Leonardo Da Vinci portrait of Jesus Christ ‘Salvator Mundi’ sells for $450,000,000

A painting of Jesus Christ by Leonardo da Vinci has sold for a record breaking $450.3million (£341million). The Salvator Mundi, Italian for Savior of the World, went under the hammer at Christie’s and went for more than double the previous record. What’s perhaps most astonishing is that in 1958 it was attributed to a different artist and sold at Sotheby’s for the paltry some of £45 (about £800 in today’s money) It is one of fewer than 20 paintings by Leonardo known to exist and the only one in private hands.
The highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction had been $179.4 million (£136 million), for Pablo Picasso’s painting Women of Algiers (Version O) in May 2015, also at Christie’s in New York. The highest known sale price for any artwork had been $300 million (£227 million), for Willem de Kooning’s painting Interchange, sold privately in September 2015 by the David Geffen Foundation to hedge fund manager Kenneth C Griffin. A backer of the Salvator Mundi auction had guaranteed a bid of at least $100 million (£75 million), the opening bid of the auction, which ran for 19 minutes. The price hit $300 million  about halfway through the bidding.

The 26-inch-tall Leonardo painting dates from around 1500 and shows Christ dressed in Renaissance-style robes, his right hand raised in blessing as his left hand holds a crystal sphere. Its path from Leonardo’s workshop to the auction block at Christie’s was not smooth. 

Once owned by King Charles I of England, it disappeared from view until 1900, when it resurfaced and was acquired by a British collector. At that time it was attributed to a Leonardo disciple, rather than to the master himself. The painting was sold again in 1958 and then was acquired in 2005, badly damaged and partly painted-over, by a consortium of art dealers who paid less than $10,000 (£7,600).

The art dealers restored the painting and documented its authenticity as a work by Leonardo. The painting was sold on Wednesday by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who bought it in 2013 for $127.5 million (£96.7 million) in a private sale that became the subject of a continuing lawsuit.

Christie’s said most scholars agree that the painting is by Leonardo, though some critics have questioned the attribution and some say the extensive restoration muddies the work’s authorship. Christie’s capitalised on the public’s interest in Leonardo, considered one of the greatest artists of all time, with a media campaign that labelled the painting The Last Da Vinci. The work was exhibited in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London and New York before the sale. 

In New York, where no museum owns a Leonardo, art lovers lined up outside Christie’s Rockefeller Centre headquarters on Tuesday to view Salvator Mundi. Svetla Nikolova, who is from Bulgaria but lives in New York, called the painting ‘spectacular’. ‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,’ she said. ‘It should be seen. It’s wonderful it’s in New York. I’m so lucky to be in New York at this time.’