Rybolovlev would hold Salvatore Mundi in a freeport for years, using it as collateral to move money around the world, until he realized his art dealer had ripped him off for nearly a billion dollars over the course of their relationship. That's the most extreme trophy you can find.” And the only Leonardo you can buy is this one. But when it comes to a painting, there's only one of each. “Extremely wealthy people are attracted to buying art because it’s something unique that they can have to themselves. Koefoed has an insight into the psyche of the über rich that he shared with us via a Zoom interview: “Billionaires are always competing to see who has the biggest house, the biggest yacht, the biggest private jet,” he says. Why would someone shell out that much cash for something that may not even be real?Ī copy of the Salvatore Mundi. Despite nagging questions of who exactly painted the Salvatore Mundi, in 2013 it was purchased for over $127 million by Dmitry Rybolovlev a Russian oligarch with an already impressive art collection that included works by Van Gogh, Rothko, and Matisse. It's a moment of great personality, but it also ties into one of the biggest questions presented in the film: who gets to decide what things are worth? In The Lost Leonardo, it’s the rich and the powerful. At one point, Jerry Saltz, the outspoken art critic at New York Magazine exclaims, “Opinions matter more than facts!” The pace remains lively, thanks in no small part, to the colorful art world subjects he interviews throughout the course of the film. With so many interlocking threads, it would be easy for a less adept director to get lost in the subject matter, but Koefoed manages to weave them all together deftly and never gets too bogged down on nuance. That unlikely journey is now the subject of Dutch director Andreas Koefoed’s fascinating new documentary The Lost Leonardo, out now. That debates about the painting's authenticity raged (they continue to this day), did not, it seemed, matter. And when it did hit the market, the price of the painting skyrocketed, becoming entangled in Russian oligarch money, and then finally, in 2017, selling to a mystery buyer for a record $450.3 million. The first Leonardo to be discovered in decades would actually be up for sale-something that had never happened in modern history. KONTROLAB // Getty ImagesĪrt collectors around the world went bonkers. Throngs of visitors crowd around an exhibit of the Salvator Mundi, an alleged painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, in Naples, 2017. We asked Dianne Modestini, the Michael Jordan of art restoration who worked on the painting, to explain: “You can't see any brushstrokes, you cannot see the transition.” The only other place she had seen the technique? The Mona Lisa. Then there was the painting technique used on Christ’s upper lip. An infrared photo of the painting showed the thumb of Christ’s right hand had been moved and repainted in a different position-something that would only happen with an original artwork, not a copy. It was during the restoration process that experts began to notice things that were a little unusual. The painting, depicting Christ giving the sign of the cross and holding a glass sphere, was in bad shape from centuries of overpainting, dirt, and grime. In 2006, a group of art speculators spent $1,175 on a painting in New Orleans thought to be a copy of a lost work by Leonardo called the Salvatore Mundi. The 75 Best Documentaries on Netflix To Stream Now.Bryan Fogel Talks the Long Road of 'The Dissident'.
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