Leonardo is sometimes credited as the inventor of the tank, helicopter, parachute, and flying machine, among other vehicles and devices, but later scholarship has disputed such claims. But if our maximum value isn't $4 billion, then what is it? Rybolovlevs spokesman, Brian Cattell, told the Wall Street Journal the family hoped the sale will finally bring to an end a very painful chapter. TINDERA: Right. Georgia O'Keeffe holds the record for the highest price paid for a painting by a woman. TINDERA: So keeping all of those things in mind and knowing what he does about the Codex today. His drawing of the Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) has also become a cultural icon. Everyone spoke with the caveat that we could never really know what the Codex is worth unless it actually goes up for auction. Twenty-eight million. Hi, Chase. Christies had also found placing the work, despite its celebrity, hard to fathom. Leonardo da Vinci painting sells for $450m at auction, smashing records He needed to do that because in order to pay the inheritance taxes on a previous Earl of Leicester, who died in 1976, they needed to sell off some stuff. Simon has said that it took a couple of years after they bought the painting to become convinced himself that he was dealing with an original work by Leonardo. Privately resold for ca. Various vandals have tried to harm da Vinci's famed masterpiece, and 1956 was a particularly bad year. Edvard Munch "The Scream" (1895): $135.2 million 9. 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. The painting was sold in November 2017,[1][2] through the auction house Christie's in New York City. So first, we looked to experts in the world of rare books and manuscripts to learn about the qualities that make a book valuable. At an auction held at Christie's New York in 2016 during a contemporary art event, Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci turned into the most expensive painting ever sold, selling for $450 million at the end of a nineteen-minute bidding war. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to ourFacebookpage or message us onTwitter. When Bill Gates bought the manuscript, rather than naming it the Codex Gates after himself, he decided to rename it the Codex Leicester after an earlier owner. The painting disappeared from 1763 until 1900, when it was bought by Sir Charles Robinson as a work by Bernardino Luini, a follower of Leonardo. And if you liked this story,sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. The auction house would not reveal the identity of the buyer or even the region from which they came. At the press conference, Artnews reported, Gouzer spoke of the exceptional rarity of a work by Leonardo. The Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci. 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. ", https://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/art/art-sales-russian-buyers-inject-confidence-into-old-master-marke/, Picasso piece sets record for art sold at auction, qatar may have purchased Warhol's 'Eight Elvises', "Nahmads confirm Picasso's $115m flower girl will go to Paris", "Rockefeller Picasso sells for $115 million including feesauthor=Robert Frank", "DIC Sells 'Anna's Light' Painting For Y10.3bn Gain", "Regarding extraordinary profit associated with the sale of a certain painting owned by the company and revision of its consolidated operating result forecast", "How Basquiat Became the $60 Million Man", "A Basquiat Sells for 'Mind-Blowing' $110.5 Million at Auction", A Monet Sells for $110.7 Million, an Auction High for an Impressionist Work, "Qatar bought Ford House's $100-million Cezanne", "$100M for Czanne painting? SIMON: The Codex is something that for most of the year, let's say you have to keep it under lock and key and out of the light. Leonardo grew up on his fathers familys estate, where he was treated as a legitimate son and received the usual elementary education of the day: reading, writing, and arithmetic. The ensuing war left the clay model a heap of ruins. But uncertainty is key to the appeal of every version of the story, as Lewis tells BBC Culture: "Nobody knows if it is a Leonardo, so you too can play the game, you can do your own Da Vinci Code on the Salvator Mundi. With its sleek narrative and a wide range of voices from dealers to art historians to investigative journalists, The Lost Leonardo is the better of the two films, and benefits greatly from using Modestini as its main character. Twenty-eight million dollars, then. TINDERA: Now the audience in the room doesnt know this, but a representative for Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates is bidding on the phone. A Leonardo da Vinci painting has sold for a record-breaking $450 million this week, at Christie's auction house in New York. Leonardo da Vinci, (Italian: Leonardo from Vinci) (born April 15, 1452, Anchiano, near Vinci, Republic of Florence [Italy]died May 2, 1519, Cloux [now Clos-Luc], France), Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. 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". Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci. 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. 