What is the most expensive painting in history?
What determines a painting‘s value? In a world where one person’s expression of the world’s suffering is another’s assortment of mindless squiggles, that is far from an easy question to answer. Thankfully, Augusto Arbizo, the director of New York’s 11R Gallery, put it rather concisely when he said that prices are determined by “an artist’s exhibition history, sales history (if any), career level, and size of artwork.” Arbizo added that “sometimes, production costs are factored in as a cost that needs to be recouped”.
Sales history becomes all the more important when we’re dealing with revered work. When it comes to someone like Leonardo da Vinci, whose name is now fabled as the greatest artist of all time, a price tag will effectively never depreciate if the painting remains intact. Proof of this exponential growth of his masterpiece: Salvator Mundi.
As of 2017, this near-mythic painting became the most expensive in history. At Christie’s auction, Salvator Mundi was purchased by an anonymous buyer for a whopping $450,312,500. It is believed that the buyer was purchasing the painting on behalf of Saudi prince, Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud. Since the purchase, da Vinci’s work has been under the ownership of the Saudi Arabian culture ministry.
Dating from 1499-1510, the painting has a controversial history. While ‘The Saviour of the World’ – as the title translates – might have a very pure intent, depicting Christ making the sign of the cross and holding a celestial sphere that represents the heavens, it has a backstory that causes many people to question it. The painting was thought to have been lost back in 1603. However, when a copy was discovered in the collection of the Marquis Jean-Louis de Ganay in Paris, it was soon argued that the work was actually the original long-lost painting.
When da Vinci scholar Martin Kemp inspected the work, he seemed to ratify its legitimacy. Kemp recalled when he reviewed the work: “It had that kind of presence that Leonardos have … that uncanny strangeness that the later Leonardo paintings manifest.” Profoundly adding: “However skilled Leonardo’s followers and imitators might have been, none of them reached out into such realms of “philosophical and subtle speculation”. We cannot reasonably doubt that here, we are in the presence of the painter from Vinci.”
In the interim years, however, Leonardo’s imitators seem to have heavily edited the work with overpainting. It was only revealed when it was restored with acetone that it may well have been a genuine. Prior to this restoration, it was believed to be a wreck that surely couldn’t have been a da Vinci. This makes Alexander Parish and Robert Simon’s $1175 punt on the painting in 2005 a very profitable move.
And for those still wondering whether they could have possibly fooled the art world with their restoration, when it went to auction in 2017 after full restoration, Christie’s were kind enough to list the reasons why it is considered genuine by the experts. “The reasons for the unusually uniform scholarly consensus that the painting is an autograph work by Leonardo are several,” they stated, “including the previously mentioned relationship of the painting to the two autograph preparatory drawings in Windsor Castle; its correspondence to the composition of the ‘Salvator Mundi’ documented in Wenceslaus Hollar’s etching of 1650; and its manifest superiority to the more than 20 known painted versions of the composition.”
Concluding: “Furthermore, the extraordinary quality of the picture, especially evident in its best-preserved areas, and its close adherence in style to Leonardo’s known paintings from circa 1500, solidifies this consensus.”
