Leonardo da Vinci painting sold for $450 million

A Leonardo da Vinci painting which depicts Jesus Christ which had been long-lost was sold at an auction for over $450 million on November 15, 2017 and thereby created a world record for the most expensive work of art at auction, according to Christie’s Auction House.

Christie’s –presented this painting depicting Jesus Christ holding up on one hand in blessing while cradling a crystal orb in the other , that preserves the artist’s own hand print was sold in New York this evening. Although the auction house guaranteed the painting at $100 million, the bidding which lasted 20 minutes with two bidders, already surpassing the guaranteed amount.  The final sale at $450, 312, 500 including buyer’s premium created a world record.

According to Christie’s, the painting goes back to 1500, leaving behind a few sketches by his hand that tie him to the imagery. Charles I of England, acquired the priced and hung in his wife’s chambers. After Charles I was executed in 1649 after a civil war between the Royalists and the English and Scottish parliaments, which were seeking to curb the monarchy’s power. The artwork was sold in October 1951 to a mason name John Stone who kept the painting till 1660, when Charles I’s son Charles II returned from exile to retake the English Throne. Stone then presented the da Vinci painting to the new king,  which stayed in Whitehall in London until the late 1700s, passing the possession to his brother James II, when that monarch took the throne. Then the painting disappears from historical record until 1900 when it was sold not a da Vinci but as a work of Bernardino Luini, one of the great master’s students.

It was not until after 2005, when the painting appeared in an auction of a U.S. estate that anyone realized what it really was.

After 2007 sale, conservator Dianne Dwyer Modestini, of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts launched a project to restore the painting, by removing the clumsy dollops of paint that people had put on the wood panel to disguise chips and restoring ugly attempt to cover a crack in the wood. Once the ugly layers of over-painting and resins were removed Modestini realised the painting weas a da Vinci original. After scrutiny by experts from around the world  who all agreed, the painting was the real thing in 2011, the painting was unveiled as a real da Vinci at an exhibit at the National Gallery in London.

Christ’s skin tone is blended with a technique called sfumato in which the artist presses the heel of his hand into the paint to blur it. Infrared confirmed that these handprints are still pressed into the paint especially on the left side of the forehead.

The painting was sold for $80 million in 2013 to Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier,who then  sold it for $127 million the following year to Russian investor Dmitry Rybolovlev.

Salvator Mundi, the long-lost  Leonardo da Vinci painting of Jesus Christ commissioned by King Louis XII of France over 500 years ago.