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. But now the Salvator Mundi has become the poster boy for the volatile mix of money, power and geopolitics that defines the art world today. The Return to Italy - the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre Museum in 1911. There are more and more platforms for telling stories. The Christie's sale itself was a highly staged drama, beginning with a marketing video that showed not the painting but the faces of observers most are ordinary people but one of them is Leonardo DiCaprio looking reverently at the image as if they were seeing Christ himself. By 1508, Leonardo returned to Milan, working for the French rulers of the city. One of the sources says the Louvre concluded that Leonardo merely "contributed to the painting," but that bin Salman would only approve the loan if the Salvator Mundi were labelled an authentic Leonardo. It came close. CLIP OF BILL GATES: Taking Leonardo's notebook and translating them so everybody can understand the way that da Vinci thought a little better than before is very important. The first question we're asking, but we're going to ask it again is, What are we actually looking at? If it's a first edition of Moby Dick, that's a great thing to have. It would not draw more than the Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450 million. That sold for $3.6 million at Sotheby's in New York in 1986. But it does have two anonymous sources, their faces hidden on camera, identified as high-ranking French government officials who had access to the Louvre's studies of the painting and to the French-Saudi negotiations. Guinness World Records lists Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa as having the highest ever insurance value for a painting. I'm an art dealer in New York. Leonardo da Vinci | Biography, Art, Paintings, Mona Lisa, Drawings On Sunday, May 29, a man disguised as an old woman in a wheelchair threw a cake at the Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci's legendary painting at Louvre, Paris. 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. But, because of the imminent danger of war, the metal, ready to be poured, was used to make cannons instead, causing the project to come to a halt. Before Rybolovlev, Salvator Mundi had been owned by a consortium of dealers including Alexander Parish, who had picked it up for $10,000 at an estate sale in the US in 2005, and had had it restored and authenticated. 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. Read about our approach to external linking. Something like the first printing in North America, or the first time a new word was used in print. What Gouzer may have meant is that buyers prepared to spend in excess of $100m on artwork exist in the modern and contemporary fields. Most art world observers thought the Salvator Mundi would be the centrepiece of a new museum or art centre in the region, but the painting has not been glimpsed in public since. In the past year two documentaries, the engaging Made You Look and the pedestrian Driven to Abstraction, tackled the case of the Knoedler Gallery in New York, which for nearly two decades sold forgeries supposedly by 20th-Century masters including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. TINDERA: That's Gates talking for a video posted on his blog a few years ago, around the time that he exhibited the Codex Leicester in some museums in Europe. The New York Times confirmed rumours that the Louvre wouldn't accede to bin Salman's demand that his painting be displayed in the same room as the Mona Lisa, giving it near-equal status. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) - The Metropolitan Museum of Art 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. All episodes of the Art Bust podcast are available now. The work of Leonardo is just as influential to the art that is being created today as it was in the 15th and 16th centuries, he said. As late as the press preview of the show, there was an empty space on the wall waiting for the Salvator Mundi, but it never arrived. 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. It then becomes a first edition of Moby Dick. On November 20, 2014 at Sotheby's, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art bought her 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. for the highest price sold. A Belgian banker and collector who bought it in 1939 for $18,000. He Died in May 2, 1519 in Amboise, Kingdom of France.His Famous works includes Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Vitruvian Man Style/Period: High Renaissance Biography. PETERSON-WITHORN: After the auction, he told the press, I'm very happy with the price. It's with you at $28 million. The film doesn't take a stand on the painting's attribution, but makes it clear that museums, dealers and potential buyers had millions to gain along with incalculable prestige by choosing to believe it is a true Leonardo. 