Salvator Mundi has sold for a record-smashing $656m at Christie's in New York. Photo / AP
Salvator Mundi has sold for a record-smashing $656m at Christie's in New York. Photo / AP
Leonardo da Vinci's long lost portrait of Christ Salvator Mundi has sold for a record-smashing US$450.3 million ($656m) at Christie's in New York - more than double the old mark for any work of art at auction.
The painting, which apparently once sold for just US$60 at auction because experts thought it was by one of his students, fetched more than four times over the Christie's pre-sale estimate of about US$100m, the Daily Mail reports.
Salvator Mundi - Italian for Saviour of the World - was purchased by an unidentified buyer bidding via telephone after a protracted bidding war that stretched to nearly 20 minutes at the New York auction house.
Leonardo da Vinci's 'Salvator Mundi' - worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Photo / AP
The 66cm-tall painting was more than twice the old auction record set by Pablo Picasso's painting Women of Algiers (Version O) (Les Femmes D'Alger) which sold for US$179.4 million in May 2015, also at Christie's in New York.
The highest known sale price for any artwork had been US$300 million for Willem de Kooning's painting Interchange, which was sold privately in September 2015 by the David Geffen Foundation to hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin.
The oil on wood panel painting, Salvator Mundi, depicts Christ with his right hand raised in blessing and his left hand holding a globe.
Commissioned by Louis XII of France in 1506, it later ended up in possession of Charles I of England and following his execution it went to Charles II and it remained in London for 400 years.
It eventually ended up in the collection of Sir Francis Cook and in 1958 it was sold by Sotheby's for just US$60 ($87) after it was wrongly attributed to a student of Da Vinci called Giovanni Boltraffio.
Robert Simon Fine Art in New York, along with a consortium of art dealers, is thought to have acquired the painting at a clearance sale in 2004 for US$10,000.
Photo / AP
Simon and his partners flew in an international panel of art experts who assessed the work, which had been heavily overpainted, and gone dark and gloomy during years of neglect.
After it was cleaned up, the experts agreed it had not been done by the pupil, but the master himself, da Vinci, and went on display to the public at the National Gallery in London in 2011.
Paris-based dealer, Yves Bouvier purchased the work at a Sotheby's private sale for US$77m in 2013.
The dealer once represented Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, 50, who has accused him of cheating him out of US$1 billion by misrepresenting sale prices on some 38 artworks - including the sale of the da Vinci when Rybolovlev acquired it for US$127m.
The oligarch's sale on Wednesday marks his biggest ever.
During the auction, a backer of the Salvator Mundi auction had guaranteed a bid of at least US$100m, the opening bid of the auction, which ran for 19 minutes. The price hit US$300m about halfway through the bidding.
Christie's auctioneer Jussi Pylkannen, taps the gavel as he ends bidding. Photo / AP
People in the auction house gallery applauded and cheered when the bidding reached US$300m and when the hammer came down on the final bid, US$400m.
The record sale price of US$450m includes the buyer's premium, a fee paid by the winner to the auction house.
Christie's said most scholars agree that the painting is by Leonardo, though some critics have questioned the attribution and some say the extensive restoration muddies the work's authorship.
Christie's capitalised on the public's interest in Leonardo, considered one of the greatest artists of all time, with a media campaign that labelled the painting The Last Da Vinci. The work was exhibited in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London and New York before the sale.
In New York, where no museum owns a Leonardo, art lovers lined up outside Christie's Rockefeller Center headquarters on Tuesday to view Salvator Mundi.
Svetla Nikolova, who is from Bulgaria but lives in New York, called the painting "spectacular".
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience," she said. "It should be seen. It's wonderful it's in New York. I'm so lucky to be in New York at this time."
