Edvard Munch "The Scream" (1895): $135.2 million 9. Previewing the lot last month, Christies described the painting of Christ holding a crystal orb in his left hand and raising his right in benediction as the biggest discovery of the 21st century. He's gone to extra lengths to make this work as a whole more accessible to the public. Billionaires just live in a different world. See a gallery of the world's most expensive paintings, Leonardo da Vincis Salvator Mundi sold for $400 million at Christies ($450.3m, including auction house premium), One of four versions of The Scream created by Munch and the only one that is privately owned. Two new documentaries delve into the ongoing saga of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi in a moment when true art crime stories are at their peak, writes Caryn James. Is it even a Leonardo at all? And trying to balance them And of course, one of the things in doing an appraisal like this is you just don't put them in a mix, whatever. But he went even beyond that. PETERSON-WITHORN: Art is one of the toughest things we value for our lists, because the value is just so subjective, and you really don't know what something will sell for until it hits the auction block. She spent years restoring the painting, and passionately defends its authenticity in precise detail, pointing out the pentimento under Christ's thumb or a curve of his mouth that could only be Leonardo's. Christies had also found placing the work, despite its celebrity, hard to fathom. 9. The buyer was anonymous, but the New York Times soon revealed him to be acting for bin Salman, a discovery that catapulted the painting into the geopolitical realm. While dozens of manuscripts like the Codex have managed to survive the centuries intact, the Codex Leicester is the only da Vinci notebook that is still in private hands. Two of his most important worksthe Battle of Anghiari and the Leda, neither of them completedhave survived only in copies. So it doesn't really look like a notebook anymore. French President Emmanuel Macron pictured in 2018 with the owner of the Leonardo, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Credit: Photo by Bandar Algaloud/Getty Images), "The Louvre is supported by the government, the ministry of culture and ultimately Macron," Cole tells BBC Culture. He was also frequently consulted as a technical adviser in the fields of architecture, fortifications, and military matters, and he served as a hydraulic and mechanical engineer. [6] Though the Louvre Museum had turned down the opportunity to purchase it for 100 million,[7] the painting was estimated to sell for $110 to $170 million. Following the French Revolution it was moved to the Louvre. An attempt to psychoanalyze the buyer of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Salvator Mundi.' Tim Schneider , November 17, 2017 The scene at Christie's New York on November 15. The writings in his notebooks suggest that he may have been a vegetarian, and there is also some speculation that he may have been gay. Oil tycoon Armand Hammer bought it that year, and 14 years later, Gates bought it at another auction. Whoever cut it up would be pilloried forever. Therell never be another painting that I shall sell for more than this painting tonight.. Qi Baishi "Twelve Landscape Screens" (1925): $148.7 million 7. 1. Top 10 most expensive works of art sold at auction - in pictures, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, Moment Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi sells for record-breaking $400m - video, Salvator Mundi painting by Leonardo Da Vinci before and after restoration, Leonardo's Vitruvian Man can go to the Louvre, court rules, Leonardo and Raphael art swap marks end of France-Italy spat, Short of imagination: Germaine Greer scorns Leonardo da Vincis art, Leonardo da Vinci events marred by Italy and France row, Rare Leonardo da Vinci notebook to go on show at British Library, World's most expensive painting is authentic Leonardo, insists expert, Louvre Abu Dhabi postpones display of Leonardo's Salvator Mundi, Leonardo scholar challenges attribution of $450m painting, Leonardo's earliest surviving work? Life of Leonardo da Vinci, a Short Biography 1. TINDERA: Right. A major turning point came when the painting was controversially displayed as an authentic Leonardo at a 2011 exhibition at the National Gallery in London. At one point, Pylkknen remarked: Historic moment, well wait as the the bidding went back and forth, pausing at just over $200m as it rose to break the auction record. Pierre-Auguste Renoir "Bal du moulin de la Galette" (1876): $154.7 million 6. Mona Lisa is not only Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting but the entire world's most famous painting. Mona Lisa. When asked whether Salvator Mundis involvement in the Rybolovlev-Bouvier case might overshadow its sale, Christies postwar and contemporary chairman, Loc Gouzer, who secured the work with a $100m guarantee, said: We cannot comment about sellers, but it has every passport, every visa.. TINDERA: Right. The role of most of these associates is unclear, leading to the question of Leonardos so-called apocryphal works, on which the