Leonardo da Vinci Painting Could Become Most Expensive Work Ever Auctioned

On Wednesday, November 15th, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (circa 1500) sold for $400 million ($450 million with fees) after 19 minutes of bidding, making it the most expensive piece ever purchased at auction, and likely the most expensive artwork ever sold.

Since October 13th, Leonardo da Vinci’s Christ portrait Salvator Mundi, or “Savior of the World,” has traveled the globe from Hong Kong to San Francisco, and has been celebrated as the “greatest artistic rediscovery of the 21st century” by Christie’s. Now it’s back in New York, where, on November 15th, it will go on offer in the house’s Post-War and Contemporary evening auction, where it is estimated to sell for $100 million.

Fewer than 20 works by Leonardo are known to exist in the world, and the last authentic original was discovered in 1909, so the arrival of this previously unpublished painting by the Renaissance master is considered a seismic Leonardo event. The painting was presented as “discovered” at a 2011 exhibition at London’s National Gallery, to great international fanfare. Christie’s chairman Loïc Gouzer said in a statement that “the opportunity to bring this masterpiece to the market is an honor that comes around once in a lifetime.”

But how did the auction house come to the estimate of $100 million? Works of art that have sold for more than $100 million at auction are rare, but we’ve seen a number of them in recent years. An untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat painting sold for $110.5 million in May; in 2015, Pablo Picasso’s Women of Algiers sold for $179 million and an Amedeo Modigliani nude sold for $170 million; and in 2013, an Andy Warhol car crash painting sold for $105.4 million.

No Old Master painting has ever crossed the $100 million mark at auction, though the French businessman Eric de Rothschild sold a pair of portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn in a private sale in 2015 to the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre for nearly $180 million, or $90 million a piece. While the record-breaking contemporary artists that top the market obviously have admirers and appeal, Leonardo is still considered by many people to be the most revered artist of all time. And, therefore, a lot of people think it should follow that his work sells for the highest prices ever recorded.

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