This portrait was painted in Florence from 1474 to 1478. All episodes of the Art Bust podcast are available now. But now the Salvator Mundi has become the poster boy for the volatile mix of money, power and geopolitics that defines the art world today. A scene from Saviour for Sale, a second documentary about the Salvator Mundi, by French journalist Antoine Vitkine (Credit: Zadig Productions). In fact, it was also noted in the Codexs 1994 auction catalogue written by late da Vinci scholar Carlo Pedretti, that the Mona Lisa is, "indeed a visual synthesis of Leonardo's scientific knowledge as summed up in the Codex.". He was known to be fastidious in personal care, keeping a beard neat and trim in later age, and to dress in colorful clothing in styles that dismissed current customs. The writings in his notebooks suggest that he may have been a vegetarian, and there is also some speculation that he may have been gay. Renaissance artist, inventor, polymath, musician, and architect who painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and drew the iconic Vitruvian Man. But just weeks before the auction happened, a devastating earthquake struck Italy and the government ended up skipping the sale. The two documentaries arrive at a time when films, podcasts and pop culture itself seem fascinated by art crimes, mysteries and forgeries. This painting depicted St. Anne, her daughter the Virgin Mary, and the infant Jesus. Inside besides da Vinci's writings, there are also about 360 drawings and diagrams throughout the manuscript. They arrive in the wake of Ben Lewis's high-profile 2019 book, The Last Leonardo, and dozens of articles. The New York Times confirmed rumours that the Louvre wouldn't accede to bin Salman's demand that his painting be displayed in the same room as the Mona Lisa, giving it near-equal status. A Malevich Suprematist Composition sold for $85.8 million at Christies, breaking the record for a work of Russian art. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. TINDERA: I'm Michela Tindera, and this is Priceless. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. TINDERA: Hammer is also the great-grandfather of Hollywood actor Armie Hammer. Twenty-eight million dollars, then. Art restorer Dianne Modestini in a scene from The Lost Leonardo, one of two new documentaries about the Salvator Mundi (Credit: Sony Pictures Classics/Entertainment Pictures). This stands as the most expensive painting by a living artist. When Leonardo was about 15, his father, who enjoyed a high reputation in the Florentine community, apprenticed him to artist Andrea del Verrocchio. Bin Salman himself visited President Emmanuel Macron in Paris while the loan was dangling in the balance. MICHELA TINDERA: So its 1994, and were listening to an auction in a salesroom at Christie's in Manhattan. And so I think it's, you know, not so much, Let's look at it and see what would happen if we took scissors to it and divided it up. But just to say, Here we have something of such significance, partly because it has survived 500 years without, you know, being destroyed.. A Leonardo, even one as dulled as this, could prove an amusing conversation piece. So it doesn't really look like a notebook anymore. Billionaires just live in a different world. (Swiss authorities investigated him for defrauding Rybolovlev over several artworks, but this year closed the case without charging him.) And that's the number we're using to value it. And it was a challenge. So, I think we could legitimately set the floor at that price. At $28 million it's away from the room now and on the telephone at $28 million. ARCHIVAL CLIP OF ARMAND HAMMER: I guess I'm wearing a great many hats. But we ended up contacting others who we thought might know the work well, too. A tempera and oil mural on plaster, "The Last Supper" was created for the refectory . Before this, the highest absolute price paid for a painting was 8.1 million (20.4 million in 2021 currency) paid by the J. Paul Getty Museum for Andrea Mantegna's Adoration of the Magi at Christie's in London on 18 April 1985. Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol are the best-represented artists in the list. And that was the process. During his second period in Florence (1500-1508), he painted his most famous work, the Mona Lisa (ca. And flipping through this copy, I have to say, I cant read a word of this. In The Lost Leonardo, Evan Beard, a Bank of America executive who deals with art as investment, talks about the common buyers' motive of using artworks as collateral for other financial manoeuvres. The Nahmad family bought Suprematist Composition in 2008 at Sotheby's, New York, for $60,002,500 ($76million in 2021 dollars) from the heirs of Kazimir Malevich. 