Leonardo da Vinci Painting ‘Salvator Mundi’ Smashes Records With $450.3 Million Sale
The rediscovered portrait of Jesus Christ becomes most expensive work of art ever sold
Leonardo da Vinci’s rediscovered portrait of Jesus Christ sold at auction for $450.3 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold.
Christie’s auction house didn’t identify the winning bidder of the 500-year-old painting, “Salvator Mundi,” or “Savior of the World.”
The estimate for the work was around $100 million. But before Wednesday night’s sale in New York, dealers had wagered the image of an enigmatic Christ dressed in a blue robe and holding a crystal orb could sell for far more—given that da Vinci is a household name, fewer than 20 of his paintings survive and this is the last one deemed by him in private hands.
The price more than doubled the $179.4 million spent two years ago for Pablo Picasso’s 1955 “Women of Algiers (Version O),” as well as an earlier record of $170.4 million for Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917-18 “Reclining Nude.” In private sales, paintings by Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin have commanded as much as $250 million and $300 million, respectively.
Alex Rotter, chairman of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department, fielded the winning telephone bid after a 19-minute bidding war with at least five rivals in which bids were initially lobbed in $10 million increments. Billionaire collectors in the saleroom watched with their cellphone cameras held aloft as though they were at a rock concert.
“I’ve been going to auctions for decades, and I’ve never heard that room let out a collective gasp like they did when it sold,” said Joanne Heyler, founding director of the Broad, a Los Angeles museum. “It’s hard for me to even comprehend that level of bidding.”
Ms. Heyler and her boss, billionaire Eli Broad, were among a slew of heavyweight collectors in the room alongside Stefan Edlis, Len Riggio, Andrew Saul, Eugenio López and J. Tomilson Hill. None of them openly bid on the da Vinci.
The da Vinci boosted Christie’s sale total to $786 million, making it the auction industry’s second-highest sale total following an $853 million sale of contemporary art held at the house three years ago.
The sale also included Andy Warhol’s $60.9 million “Sixty Last Suppers,” a homage to another da Vinci masterpiece, over the Warhol’s $50 million estimate. Five other pieces in the sale sold for over $20 million, including examples by Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline, and records were also broken for artists like Kerry James Marshall and Lee Krasner.
Christie’s went to extraordinary lengths to position the da Vinci auction as a blockbuster event on par with Sotheby’s sale in 2012 of Edvard Munch’s “Scream” for nearly $120 million. It exhibited the painting around the world, with stops in Hong Kong, London and San Francisco. At least 27,000 people world-wide turned up to get a glimpse, the house said.
Once the painting arrived at Christie’s Rockefeller Center headquarters in New York, workers hung it at the end of a long, dimly lit gallery that had been painted black, creating a shrine effect. Christie’s produced a short film showing celebrities like actor Leonardo DiCaprio and rocker Patti Smith staring at the work, mouths agape.
“Salvator Mundi” isn’t instantly recognizable, like da Vinci’s “Last Supper” or “Mona Lisa.” This painting was considered a plum for its rarity. Auction records show only a trio of da Vinci’s 2,500 drawings have ever even come up for sale—the highest fetched $11.4 million in 2001—and no authenticated paintings have entered the market in at least a century.
The sale reflects the trophy-hunting atmosphere dominating the international art market lately, as billionaires from China, Qatar and beyond compete for a handful of masterpieces on the block. Bragging rights are at stake, but the collective bidding also has helped reset price levels for dozens of major artists.
It helps that da Vinci is hailed as a hero of the Renaissance, a period in Europe when artists experimented with optical illusion and anatomical dissection to render their subjects lifelike and landscapes infinite.
In this work, da Vinci depicts Christ in flowing robes, his left hand cupping a crystal orb while his right is raised in blessing. The figure’s brown ringlets fall around his shoulders, framing a long face and dimpled chin.
Da Vinci painted the portrait around 1500, and it bounced among European royals for hundreds of years before shoddy cleaning efforts and overpainting rendered it almost unrecognizable.
When it surfaced in 1958 at Sotheby’s, it sold as a “school of da Vinci” work for only £45 (about $125 at the time). But in 2005 a group of Old Master dealers and a conservator took a closer look and campaigned for its reauthentication. Ultimately, they won validation from museums and da Vinci scholars.
“Salvator Mundi” comes from the collection of Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian fertilizer billionaire.
Walking out of Christie’s after Wednesday’s sale, art lawyer Thomas Danziger said he felt it was “fitting” for a da Vinci to take top auction honors in this “superheated” art market, adding: “The only thing to be said for the sale price is ‘Wow.’ ”