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| “Salvator Mun" |
Rhett Jones reports in Gizmodo that on Wednesday, November 15, 2017, auction records were shattered when an anonymous buyer
spent $450.3 million to be the proud owner of a “long lost” painting
“by” Leonardo da Vinci. The thing is, it may not have even been painted
by Leonardo, it’s in terrible shape, it’s not especially good, but in
the financial world of art, none of that matters.
Christie’s auction house has been
hyping the emergence of
Salvator Mundi (“Savior of the World
”)
as “the greatest and most unexpected artistic rediscovery of the 21st
century.” It’s believed to be the only Leonardo in private hands.
According to
Artnet,
it was once part of the collection of King Charles I and has since
bounced around less prestigious homes. In 1958, it was auctioned at
Sotheby’s London for £45 and attributed to Boltraffio, a painter who
worked in Leonardo da Vinci’s studio. It was then picked up at an estate
sale for around $10,000 back in 2005. In the last decade, researchers
and authenticators have studied its history and deemed it an authentic
Leonardo.
The opening bid was set at $100 million and Christie’s
reportedly
wondered aloud if some collector could conceivably drop $2 billion on
it. If the auction house truly thought that was a possibility, I guess
they were a little disappointed by the final hammer price. But that
$450.3 million is by far the highest price paid for a painting at
auction. The previous
record holder was Pablo Picasso’s
Les Femmes d’Alger, which sold for $179,364,992 in 2015.
The Guardian claims
Salvator Mundi
is also the highest priced artwork ever sold privately, but that record
is a lot harder to definitively establish because artworks change hands
without public records all the time.
Not everyone, however, is sure that this record-breaking painting is by
Leonardo da Vinci. Authentication is a subjective trade, and a buyer’s
confidence in an authenticator’s assessment is mostly based on that
authenticator’s reputation. In the case of
Salvator Mundi, it
was being restored by Dianne Dwyer Modestini, a professor of paintings
conservation at New York University, in 2007 when she started having a
feeling that something was different about this piece. She was
commissioned to clean up what she thought was a copy of the famous
Florentine’s work but began to see details that were very Leonardo-like.
A subsequent X-ray revealed traces of changes being made to the
composition over time. Someone making a copy wouldn’t be making these
drastic changes. Since then, many top scholars have concluded that it
is, in fact, a Leonardo based on numerous factors including the
technique, materials, and outside historical data.
Other experts have their doubts. Charles Hope, an emeritus professor
at the Warburg Institute at the University of London, wrote in the
New York Review of Books,
“even making allowances for its extremely poor state of preservation,
it is a curiously unimpressive composition and it is hard to believe
that Leonardo himself was responsible for anything so dull.”
Most critics seem to agree that the painting is far below Leonardo da Vinci’s typical standards, especially considering that
Salvator Mundi has been dated to 1500. That would place its composition directly between
The Last Supper (1498) and the
Mona Lisa (1502). Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York Magazine,
wrote:
The painting is absolutely dead. Its surface is inert,
varnished, lurid, scrubbed over, and repainted so many times that it
looks simultaneously new and old.
Experts estimate that there
are only 15 to 20 existing da Vinci paintings. Not a single one of them
pictures a person straight on like this one. There is also not a single
painting picturing an individual Jesus either. All of his paintings,
even single portraits, depict figures in far more complex poses. Even
the figure that comes remotely close to this painting, Saint John the
Baptist, also from 1500, gives us a turning, young, randy-looking man
with hair utterly different from and much more developed in terms of
painting than the few curls Christie’s is raving about in their picture.
Writing for the
New York Times, art critic Jason Farago agrees that this is not the “Male
Mona Lisa” it’s been advertised to be.
Authentication is a serious but subjective business. I’m not the man to
affirm or reject its attribution; it is accepted as a Leonardo by many
serious scholars, though not all. I can say, however, what I felt I was
looking at when I took my place among the crowds who’d queued an hour or
more to behold and endlessly photograph “Salvator Mundi”: a proficient
but not especially distinguished religious picture from
turn-of-the-16th-century Lombardy, put through a wringer of
restorations.
Most assessments repeat similar
criticisms: the composition is totally wrong; the details don’t say
Leonardo; if it came from his studio, it was probably done by an
assistant; and, on top of it all, the thing is a shadow of its former
self because it’s been so heavily repainted. One expert cracked a joke
to Saltz at the viewing: “Why is a Leonardo in a Modern and Contemporary
auction? Because 90 percent of it was painted in the last 50 years.”
So
why would this subpar and possibly misattributed Leonardo fetch so much
money? Because quality and authenticity don’t really matter in art
sales as long as a few top gatekeepers can get on the same page about
the value of a work. As art critic Blake Gopnik told
Marketplace:
I’m
not saying that this isn’t Leonardo. I’m also not saying that it is a
Leonardo. I’m actually saying that it’s a kind of incoherent question to
ask. It’s kind of like asking, “Is the moon Jewish, or is the sun gay?”
Pictures, even today (let alone in the 16th century), can be all sorts
of things between being by a great master and being by some assortment
of assistance.
Art brings in huge prices because it
carries cultural cachet, looks good in your home, offers access to high
society, and above all, is a very convenient way to park some money.
High-priced art is often used for
money laundering,
but even in legitimate circumstances, it’s just another way to
diversify the ways in which your money is being stored if you’re an
extremely rich person. And hey, it goes up in value all the time.
Speaking
of extremely rich people, who paid for this? We don’t know, and if the
buyer doesn’t want to say, we may never know. Liu Yiqian, a Chinese
billionaire, was rumored to be the buyer, but he told
The New York Times it wasn’t him. Another possibility is Bill Gates. He did pay
$30 million for Leonardo’s journals back in 1994.
But
that’s the story with this piece. We don’t know for sure that it’s
authentic, we don’t know that it’s any good, and we don’t know who
bought it. We just know that some people decided it was worth a buttload
of money. And so it is.
Note EU-Digest: This report really shines a direct light on
how decadent our so-called "Western Values" have become, when someone
can spent close to half a billion dollars on a possibly fake da Vinci
painting, and this while millions of children are dying as a result of
famine, wars and other calamities, many of which the direct results of
those same "Western Values".
Read more: Someone Spent Almost Half a Billion Dollars on a Possibly Inauthentic da Vinci Painting