7 | The Macklowe Collection | | Sotheby", "Sale Offers a Reason for Relief at Sotheby's", "Ming Dynasty Scroll Sells for Record $77 Million at Auction", The Collection of Eleanore and Daniel Saidenberg, Francis Bacon (19091992) Portrait of George Dyer Talking, Francis Bacon Work Sells for $70 Million at Christies Auction, "sGallery: A Gauguin and a van Gogh Change Hands", Andy Warhol's "Four Marlons" auction results, "Magritte 'Masterpiece' Sells for Record-Breaking $79.8 M. During Sotheby's Sale", "China auction sees Qi Baishi painting sell for $65m", "The buyer of 422.5 Million Qi Baishi painting revealed", "What Are The Top 10 Al-Thani Family Art Acquisitions? 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 . The abrupt $20m and $30m jumps in price were indeed unusual, Cerutti confirmed. TINDERA: Gates is up against a group from a bank in Milan thats sitting in the front of the Christie's salesroom. Twenty-eight million. The US art critic Jerry Saltz rails in The Lost Leonardo that "it's not even a good painting", much less a great Leonardo, while true believers gush that seeing it in person is a transcendent experience. The general attitude toward art crime, he says, used to be shrugged off as "it's billionaires spending money, crooking each other", but today there is a realisation that "no, you can't loot that country's entire cultural heritage". And how does that help us come up with a number for today? Alison Cole, editor of The Art Newspaper, has written extensively about the painting and saw it at the National Gallery. She spent years restoring the painting, and passionately defends its authenticity in precise detail, pointing out the pentimento under Christ's thumb or a curve of his mouth that could only be Leonardo's. Author of. The final winning bid? CBS CLIP, CONNIE CHUNG: You know, you may be the richest man in America, or at least the second-richest man in America. The earliest sale on the list below (Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh) is from March 1987; with a price of 24.75 million (74.1 million in 2021 currency). DARREN WINSTON: Once we've decided that the book is worth looking at for its condition, for its provenance. Leonardo Da Vinci 1503 It was kept it at the Palace at Fontainebleau, where it remained until King Louis XIV moved the painting to the Palace of Versailles. A lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci may have been found in a Scottish farmhouse, reported The Daily Mail. The auction house would not reveal the identity of the buyer or even the region from which they came. One sold for nearly $6 million, and the other for $5.2 million. The buyer was anonymous, but the New York Times soon revealed him to be acting for bin Salman, a discovery that catapulted the painting into the geopolitical realm. Guinness World Records lists Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa as having the highest ever insurance value for a painting. The source says he advised the government that "exhibiting under the Saudi conditions would be like laundering a piece that cost $450 million". Leonardo grew up on his fathers familys estate, where he was treated as a legitimate son and received the usual elementary education of the day: reading, writing, and arithmetic. The painting, which dates to around 1500, was lost to history for more than 200 years, was damaged and badly restored, and was sold and resold as a minor work, probably by a Leonardo acolyte.. Hi, Chase. But it does have two anonymous sources, their faces hidden on camera, identified as high-ranking French government officials who had access to the Louvre's studies of the painting and to the French-Saudi negotiations. The sale places Salvator Mundi as the highest-priced work sold privately or at auction, including Pablo Picassos 1955 Women of Algiers (Version O), sold for $179.4m, and Amedeo Modiglianis 1917-18 Reclining Nude, sold for $170.4m. The Louvre very much wanted to include it in its grand exhibition to celebrate Leonardo's 500th anniversary in 2019. TINDERA: That's Gates talking for a video posted on his blog a few years ago, around the time that he exhibited the Codex Leicester in some museums in Europe. Christie's billed the painting as an original work by Leonardo da Vinci himself. Additional audio credits: AP, CBS, GatesNotes-The Blog of Bill Gates. Contemporary art, Mould told the Guardian, is where all the big money is. Everyone agreed, like Robert Simon said, that were it to go up for auction today. His was the last name on the 1988 provenance list; painting came from "a private collection in Arizona". But he went even beyond that. And it was, you know, a thrilling project to be involved with. Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci. Gifted with a curious mind and a brilliant. "I'm absolutely sure that six months down the road or a year, there's going to be some kind of new information, whether true or not, that's going to blow up everywhere in the news media," Dalsgaard says. You can't really show it offwhether it's to your best friends or in a museum if you're a public institution. In New York last night, he said he had never doubted the piece would break records. But no one thought it was still worth the $30.8 million Gates paid for it. Leonardos artistic inclinations must have appeared early. CLIP OF BILL GATES: So here, you're just seeing the page exactly as it looked to da Vinci. He was listed in the register of the royal household as pictor et ingeniarius ducalis (painter and engineer of the duke). Source: pinterest.com. He's gone to extra lengths to make this work as a whole more accessible to the public. Fifty-fivefive-point-five million dollars to start it. Here's how much the artwork is worth! Unless new documentation surfaces (unlikely after all these centuries), or a new scientific method of authentication arrives (also tricky because the work has been so damaged), the mystery may prove eternal. There are a great many superb extant pen and pencil drawings from this period, including many technical sketchesfor example, pumps, military weapons, mechanical apparatusthat offer evidence of Leonardos interest in and knowledge of technical matters even at the outset of his career. He created something he called the Codescope, which was software built to help museum-goers actually read da Vinci's backwards scrawl. The sale generated a sustained 20 minutes of tense telephone bidding as the auctioneer Jussi Pylkknen juggled rival suitors before a packed crowd of excited onlookers in the salesroom. For her part, Modestini has documented her work and the scientific studies of the painting, and published them online. It was first unveiled to the public at the National Gallery in London in 2011. Five hundred years later, the Codex is in such good condition, in part because it hasn't changed hands many times. TINDERA: Slicing up and selling off a beautiful manuscript or book is not without precedent, though, Robert explained to us. That these tales can work in a podcast, where no one can even see the work being described, suggests how much the allure of today's art-crime stories is in the skulduggery and mystery, not aesthetics. 1 (Royal Red and Blue)", "Claude Monet (18401926), Odalisque couche aux magnolias", "Basquiat Tops Phillips Contemporary Sale at $85 Million", "Titian masterpiece Diana and Callisto saved for nation", "No. But if our maximum value isn't $4 billion, then what is it? There's also something called primacy, which is being the first. The saleroom erupted in cheers and applause. 1. While dozens of manuscripts like the Codex have managed to survive the centuries intact, the Codex Leicester is the only da Vinci notebook that is still in private hands. Robert Simon told us that he thought it would not sell for less than $150 million. But many experts think she did a drastic over-restoration. He applied his creativity to every realm in which graphic representation is used: he was a painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer. Steve Wynn, who bid on the painting at auction, privately acquired the work several months later from the unidentified buyer for an undisclosed, supposedly lower price. for the highest price sold. It's now been determined that his painting is not, in fact, a da Vinci. This time, though, it sold for three times that in the battle we heard about at the beginning of the episode between Gates and the Italian bank. In 1472 Leonardo was accepted into the painters guild of Florence, but he remained in his teachers workshop for five more years, after which time he worked independently in Florence until 1481. Because the Louvre cannot comment on privately-owned works it has not displayed, the book can't be published, and at first, Cole says, the museum denied its existence. TINDERA: That's right. The world's most expensive painting to sell at auction is Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450.3 million on November 15, 2017 at Christie's.Shattering previous records and exceeding auction expectations, the sale underscored market demand for the artist's rare auction appearances, and the competition among collectors to own a work of such caliber and distinction. Leonardo da Vinci paintings that is on public display in the Western Hemisphere. A list in another currency may be in a slightly different order due to exchange-rate fluctuations. Four hundred million selling here at Christies. Earlier this summer, very fittingly, as the country's oldest auction house, they sold a copy of the Declaration of Independence for $4.4 million. So that was kind of the basic first principle. It would not draw more than the Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450 million. And then, how do we rationalize the difference in the kind of object it is? Amidst all these delightfully tangled histories, nothing rivals the Salvator Mundi. Five-point-five million dollars to start. TINDERA: That's right. When asked whether Salvator Mundis involvement in the Rybolovlev-Bouvier case might overshadow its sale, Christies postwar and contemporary chairman, Loc Gouzer, who secured the work with a $100m guarantee, said: We cannot comment about sellers, but it has every passport, every visa.. TINDERA: That's Darren Winston. Saviour for Sale opens in the US on 17 September. Record private sales are believed to include $250m for a painting by Paul Czanne and $300m for a Paul Gauguin. But many experts on camera and elsewhere in the press think he leapt to an early conclusion. I'm going to show it all over the world.. The Salvator Mundi can be exhibited, and if it goes to a museum in Saudi Arabia, and people travel there and go to see it, I mean, it would have in terms of that income value I was talking about, it would have, you know, a phenomenal one, you know, perhaps quite in excess of the $450 million that it brought at auction. [11][12] Prices realised for just his nine paintings listed below, when adjusted for inflation to 2017, add up to over US$900million. So Gates buying Leonardo da Vinci's notebook is the equivalent of a typical 66-year-old splurging ona new iPad. Its the last painting by Leonardo, the greatest of all Renaissance artists, and it had an appeal to collectors from all parts of the world., Every major scholar of Leonardos work accepts the picture and has for the past decade, he said, addressing questions over the paintings authenticity and condition, adding: Its not in flawless condition, its 500 years old and absolutely has the presence and condition of a true Leonardo.. TINDERA: Okay, so our $4 billion estimate isn't all that realistic. Guinness World Records lists Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa as having the highest ever insurance value for a painting. At the same time, Bouvier was negotiating and eventually succeeded to buy the painting for $112 million from Ursula Ucicky, widow of, Some fear existed, that Portrait of Dr. Gachet had been cremated with the owner in 1996, but Gachet's portrait was privately resold to. Most experts today agree the painting was probably produced by assistants in Leonardo's workshop, where he added some finishing touches a common practice. Son of Daniel (conductor & cellist) and Eleanore Saidenberg who were Picasso's New York dealers from 1955 to 1973. He also worked in the next-door workshop of artist Antonio del Pollaiuolo, a sculptor, painter, engraver, and goldsmith, who frequently worked with his brother, Piero. The Virgin and Child with St Anne was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci in 1510. Mona Lisa is not only Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting but the entire world's most famous painting. According to the Christie's auction catalogue for the 1994 sale, the Codex was described as being in good and stable condition. Alan Wintermute, a senior specialist in old master paintings at Christies in London, called it the holy grail of old masters. So next, we decided to try some sources who not only know Old Masters works, but they know da Vinci really well. Many factors seem to have converged to create this flourishing moment for true art crime. So, we reached out to Martin Kemp, who is another da Vinci scholar, and an Oxford University emeritus professor. Taking inflation into account, the 1962 value would be around US$900 million in 2021.[3]. This wall painting in the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, allowed Leonardo to explore how the body communicates inner states of being. The painting was sold in November 2017,[1][2] through the auction house Christie's in New York City. The winning bidder would later be revealed to be Saudi Arabia's Prince. Apparently, Hammer had made a habit of buying things with Occidental Petroleum money. On Sunday, May 29, a man disguised as an old woman in a wheelchair threw a cake at the Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci's legendary painting at Louvre, Paris. The painting, which dates to around 1500, was lost to history for more than 200 years, was damaged and badly restored, and was sold and resold as a minor work, probably by a Leonardo acolyte. When he was about 15, his father, who enjoyed a high reputation in the Florence community, apprenticed him to artist Andrea del Verrocchio. As a painter, Leonardo completed six works in the 17 years in Milan. However, weeks after the grand opening of his museum, where he planned to showcase the Codex and other art he had collected over the years, Hammer died at the age of 92. Like we did earlier in this episode, he considered the price that it sold for in 1980. Rybolovlev resold Te Fare in February 2017 at Christie's in London for $25 million. With closing fees from the auction house, it came out to $30.8 million. Since the museums rarely sell them, they are considered priceless. At 18 million in this room. