Sold for $450m: the oddity that became a Leonardo
Salvator Mundi, a newly rediscovered Leonardo da Vinci, last week shattered the record for the most expensive painting sold at auction, said The Guardian – selling at Christie’s in New York for $400m (plus $50m in fees). The sale generated “a sustained 20 minutes of tense telephone bidding”. When the bids pushed over $200m, surpassing the previous record – the $179m paid for Pablo Picasso’s Women of Algiers (Version 0) in 2015 – the auctioneer Jussi Pylkkänen said: “Historic moment, we’ll wait.” Then the bidding resumed, jumping sometimes tens of millions of dollars at a time. The “staggering price” sparked a hunt for the buyer, said Josh Spero in the FT. But so far, the new owner’s identity remains as “inscrutable” as the Mona Lisa’s smile. Some experts thought a Chinese buyer was most likely. Others suggested a Gulf royal or a tech billionaire.
The painting has only recently been attributed to Leonardo, said Maurice Howard on The Conversation. For many years it was thought to be the work of a follower. Once owned by Charles I, it was sold for £45 at Sotheby’s in London in 1958 and turned up in an estate sale in New Orleans in 2005, when it was bought by two art dealers for less than $10,000. After extensive restoration, it was widely accepted as a Leonardo by 2011, when it was included in the National Gallery’s exhibition of the artist’s work. Soon after, a Russian collector, Dmitry Rybolovlev, bought it for $127.5m.
“I’ve looked at art for almost 50 years and one look at this painting tells me it’s no Leonardo,” said Jerry Saltz in New York magazine. It is “absolutely dead. Its surface is inert, lurid, scrubbed over, and repainted so many times that it looks simultaneously new and old.” Christie’s marketed it brilliantly as “the male Mona Lisa”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. But this “sci-fi Christ” resembles that painting only in that it shows “the upper half of a figure in a frame”. The sole thing the sale proves is that “we live in a mad world in which obscenely rich people waste obscene amounts of money on the obscene acquisition of trophy art”.