THE LAST DA VINCI'S ROAD TO NY
From a royal execution and centuries of neglect to auction sensation
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T was there when its thenowner, King Charles I, was beheaded in 1649.
It was hanging in Buckingham Palace back when it was still called Buckingham House in 1703.
It survived the Nazis’ 1940 London Blitz when its keepers abandoned it in their basement.
By 1958, its origins had become so lost in time that it was sold for a paltry $90 to a collector from Louisiana.
The long, strange journey of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterwork “Salvator Mundi” takes its next turn Wednesday at Christie’s in Rockefeller Center, where it will go under the hammer for a hoped-for $100 million.
It is the first Leonardo to emerge in nearly a century, and one of just 16 surviving paintings by the Italian Renaissance polymath.
“Salvator Mundi” — which translates to “Savior of the World” and depicts Jesus Christ holding an Earth-like glass orb — was nearly forgotten forever during its 500-year journey from Italy to the Big Apple.
“We came pretty close to losing it,” Alan Wintermute, a Christie’s vice president and specialist in Old Master paintings, told The Post. “It’s so rare that anything this important reappears in the way it has, that you can’t help but be excited.”
Battered by time and marred by ham-handed attempts to restore it, the so-called “Last da Vinci” was, for centuries, thought to be no more than a student’s copy of the original.
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EONARDO is believed to have produced the work — painted in particularly expensive oil pigments on a walnut panel — sometime around 1500, most likely for then-King of France Louis XII, according to Dr. Robert Simon of Robert Simon Fine Art, who helped authenticate the masterpiece.
Simon called the French provenance “speculation, but informed speculation,” adding that the earliest written record of its ownership goes back to King Charles I of England 100 years after the work was painted.
“It appears in an inventory after he’s executed,” Simon explained. “At that point, it’s described as being owned by the queen in Greenwich.”
Charles’ queen, Henrietta Maria of France, most likely in- herited the painting and brought it with her to England as part of her dowry when she married him in 1625, Wintermute said, explaining that it likely hung in her private bedchamber.
But it was not recorded until 1949, when the newly formed Commonwealth took stock of Charles I’s assets and began divvying them up among the Crown’s many creditors.
“When he’s executed, he leaves enormous debt, and all his personal property is recorded quite precisely,” Wintermute said.
The painting went to mason John Stone, but he was forced to return it after a few years.
“When the monarchy was restored 10 years later, under threat of death, everyone who had something from the Crown was required to return it,” Simon noted.
And so King Charles II of England regained his parents’ painting in 1660, later passing it to his brother and successor, King James II.
But James II had no legitimate heirs, which frustrated historians’ attempts to track the painting after his death, according to Wintermute.
Likely, James II’s illegitimate daughter, Catherine, inherited the Leonardo, because it wound up in the collection of her husband, John Sheffield, duke of Buckingham — who famously built Buckingham Palace.
And before it got its palatial moniker, Buckingham House — as it was known when first erected in 1703 — was home to the “Salvator Mundi,” according to Wintermute.
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T 200 years old, the painting had likely begun to show its age, and unsophisticated restorationists began filling in cracks in the wood with putty and attempting to touch up the masterwork.
“It may have had heavy overpaint on it even in that time,” Wintermute said of its days hanging in the future epicenter of British monarchy.
But it was still recognizable as a Leonardo in 1763, when Sheffield’s son, Sir Charles Herbert Sheffield, sold it as “L. Da. Vinci A head of our Saviour.”
It went for the equivalent of about $500 in today’s money.
The painting disappeared for 150 years, and when it reemerged, it was nearly unrecognizable due to all the maladroit touch-ups.
The work resurfaced in 1900, when British collector Sir Francis Cook bought the painting, then attributed to Leonardo’ s student Bernardino Luini, from Sir John Charles Robinson.
It passed through four generations of the Cook family, who misidentified it as having been done by Leonardo acolyte Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, according to Christie’s.
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HEN World War II erupted, and German bombers thundered over London, the Cooks evacuated. They left the painting behind thinking it had little value. “All the important pictures were evacuated to Wales,” Simon said. “The house was bombed and it survived. It was completely luck that this painting survived.” Then in 1958, four generations after his family acquired it, Sir Francis Ferdinand Maurice Cook sold the painting through Sotheby’s as a “Boltraffio” for the equivalent of $90 to a private collector from Louisiana. It remained there until New York art collector Alex Parish picked up the piece on behalf of an art consortium for $10,000 in a 2005 estate sale. “I think it was so cheap and they thought that, even if it was a Leonardo copy, it would be worth substantially more than they paid for it,” Wintermute said. That’s when things got really interesting, though. The group hired NYU conservator Dianne Dwyer Modestini in 2007 to scrape off “crude layers of old repainting,” Wintermute said. Modestini and Simon spent a year and a half carefully removing overpaint and analyzing the original by using infrared imagery to peer beneath each layer and find earlier drafts that clearly matched Leonardo’s method of working.
A palm print left when Leonardo purposefully smudged the area above Jesus’s left eyebrow is another giveaway — that was the painter’s technique for softening shadowed areas, Simon said.
And X-ray imaging showed the many layers of “thin, almost-liquid glaze” he used to achieve a smoky effect around Christ’s features, according to Wintermute.
The pigment used in Jesus’ cloak, however, was not made from the azurite Leonardo commonly used for his blues. Instead, the cloth is rendered in ultramarine from the rare stone lapis lazuli, which came exclusively from Afghanistan, Simon said.
By the time London’s National Gallery exhibited the painting as a Leonardo, a dozen leading researchers there, along with those from the Met, the University of Florence and the National Gallery of Art in Washington had agreed it was genuine.
The National Gallery exhibited the painting with full attribution to Leonardo in 2011, “probably the first time it had been exhibited ever to the public,” Wintermute said.
Two years later, Parish and crew sold it to Swiss dealer Yves Bouvier for $80 million — 8,000 times what they had paid for it.
Bouvier cashed in even faster, selling it that year for $127 million to Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev. He is currently suing Bouvier for allegedly overcharging him for that and other works.
The Russian is selling the work through Christie’s at a starting bid of $100 million.
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OT everyone is sold. Critics say the painting’s hazy pedigree and high level of retouching make it practically worthless.
“There’s so little of Leonardo there. From a commercial standpoint, I don’t think it has any value. I wouldn’t buy it at any price,” gallerist Richard Feigen told The Post, adding when pressed, “Well, $10 I could do.”
Wintermute chalked any negative reactions up to jealousy.
“I think haters are gonna hate. It’s honestly almost entirely ignorant gossip,” Wintermute said. “It’s going to sell for a lot of money, and that, I think, does bring out the competitive instincts in some members of the art community.”