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of their time. TINDERA: So how much is the Codex worth today? a 2011 exhibition at the National Gallery in London, Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of the Art World, Kim Kardashian was photographed next to it. Before the auction opened, the 500-year-old Leonardo da Vinci painting was estimated to sell for $100 million. The Louvre and the National Gallery refused to comment for either film. ", Auction Records Fall at Phillipss Sale of Contemporary Masters, "Fernand Lger (18811955), Contraste de formes", "Warmer Response at Sotheby's 2nd Night of Auctions", "Hong Kong Billionaire Lau Sets Two Records in 24 Hours", Led by $66M Van Gogh, Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Sale Robustly Kicks Off Season, "Willem de Kooning (19041997), Untitled XXV", "Wang Meng painting auction for $62 million", "A Petite $69 Million Picasso Leads Sotheby's Solid $189 Million Impressionist Sale in London", "Property from a Distinguished Private Collection Pablo Picasso Femme Au Bret Et La Robe Quadrille (Marie-Thrse Walter)", Getty breaks record with $65.1-million purchase of Manet's 'Spring', As Stocks Fall, Art Surges at a $315.8 Million Sale, Claude Monet's "Le Bassin aux nymphas" auction results, A Zao Wou-Ki painting sold for $65 million, breaking records for a work by an Asian artist, Zao Wou-Ki's "Juin-Octobre 1985" auction results, The Most Expensive Paintings ever sold list by theartwolf, Oeuvres d'art les plus dispendieuses au monde, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_most_expensive_paintings&oldid=1140779647, Private Collection, New York, United States, This page was last edited on 21 February 2023, at 19:17. TINDERA: Ultimately, in his appraisal, which Simon submitted in December 1993. On permanent display at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa was assessed at US$100 million on 14 December 1962. So first, we looked to experts in the world of rare books and manuscripts to learn about the qualities that make a book valuable. With its sleek narrative and a wide range of voices from dealers to art historians to investigative journalists, The Lost Leonardo is the better of the two films, and benefits greatly from using Modestini as its main character. Previewing the lot last month, Christies described the painting of Christ holding a crystal orb in his left hand and raising his right in benediction as the biggest discovery of the 21st century. Well, as we mentioned, the most expensive painting ever sold at auction was the Salvator Mundi for $450 million. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. That's because da Vinci wrote it backwards, which is what he did for much of what he wrote. The image of Christ as The Saviour of the World was billed as The Last da Vinci at Christie's 2017 auction, where it sold for a record $450 million (342 million) to a proxy for bin Salman (yes, that bin Salman, whom the CIA found responsible for ordering the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi). We know quite a bit about Leonardo's life from a mini-biography by Giorgio Vasari, a Leonardo fanboy and the world's first art historian.Born a nobody, Leonardo was a charismatic and complicated man self confident and not, driven and not, distracted and not. When Bill Gates bought the manuscript, rather than naming it the Codex Gates after himself, he decided to rename it the Codex Leicester after an earlier owner. The 16th-century writer Giorgio Vasari indicated that Leonardo cared little for money but was very generous toward his friends and assistants. A Leonardo da Vinci painting has sold for a record-breaking $450 million this week, at Christie's auction house in New York. TINDERA: On sale is a one-of-a kind Leonardo da Vinci manuscript known as the Codex Hammer. The collector acquired it from Bouvier for $127m, who had in turn acquired it from Sothebys in a private sale in 2013 for about $50m less. This list is ordered by consumer price index inflation-adjusted value (in bold) in millions of United States dollars in 2021. The subjects range from Inigo Philbrick, criminally charged with defrauding clients by selling more than 100% of shares in artworks, to a golden Egyptian coffin whose smuggled past came to light after Kim Kardashian was photographed next to it at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute gala. Most art world observers thought the Salvator Mundi would be the centrepiece of a new museum or art centre in the region, but the painting has not been glimpsed in public since. 