Record £341 m is paid for Da Vinci once sold for £45
LEONARDO da Vinci’s painting of Christ The Saviour Of The World has become the most expensive artwork in history, selling for an eye-watering £341million.
The price was a spectacular 7,577,777 times more than the £45 it sold for just 59 years ago when it was thought to be by a pupil of the artist.
The ethereal portrait of Christ is one of fewer than 20 Da Vinci oil paintings still in existence and is the only work by the Italian master thought to be in private hands.
Wednesday night’s auction in New York began at $100million before a bidding contest via telephone began that lasted for almost 20 minutes.
At the end it went to an unidentified buyer who bid precisely $400million – $450.3million (£341million) once the auction fees are added.
As the gavel was thumped down confirming the sale, there were astonished gasps followed immediately by applause.
The sum is more than twice the previous auction record set by Pablo Picasso’s painting Women Of Algiers which sold for £135million in May 2015.
Dr Tim Hunter, an expert in Old Masters, described the Da Vinci as “the most important discovery in the 21st century”.
He said: “Records get broken from time to time but not in this way. Da Vinci painted less than 20 oil paintings and many are unfinished so it’s incredibly rare and we love that in art.”
Commissioned by Louis XII of France in 1506, The Saviour Of The World came to England in the reign of Charles I, eventually ending up in the collection of baronet Sir Francis Cook. In 1958 it was sold in London by Sotheby’s for £45 after it was wrongly attributed to a student of Da Vinci. A consortium led by Robert Simon Fine Art of New York is then thought to have acquired the painting at a clearance sale in 2004 for around £7,500. Heavily overpainted, it had become a dark and gloomy image after years of neglect. But after it was cleaned up, experts ruled it had been painted not by a pupil but the master himself, Da Vinci. Paris-based dealer Yves Bouvier then purchased the work at a Sotheby’s private sale for £58million in 2013.
Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, 50, subsequently acquired it for £96million.
Rybolovlev has accused Bouvier of cheating him out of $1billion during art transactions.
The record sale price for The Saviour Of The World might now placate him.
It is not known where the painting will be kept or whether it will be on public display.
AS investments go, it’s hard to beat making a profit of £245million in just four years. Congratulations to the new owner of Da Vinci’s Saviour Of The World and even bigger congrats to the seller.
Art for art’s sake, of course.