The last Leonardo da Vinci painting in private hands sold for $450m on Wednesday evening after a fevered, 19-minute round of bidding at Christie’s in Manhattan, shattering the record for the most expensive piece of art ever sold.
“Salvator Mundi”, Latin for “saviour of the world”, is one of roughly 15 surviving works by Da Vinci and depicts Jesus Christ in a flowing robe, holding a crystal orb and raising his right hand in benediction.
The 67.5cm tall portrait, painted around 1500 and once owned by King Charles I of England, was presumed lost until its rediscovery in 2005. It was publicly unveiled at the Da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery in London in 2011 following extensive restoration to fix years of overpainting and neglect.
Jussi Pylkkanen, auctioneer for the evening, opened bidding at $70m. There were gasps throughout the saleroom in the Rockefeller Center when it hit $200m.
Bidders interested in the Da Vinci — Lot 9 of the evening’s sale — were given special red paddles, a move the auction house attributed to the work’s high worth, although much of the action was fuelled by phone bidders.
The undisclosed buyer was represented on the phone by Alex Rotter, Christie’s co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art.
“It was wild,” Mr Rotter told the Financial Times about representing the buyer over the phone. “It was one of the experiences of a lifetime.”
The $450m figure includes $50.3m of premiums paid by the buyer to Christie’s for its services.
Following its sale for $127.5m in 2013, the painting was at the centre of a legal feud between then buyer Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian billionaire and owner of Monaco football club, and seller Yves Bouvier, owner of Natural Le Coultre, one of the largest fine-art storage and shipping specialists.
A small group of critics have even questioned the painting’s authenticity.
Other paintings on offer on Wednesday evening included works by Mark Rothko, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. The inclusion of the 32ft Warhol painting “Sixty Last Suppers”, which riffed on Da Vinci’s famed “The Last Supper”, was part of the reason Christie’s persuaded the seller to put “Salvator Mundi” up for auction.
“Sixty Last Suppers” features a black-and-white silkscreen grid of 60 prints of “The Last Supper” and was among the last works created by Warhol before his death in 1987.
The unorthodox decision to include the Da Vinci in the contemporary auction sparked hand-wringing by collectors, some of whom believed it should be shown alongside old masters in Christie’s evening sale on Monday. The piece was secured by the auction house’s co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art, Loic Gouzer, who has been at the forefront of the concept of themed sales.
At the “Salvator Mundi” unveiling in October, Mr Gouzer told the FT he liked the way art informs other art, adding that pairing the Da Vinci with pieces by Warhol, Twombly and Basquiat “was the best platform to do it”.
“He was so influential that every artist will start by looking at his art. So in the hands and brain of every artist is Da Vinci,” Mr Gouzer said at the time. “And it’s so contemporary. You show it to any taxi driver and they will know who it is. It never gets old.”
The sale of “Salvator Mundi” helped Christie’s blow past its presale high estimate of $486m with total sales of more than $785m, including buyer’s premiums, with 84 per cent of the 58 lots sold.
Mr Rotter said that even without the Da Vinci painting, “we had higher results than last year”, when Christie’s was offering close to 90 lots instead of 58. The higher total with fewer lots sold “is an achievement that helps us continue the way we’re working, which is much more toward smaller sales that really have something to present.”
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