master collaborated with his assistants. The Netflix series This Is a Robbery delves into the 1990 theft of masterworks including a Rembrandt from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. We also spoke with Stephen Massey, who we heard at the beginning of this episode. The unique fame that Leonardo enjoyed in his lifetime and that, filtered by historical criticism, has remained undimmed to the present day rests largely on his unlimited desire for knowledge, which guided all his thinking and behaviour. Unless new documentation surfaces (unlikely after all these centuries), or a new scientific method of authentication arrives (also tricky because the work has been so damaged), the mystery may prove eternal. And then amid all of this, he buys this one-of-a-kind Leonardo da Vinci manuscript at a Christie's auction for $28 million. And then, how do we rationalize the difference in the kind of object it is? Son of Daniel (conductor & cellist) and Eleanore Saidenberg who were Picasso's New York dealers from 1955 to 1973. When Leonardo was about 15, his father, who enjoyed a high reputation in the Florentine community, apprenticed him to artist Andrea del Verrocchio. However, other critics have disagreed with the truth of that claim. Later in 2002, Thomson donated his private collection, including the Rubens, to the. Christies CEO, Guillaume Cerutti, said he did not know whether the buyer would reveal themselves. In particular, Qi Baishi's Twelve Landscape Screens was sold for $140.8 million in 2017. By 1508, Leonardo returned to Milan, working for the French rulers of the city. On July 12, 2011, $75M was equivalent to 53M. In total, Christies said, 27,000 people had seen the work on a pre-sale tour with stops in Hong Kong, London and San Francisco. But there would, there are people in the world that would probably do that. So Gates buying Leonardo da Vinci's notebook is the equivalent of a typical 66-year-old splurging ona new iPad. Among Leonardos pupils at this time were Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Ambrogio de Predis, Bernardino de Conti, Francesco Napoletano, Andrea Solari, Marco dOggiono, and Salai. 1503-1519). And it was a challenge. Biography Of Leonardo da Vinci: How Old Is Leonardo da Vinci | Net Worth | People ProfilesPeople Profiles is a channel that dives deep into the lives of some. Finding a new one is rarer than finding a new planet, he said. DARREN WINSTON: Once we've decided that the book is worth looking at for its condition, for its provenance. He had an exceedingly inquisitive mind and made strenuous efforts to become erudite in languages, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, and history, among other subjects. A scene from Saviour for Sale, a second documentary about the Salvator Mundi, by French journalist Antoine Vitkine (Credit: Zadig Productions). In The Lost Leonardo, Evan Beard, a Bank of America executive who deals with art as investment, talks about the common buyers' motive of using artworks as collateral for other financial manoeuvres. In contrast, there are currently only nine pre-1875 paintings among the listed top 89, and none created between 1635 and 1874. Christie's billed the painting as an original work by Leonardo da Vinci himself. Leonardo da Vinci was described as having a gracious but reserved personality and an elegant bearing. The saleroom erupted in cheers and applause. This list is ordered by consumer price index inflation-adjusted value (in bold) in millions of United States dollars in 2021. That included footing the bill for not only the Codex he purchased for the $5 million in 1980, but also the tens of millions of dollars spent creating his own art museum in Los Angeles. He had just gotten married to Melinda Gates on New Year's Day of that year and was in the middle of building his multi-million-dollar mega mansion, Xanadu 2.0. TINDERA: Ultimately, in his appraisal, which Simon submitted in December 1993. In 1472 Leonardo was accepted into the painters guild of Florence, but he remained in his teachers workshop for five more years, after which time he worked independently in Florence until 1481. PETERSON-WITHORN: So I thought this was super fascinating that you could actually consider a work of art as something that could not only hold value and appreciate in value, but could also be a business, generating income for its owner over time. So, in discussing what the Codex might be worth today, Robert Simon brought up a recent sale of a da Vinci, which was of a teeny, tiny three-inch by three-inch drawing of a bear's head, which sold in July of this year for $12 million. So I thought, "What if Gates cut up all the drawings into individual little works of art and sold them off that way? [15] Not listed here in this list is Chinese painter Wang Shaofei's The High Sun, which was appraised for $74 million in 2017.