The painting 'Salvator Mundi' was sold on Wednesday night for world-shattering record of $450.3 million at Christie's auction house.
- Nov 16, 2017
AceShowbiz - One of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings just broke the world record for any art sold at auction or privately. The painting called "Salvator Mundi", Italian for "Savior of the World", was sold for $450.3 million at Christie's auction house on Wednesday night, November 15. The buyer was not immediately disclosed.
The highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction had been $179.4 million for Pablo Picasso's "Women of Algiers (Version O)", which was also sold at Christie's in New York in May 2015. Meanwhile, the highest known sale price for any artwork was previously held by Willem de Kooning's "Interchange", which was sold privately for $300 million in September 2015 by the David Geffen Foundation to hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin.
"Salvator Mundi" is a 26-inch-tall painting depicting Christ dressed in Renaissance-style robes, with his right hand raised in blessing as his left hand holds a crystal sphere. The painting dates from around 1500.
"This was a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality," said Todd Levin, a New York art adviser. Christie's marketing campaign played a big role in the enthusiasm shown to the painting as the auction house went so far as to enlist an outside agency to advertise the work. Christie's called the artwork "the Last da Vinci," for being the only known painting by the Renaissance master still in a private collection (some 15 others are in museums).
"Salvator Mundi" was once owned by King Charles I of England and it disappeared from view until 1900, when it resurfaced and was acquired by a British collector. The painting was sold again in 1958 and then acquired in 2005, badly damaged and partly painted-over, by a consortium of art dealers who paid less than $10,000. The art dealers restored the painting and documented its authenticity as a work by Leonardo.
While there were questions as to how much the painting had been executed in part by studio assistants and whether Leonardo had actually made the work himself, or how much of the canvas had been repainted and restored, 27,000 people had lined up at pre-auction viewings in Hong Kong, London, San Francisco and New York to glimpse the painting.
"There is extraordinary consensus it is by Leonardo," said Nicholas Hall, the former co-chairman of old master paintings at Christie's, who now runs his own Manhattan gallery. "This is the most important old master painting to have been sold at auction in my lifetime."
