Is Da Vinci's Portrait of Christ selling for half a billion dollars today worth it?
When a 26-inch oil painting, badly damaged and heavily restored, once hawked for $60 sells for $450.3 million (that’s Rs 2,920 crore), the world definitely needs a saviour.
“Salvator Mundi”, Latin for ”Saviour of the World”, thought to have been painted by Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci about 500 years ago broke all auction records to sell at Christies in New York to an undisclosed buyer. (The previous record price for a work of art was for a Picasso, “Women of Algiers”, at $179 million in 2015). Depicting Christ, his right hand raised in blessing while the left holds an orb, the work has had its share of resurrections.
Believed to have been originally painted for the French Royal family, the painting was taken to England by Queen Henrietta Maria when she married King Charles I in 1625. It disappeared, only to resurface in 1900 when it was attributed to a student of da Vinci’s and sold for a meagre $60. Lost again, the work was back on the scene in 2005 where a consortium of art dealers paid less than $10,000 for it. After years of research and restoration, it was identified as the hand of da Vinci himself. Eventually sold again for $80 million at Sotheby’s in 2013, it was “flipped” within days by a Swiss art dealer and sold to Russian billionaire and fertiliser king, Dmitry Rybolovlev for $127.5 million.
So, what took the price to more than $450 million in a 19-minute bidding war on the evening of November 15 in a Manhattan auction room? Christie’s called the work “the Last da Vinci”, the only known painting by the Renaissance master still in a private collection (some 15 others are in museums).
The auction house’s marketing campaign was unprecedented in the art world; it was the first time they recruited an external agency to advertise the work. During its world tour across in Hong Kong, London, New York and San Francisco, some 27,000 people lined up to view the painting — it was a chance for communion with the da Vinci’s Christ before it disappears again into a private collection.
To critics, the sky-high price illustrates how salesmanship and marketing are dominating the conversation about art and its value.
“Any private collector who gets suckered into buying this picture and places it in their apartment or storage, it serves them right,” wrote Jerry Saltz.
But in the end it was about rarity and brand. Where the world of art and commerce intersect, it doesn’t get better than this; “the holy grail of our business” as a Christies co-chairman called it. They certainly seem to have cracked the code.
As to who bought this work for nearly half a billion dollars? This remains a mystery.
At least for now.