Salvator Mundi sold at the auction house Christie's in New York on 15 November 2017 for 450.3 million dollars, fees included, the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. Three things drove the price: it was billed as the last known Leonardo da Vinci in private hands, a dealer had marked it up four years earlier, and two bidders would not stop.
Salvator Mundi, Latin for Savior of the World, is a small wooden panel showing Christ with a transparent orb in his hand. It is badly damaged, and some scholars still question whether Leonardo painted all of it. In 1958 a London auction had sold it for 45 pounds, as a copy.
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The record did not start in New York. In 2013, four years before the sale, a Russian collector paid 127.5 million dollars for the same panel in a private deal, and that deal later ended up in court.
I don't think 450 million dollars was ever a verdict on the brushwork. The number came from the people who traded the panel, each step taking place in private rooms, among a handful of dealers, a conservator and a few scholars.
From a 45 pound copy to a Leonardo
Before 1958 the panel belonged to Sir Frederick Cook, a collector who had bought it in 1900 from the dealer Sir Charles Robinson as a work by Luini, a painter from Leonardo's circle. On 25 June 1958 the Cook collection was sold at Sotheby's, the London auction house, and the panel went for those 45 pounds.
It resurfaced in 2005 at a small regional auction in the United States, where it sold for a price believed to be under 10,000 dollars. The buyers were New York dealers, among them Robert Simon and Alexander Parish. The panel carried, apparently, no attribution at all.
They sent it to Dianne Modestini, a conservator in New York. In her own account, she removed the old varnish and the overpaint and found that the background had been repainted brown and that the head was damaged.
Someone had scraped the panel down so hard, probably in the early nineteenth century or before, that very little of the original black background remained.
In November 2011 the National Gallery in London showed the panel in its Leonardo exhibition, after five scholars had examined it. The art historians Martin Kemp and David Alan Brown agreed that it was by Leonardo.
A third, the Italian art historian Maria Teresa Fiorio, felt that the ruined head made a firm conclusion impossible. The exhibition's curator, Luke Syson, was convinced. The glass ball in Christ's left hand was harder to explain.
What You'll Discover
What is wrong with the glass ball.
How a dealer added 40 million dollars.
What happened in nineteen minutes.
Why nobody has seen it since.