.
All the others are held in museum or institutional collections.
Wednesday’s price was all the more extraordinary given that the oil on panel fetched only £45 in 1958, at the time believed to have been a copy, before subsequently disappearing for years.
Dated to around 1500, the work sold after 19 minutes of frenzied bidding – an incongruous Old Master in Christie’s evening postwar and contemporary sale, which attracts the biggest spenders in the high-octane world of international billionaire art collectors.
Christie’s declined to identify the buyer, other than to confirm that bids came from every part of the world.
Whoops and applause rippled through the packed room as bids quickly escalated into uncharted territory, coming down to two head-to-head rivals on the telephone.
So huge was interest that nearly 30 000 people had flocked to see the painting at Christie’s showrooms in Hong Kong, London, San Francisco and New York, the auction house said.
The work was exhibited at The National Gallery in London in 2011, after years of research trying to document its authenticity after it was found, mistaken for a copy, in a US auction in 2005.
Christie’s experts said the painting’s rarity was difficult to overstate, calling it the “Holy Grail” for auction specialists.
Christie’s says it belonged to Charles I, after possibly being made for the French royal family and taken to England by Queen Henrietta Maria when she married the English monarch in 1625.