[16]. And flipping through this copy, I have to say, I cant read a word of this. He created something he called the Codescope, which was software built to help museum-goers actually read da Vinci's backwards scrawl. Yves Bouvier, a Swiss art dealer, bought the painting from the New York dealers for $83 million, reportedly on behalf of his client, a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev, though this is disputed by Mr Bouvier. That these tales can work in a podcast, where no one can even see the work being described, suggests how much the allure of today's art-crime stories is in the skulduggery and mystery, not aesthetics. Usually estimated at "over 50 M" or "between 50 and 60 million Euros". Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci. At the same time, Bouvier was negotiating and eventually succeeded to buy the painting for $112 million from Ursula Ucicky, widow of, Some fear existed, that Portrait of Dr. Gachet had been cremated with the owner in 1996, but Gachet's portrait was privately resold to. Twenty-eight million dollars, then. But when I saw it, it didn't sit comfortably with me as an autograph Leonardo." At the time bin Salman was trying to burnish Saudi Arabia's image by loosening a few restrictions. A Belgian banker and collector who bought it in 1939 for $18,000. "As long as this painting is hidden from the world and the future and fate of this painting is unknown, it's going to be clouded in a realm of mystery and the world will be ready to read anything new. Probably, they knew there was room before the end of the competition., They wanted to get the job done quicker, but it still took a long time.. Five are traditional Chinese paintings by Qi Baishi, Wu Bin, Wang Meng and Xu Yang. How many Leonardo da Vinci paintings are there? Here are 20 of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous paintings: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol are the best-represented artists in the list. (or simply Leonardo) (Leonardo diser Piero ser da Vinci) (Italian, 1452-1519). Or is it? Alison Cole, editor of The Art Newspaper, has written extensively about the painting and saw it at the National Gallery. Leonardo devoted 12 yearswith interruptionsto this task. MASSEY: Nineteen-million five hundred thousand I'll be happy to take. Sowhat do we do with any of that? It's on the last telephone at $28 million. This sale tripled the previous record, and introduced a new era in top art sales. a 2011 exhibition at the National Gallery in London, Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of the Art World, Kim Kardashian was photographed next to it. The ensuing war left the clay model a heap of ruins. You can't really show it offwhether it's to your best friends or in a museum if you're a public institution. He also considered a painting done by Renaissance artist Pontormo, which was purchased by the Jay Paul Getty Museum for $35.2 million at Christie's in 1989. TINDERA: That average of every expert opinion worked out to about $130 million. Art restorer Dianne Modestini in a scene from The Lost Leonardo, one of two new documentaries about the Salvator Mundi (Credit: Sony Pictures Classics/Entertainment Pictures). TINDERA: Hammer is also the great-grandfather of Hollywood actor Armie Hammer. Self-portrait as Archangel Gabriel unveiled, Queen's Leonardo da Vinci drawings to be shown across UK cities, Salvator Mundi by Leonardo Da Vinci before and after restoration. CBS CLIP, CONNIE CHUNG: You know, you may be the richest man in America, or at least the second-richest man in America. The rest are owned by museums around the world. And if you liked this story,sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. ARCHIVAL CLIP OF ARMAND HAMMER: I guess I'm wearing a great many hats. His father, Ser Piero, was a Florentine notary and landlord, and his mother, Caterina, was a young peasant woman who shortly thereafter married an artisan. And my enjoyment in owning these wonderful works of art. The winning bidder would later be revealed to be Saudi Arabia's Prince. It next appeared at a Sotheby's in England in 1958 where it sold for 45 - about $125 at the time. Bouviers mark-up led to Rybolovlevs criminal complaint in a Mongasque court, alleging a scheme for overcharging him. Record private sales are believed to include $250m for a painting by Paul Czanne and $300m for a Paul Gauguin. No one in the art world knows for sure where the painting is. His Last Supper (149598) and Mona Lisa (c. 150319) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. Author of. Amid all of that the Codex went back to Christie's in 1994, where it was once again expected to bring $10 million. TINDERA: Simon shared with us his own process for how he estimated the fair market value in the appraisal he put together nearly 30 years ago. On the last telephone, 18 million. PETERSON-WITHORN: After the auction, he told the press, I'm very happy with the price. He's the head of the Books, Maps and Manuscripts department at Freeman's Auction House in Philadelphia. In the film, the art historian Frank Zllner, who has compiled a catalogue raisonn of Leonardo's paintings, wryly calls the Salvator Mundi "a masterpiece by Dianne Modestini," who made it "more Leonardesque than Leonardo had done." July 8, 2021. This wall painting in the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, allowed Leonardo to explore how the body communicates inner states of being. And so I think it's, you know, not so much, Let's look at it and see what would happen if we