Is the world’s costliest painting fake?
Leonardo paints Salvator Mundi possibly for King Louis XII of France and his consort, Anne of Brittany.
A new French feature-length documentary on the Salvator Mundi, the costliest painting, seems to have solved one of the key mysteries surrounding the enigmatic and controversial painting. Why it never appeared in the Musee du Louvre’s blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci show?
Antoine Vitkine’s film, which The Art Newspaper gained exclusive access to, was entitled The Savior for Sale and was released on April 13th.
In the film, an anonymous senior official in French President Emmanuel Macron’s government, codenamed ‘Jacques’, tells Vitkine that the Louvre’s extensive scientific examination of the painting, conducted in secret, concluded that Leonardo da Vinci himself ‘only contributed’ to the picture and that its ‘authenticity could not be confirmed, reported The Art Newspaper, adding that the painting’s owner, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), had acquired the painting (through a proxy) for USD 450 million — the largest price ever paid for a work of art — at Christie’s, New York in November 2017.
As per some media reports, MBS pressured bosses at the Louvre to lie about the authenticity of a supposed Leonardo da Vinci painting in order to save his own face, a new documentary alleges.
The documentary alleged that some members of the French government, including Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, lobbied on behalf of bin Salman’s request. They were concerned about the impact on France’s wide-ranging strategic and economic relationship with Saudi Arabia.
But Macron ultimately decided to reject bin Salman’s request, leaving it to the Louvre to negotiate with the Saudis on how the painting should be presented in their retrospective, said the documentary.
Leonardo paints Salvator Mundi possibly for King Louis XII of France and his consort, Anne of Brittany. It is most likely commissioned soon after the conquests of Milan and Genoa.
The 26-inch haunting oil-on-panel painting depicts a half-length figure of Christ as Savior of the World.
In his painting, Leonardo presents Christ as he is characterized in the Gospel of John 4:14:
The painting disappeared from 1763 until 1900 when it was bought by Sir Charles Robinson as a work by Bernardino Luini, a follower of Leonardo. It next appeared at a Sotheby’s in England in 1958 where it sold for £45 ($125 at the time). It then disappeared again until it was bought at a small US auction house in 2005.
Like many of Leonardo’s surviving works, the painting was not in good condition when it resurfaced in the early 2000s. It required extensive restoration.
Even though some experts on Renaissance art questioned the attribution of the painting to Leonardo, it was sold at auction at Christie’s in New York in November 2017 for $450,312,500.
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