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 Christies in New York for $450.3m, including auction house premium, shattering the world record for any work of art sold at auction. And we're going to show you how we narrowed that range to settle on one number. [note 1] Where necessary, the price is first converted to dollars using the exchange rate at the time the painting was sold. ", https://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/art/art-sales-russian-buyers-inject-confidence-into-old-master-marke/, Picasso piece sets record for art sold at auction, qatar may have purchased Warhol's 'Eight Elvises', "Nahmads confirm Picasso's $115m flower girl will go to Paris", "Rockefeller Picasso sells for $115 million including feesauthor=Robert Frank", "DIC Sells 'Anna's Light' Painting For Y10.3bn Gain", "Regarding extraordinary profit associated with the sale of a certain painting owned by the company and revision of its consolidated operating result forecast", "How Basquiat Became the $60 Million Man", "A Basquiat Sells for 'Mind-Blowing' $110.5 Million at Auction", A Monet Sells for $110.7 Million, an Auction High for an Impressionist Work, "Qatar bought Ford House's $100-million Cezanne", "$100M for Czanne painting? Georgia O'Keeffe holds the record for the highest price paid for a painting by a woman. One of my hats I wearI'm a capitalist. His drawing of the Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) has also become a cultural icon. At the height of the auction, as many of six bidders were in play. Usually estimated at "over 50 M" or "between 50 and 60 million Euros". There is hardly a person on this planet that doesn't know about this artwork. Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and engineer who is best known for his paintings, notably the Mona Lisa (c. 150319) and the Last Supper (149598). The work, thought to be a 500-year-old portait of Madonna and child, is potentially worth over $150 million (100 million) if experts are able to prove its authenticity. Christies had also found placing the work, despite its celebrity, hard to fathom. Something like the first printing in North America, or the first time a new word was used in print. Oil tycoon Armand Hammer bought it that year, and 14 years later, Gates bought it at another auction. MASSEY: Still with me then at five-million five hundred thousand, five-million eight hundred thousand, five-million eight hundred thousand. Its the zenith of my career as an auctioneer. In the past year two documentaries, the engaging Made You Look and the pedestrian Driven to Abstraction, tackled the case of the Knoedler Gallery in New York, which for nearly two decades sold forgeries supposedly by 20th-Century masters including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. It suffers from not having Modestini or some other compelling central figure. The quality of the painting itself divides people. On the telephone in this room at $28 million. [3] It may have been that the rather sophisticated spirit of Neoplatonism prevailing in the Florence of the Medici went against the grain of Leonardos experience-oriented mind and that the more strict, academic atmosphere of Milan attracted him. 9. However, we should probably note that it seems unlikely that as the owner of the Codex, Gates would actually do this. On November 20, 2014 at Sotheby's, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art bought her 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. In this room, inon the telephone rather, at $28 million. Read about our approach to external linking. The role of most of these associates is unclear, leading to the question of Leonardos so-called apocryphal works, on which the master collaborated with his assistants. (Maybe so, but in the films and other reproduced images it does have a more cloying look). The Netflix series This Is a Robbery delves into the 1990 theft of masterworks including a Rembrandt from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It came close. It is Oil on wood and measures 168 x 130 cm (5 1/2 x 4 1/2 ft.). Despite the excitement over the sale of the only Leonardo in private hands queues of people had formed around Rockefeller Center in New York to see the canvas many in the art world had wondered if the piece would find a buyer. Simon has said that it took a couple of years after they bought the painting to become convinced himself that he was dealing with an original work by Leonardo. He decided that the Codex's fair market value was $50 million. (According to contemporary sources, Leonardo was commissioned to create three more pictures, but these works have since disappeared or were never done.)