took scissors to it and divided it up. But just to say, Here we have something of such significance, partly because it has survived 500 years without, you know, being destroyed.. The first is da Vinci's "The Last Supper," painted during his time in Milan, from about 1495 to 1498. Somewhere in Saudi Arabia, hidden away by order of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is the world's most expensive painting, Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. Gifted with a curious mind and a brilliant. Still, it was a record-breaking event. For example, on June 25, 2019, the American hedge fund manager J. Tomilson Hill bought a recently rediscovered Judith and Holofernes (1607) attributed to Caravaggio, two days before it would have been auctioned in Toulouse. Taking inflation into account, the 1962 value would be around US$900 million in 2021. At that time this was the 4th highest (unadjusted) price at auction and 10th highest price on this list. His was the last name on the 1988 provenance list; painting came from "a private collection in Arizona". His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of their time. At 18 million in this room. The painting, which dates to around 1500, was lost to history for more than 200 years, was damaged and badly restored, and was sold and resold as a minor work, probably by a Leonardo acolyte.. An exceptional case is graffiti artist David Choe, who accepted payment in shares for painting graffiti art in the headquarters of a fledgling Facebook. That's why these valuations can be so tricky. I'm an art dealer in New York. The image of Christ as The Saviour of the World was billed as The Last da Vinci at Christie's 2017 auction, where it sold for a record $450 million (342 million) to a proxy for bin Salman (yes, that bin Salman, whom the CIA found responsible for ordering the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi). 7 | The Macklowe Collection | | Sotheby", "Sale Offers a Reason for Relief at Sotheby's", "Ming Dynasty Scroll Sells for Record $77 Million at Auction", The Collection of Eleanore and Daniel Saidenberg, Francis Bacon (19091992) Portrait of George Dyer Talking, Francis Bacon Work Sells for $70 Million at Christies Auction, "sGallery: A Gauguin and a van Gogh Change Hands", Andy Warhol's "Four Marlons" auction results, "Magritte 'Masterpiece' Sells for Record-Breaking $79.8 M. During Sotheby's Sale", "China auction sees Qi Baishi painting sell for $65m", "The buyer of 422.5 Million Qi Baishi painting revealed", "What Are The Top 10 Al-Thani Family Art Acquisitions? [note 1] Where necessary, the price is first converted to dollars using the exchange rate at the time the painting was sold. Soon, the painting was on its way to Christie's. Months earlier, he had appeared on the cover of Forbes, and he was a member of our very first Forbes 400 ranking. His shares were of limited value when he was given them, but by the time of Facebook's IPO they were valued at around $200 million. And seeing these works enjoyed by people all over the world. I'll give everyone time. Last Supper (c. 1495-98) Leonardo da Vinci: Last Supper Images Group/REX/Shutterstock.com. Antoine Vitkine's film Saviour for Sale is most notable for some explosive additions about what might have happened behind the scenes at the Louvre. The general attitude toward art crime, he says, used to be shrugged off as "it's billionaires spending money, crooking each other", but today there is a realisation that "no, you can't loot that country's entire cultural heritage". Then we look at the condition, and we base the condition on what's in our hands, and how you look at a book thats 150, 170 years old. 1 for US$44.4 million (equivalent to US$50.8million in 2021). In November 2017 Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman paid $450 million for a da Vinci painting. The work, thought to be a 500-year-old portait of Madonna and child, is potentially worth over $150 million (100 million) if experts are able to prove its authenticity. TINDERA: The Italian government had reportedly been expected to participate in the auction. TINDERA: Okay, so to recap, when it sold in 1980, it was expected to sell for $10 million, but ended up going for half that. She was universally considered to be the painter's sitter. A Malevich Suprematist Composition sold for $85.8 million at Christies, breaking the record for a work of Russian art. TINDERA: On sale is a one-of-a kind Leonardo da Vinci manuscript known as the Codex Hammer. From about 1483 to 1486, he worked on the altar painting The Virgin of the Rocks, a project that led to 10 years of litigation between the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, which commissioned it, and Leonardo; for uncertain purposes, this legal dispute led Leonardo to create another version of the work in about 1508. According to the provenance in the auction catalogue, a few Italian artists own the Codex after da Vinci's death, including a painter named Giuseppe Ghezzi, who apparently sold it in 1717 to Thomas Coke, a man who eventually became England's Earl of Leicester. Privately resold for ca. Since the museums rarely sell them, they are considered priceless.