Authenticating artwork has never been an exact science. A notorious recent case concerns the celebrated Salvator Mundi. Possibly painted (at least in part) by Leonardo Da Vinci, Salvator Mundi leaped above all previous auction records with its 2017 sale by Christie’s New York for more than $450 million. The mysterious buyer turned out to be a Saudi prince, the Minister of Culture under the country’s ambitious new ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. But the cost of a painting doesn’t necessarily determine its value when persistent doubts remain about its authenticity.
The Salvator Mundi case is now the subject of two documentaries, Andreas Koefoed’s The Lost Leonardo and Antoine Vitkine’s The Savior for Sale: Da Vinci’s Lost Masterpiece? Both are probing, well-made, continent hopping examinations of the high-end art market—especially the dealers, auctioneers and museums that form its support network—through the lens of the Salvator rely on anonymous sources, their faces masked, within the Louvre. After all, we’re now dealing with a Saudi regime that thought nothing of luring dissident journalist Jamal Shashoggi to a consulate on foreign soil, murdering and dismembering him.
The two films tell much the same story, interview many of the same people and arrive at similar conclusions. The quest for the missing masterpiece began in Louisiana where Salvator Mundi was discovered hanging in the stairwell of a private home. After Christie’s turned up its nose, the owner’s heir took it to a New Orleans auction house in 2005, where it caught the eye of a “sleeper hunter” (“sleepers” are artworks undervalued or misidentified by auctioneers). He brought it to a New York art dealer who saw promise under the centuries of dirt and overpainting. One can see why. At least after its controversial “restoration,” the Salvator Mundi depicts Christ bathed in the soft aura of a transcendent peace that surpasses all understanding. The press dubbed it “the Male Mona Lisa” with good reason. The painting is fascinating, it’s from Da Vinci’s era and in his style—but did he actually paint it?
The question would be academic if the painting was attributed to an obscure Renaissance Italian. Instead, it captivated the media and the art world because it might be by Da Vinci, that towering figure who embodied art and craft, science and technology—truly a “Renaissance Man.” Looming over Salvator Mundi’s discovery was the popularity of a potboiler novel and a Hollywood movie. The Da Vinci Code made Salvator Mundi honey to an infotainment industry searching for a sweet new story.
Problems of authentication arose when the New York dealer sent Salvator Mundi to Britain’s National Gallery for possible inclusion in a Da Vinci exhibition. The Gallery’s curator had it examined by five art historians. According to The Savior for Sale, one said it was by Da Vinci, one said it wasn’t and three said they didn’t know. The Lost Leonardo is less clear on that assessment but gathers other experts who denounce the painting as a fraud or—charitably—a case of mistaken identity.
With scant evidence, the curator, a glib fellow who seems more concerned with branding than painting, pressed ahead with his plans, calling the evidence “sufficiently strong” for Salvator Mundi’s inclusion in the exhibit.
The National Gallery is an impressive bullet point on any painting’s resume. Afterward, the New York dealer and his new partner decided it was safe to sell it as a probable Da Vinci.
From there, the history detective work of authentication is crisscrossed with international intrigue by private actors and governments. Millions of dollars passed through shell companies and holding companies, through intermediaries working through other intermediaries, until it was purchased by a Russian oligarch living abroad (in many places), his mansions furnished with bullet proof windows and panic rooms. In The Savior for Sale he seems interested in art; in The Lost Leonardo his interest is all about mobile assets. Either way, rather than hang his many masterpieces over his many mantlepieces, the oligarch (like other art investors) stores them in a steel-vaulted sanctuary in Singapore. The Bomb could fall and humanity perish but his collection might survive.
Problem was the oligarch’s slippery Swiss art advisor cheated him on the sale and pocketed a larger-than-agreed commission for his services. The outraged oligarch destroyed the art advisor’s career and decided to flip the painting at auction. The Christie’s catalog essay was written by the lone art historian from the National Gallery conclave convinced of its authenticity. Even he tells The Savior for Sale that the Christie’s catalog was “overly definite” in asserting the painting was by Da Vinci. It may be revealing that Christie’s marketed the Salvator Mundi auction not to collectors of old masters but collectors of contemporary art—the sort of wealthy idiots who pay money for Damien Hirst.
The Saudis outbid everyone, likely to use Salvator Mundi as the anchor for a great museum to rise as part of the crown prince’s plan for a post-petroleum Arabia. The crown prince is as preoccupied with marketing Saudi Arabia as the curator was in marketing the National Gallery. As usual, PR campaigns are compounded from lies, half-truths and optimism.
The controversy continued. According to The Savior for Sale, the Saudi crown prince offered millions to France if the Louvre exhibited Salvator Mundi alongside the Mona Lisa—and stamp the painting as 100 percent authentic. The most the Louvre’s investigators were willing to do was to assert that Salvator Mundi was made in Da Vinci’s workshop and the master may have added a few strokes of paint to the handiwork of his acolytes. Although it’s doubtful that the search for the truth behind Salvator Mundi will lead to definitive answers, truth has little meaning to the players in this drama.
The Lost Leonardo is screening at the Downer Theater.
