Rare Leonardo da Vinci painting sells for $450 million at auction

Salvator Mundi, the long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting of Jesus Christ commissioned by King Louis XII of France more than 500 years ago, has sold at Christie’s in New York for $450.3m, including auction house premium, shattering the world record for any work of art sold at auction.

The work had carried a guarantee understood to be around $100 million, so it was a certainty to sell, but the bidding blew past that number quickly and kept going over the course of 19 minutes.

The painting shows Christ with one hand raised, the other holding a glass sphere. Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519 and there are fewer than 20 of his paintings in existence. In 1958 it was sold at auction in London for a mere £45.
By then the painting was generally reckoned to be the work of a follower of Leonardo and not the work of Leonardo himself.
It apparently was part of King Charles I of England's collection in the 1600s and got lost, but was "rediscovered" in 2005.

Dr Tim Hunter, who is an expert in Old Master and 19th Century art, told the BBC the painting is "the most important discovery in the 21st Century". "It completely smashes the record for the last Old Masters painting to sell – Van Gogh's Sunflowers in 1988. Records get broken from time to time but not in this way. "Da Vinci painted less than 20 oil paintings and many are unfinished so it's incredibly rare and we love that in art."

Before the auction it was owned by Russian billionaire collector Dmitry E Rybolovlev, 50, a Russian fertiliser oligarch who has been at the center of of an art-world scandal involving claims that a Paris-based dealer, Yves Bouvier, cheated the collector out of as much as $1bn on sales of 38 artworks, including the Leonardo.

The sale of Salvator Mundi, which was painted around 1500 and presumed lost until early this century, was Rybolovlev’s largest to date. The collector acquired it from Bouvier for $127m, who had in turn acquired it from Sotheby’s in a private sale in 2013 for about $50m less.

Bouvier’s mark-up led to Rybolovlev’s criminal complaint in a Monégasque court, alleging a scheme for overcharging him. The case led to the resignation of Monaco’s then justice minister, Philippe Narmino. Rybolovlev’s spokesman Brian Cattell told the Wall Street Journal the family hoped the sale “will finally bring to an end a very painful chapter”.