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. Then I went to those other items that were of kind of the same rarity as works of the Renaissance that had been on the market. The sale of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers was the first time a "modern" (in this case 1888) painting became the record holder, as opposed to the old master paintings which previously had dominated the market. The Virgin and Child with St Anne by Leonardo da Vinci. PETERSON-WITHORN: The person who ended up winning the auction was Armand Hammer, the 82-year-old multimillionaire chairman of oil and gas giant Occidental Petroleum. Leonardo da Vinci not only developed his skill in drawing, painting and sculpting during his apprenticeship, but through others working in and around the studio, he picked up knowledge in such diverse fields as mechanics, carpentry, metallurgy, architectural drafting and chemistry. She tells BBC Culture, "Since then, Dianne Modestini continued to work on it. And one of the other, one of the principles and differences between, say an auction estimate and an appraisaland this is for what we call fair market value appraisalis that we come up with a single value, understanding that it's very rare that we kind of hit the bull's eye, but that is the opinion of the appraiser. 1. Leonardo did not seriously study Latin, the key language of traditional learning, until much later, when he acquired a working knowledge of it on his own. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. This possibly-Leonardo treasure's route to fame began when it surfaced at an obscure New Orleans auction house in 2005 and was bought by two New York dealers for a measly $1,175. It's not a da Vinci. - Celebrity Net Worth The Met has since returned the coffin to Egypt. Price excludes sales commission and other costs. So it's difficult to get much better than someone who has actually appraised an item. She was universally considered to be the painter's sitter. And Lewis points out that as the art market has enlarged, our world view itself has changed. So it doesn't really look like a notebook anymore. So Gates sort of went out and bought the ultimate book. Taking inflation into account, the 1962 value would be around US$900 million in 2021. In cases like these, that's why we have to turn to the experts who know more about this than us. Bouviers mark-up led to Rybolovlevs criminal complaint in a Mongasque court, alleging a scheme for overcharging him. TINDERA: Hypothetically though, Simon explained that our logic of taking one drawing and reviewing the sale price of that to extrapolate what a whole manuscript filled with drawings might be worth was something he considered in his own appraisal. ARCHIVAL CLIP-STEPHEN MASSEY, CHRISTIES: The Leonardo da Vinci Codex Hammer. Hence, every phenomenon perceived became an object of knowledge, and saper vedere (knowing how to see) became the great theme of his studies. This portrait was painted in Florence from 1474 to 1478. The current record price is approximately US$450.3 million (which includes commission), paid for Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi (c.1500). - The world's greatest art detective, - The men who Leonardo da Vinci loved, - The detail that unlocks the Mona Lisa. 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. If all we do is adjust the $30.8 million that Gates paid for it for inflation, that gets us to somewhere around $50 million today. Corrections? And how does that help us come up with a number for today? The figure more than doubles the existing record for an artwork sold at auction: a $179.4 million bid for a Picasso in 2015. SIMON: And if you look at the illuminated manuscripts that are from, you know, missiles, and you know, these are Renaissance manuscripts, many of them have been broken apart. On July 12, 2011, $75M was equivalent to 53M. Since the painting first arrived at the Louvre in 1815, "Mona Lisa" has received plenty of love letters and flowers from admirers. To him, it was just his collection of scientific observations and illustrations and writings, mostly focused on the study of water. Salvator Mundi, the long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting of Jesus Christ commissioned by King Louis XII of France more than 500 years ago, has sold at Christie's in New York for $450.3m . Here are 20 of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous paintings: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. 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. I wana write a poem about it. But there would, there are people in the world that would probably do that. But we ended up contacting others who we thought might know the work well, too. The sale of Salvator Mundi, which was painted around 1500 and presumed lost until early this century, was Rybolovlevs largest to date. "I'm absolutely sure that six months down the road or a year, there's going to be some kind of new information, whether true or not, that's going to blow up everywhere in the news media," Dalsgaard says. MASSEY: Twenty-five million, twenty-six million. In The Lost Leonardo, a grinning Bouvier says his exploits are just business as usual: "you buy low and you sell high." I'll give everyone time. At 18 million in this room. 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. 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? His Last Supper (149598) and Mona Lisa (c. 150319) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. But one tries to lay out in a rational way, why one has a higher value than the other, why one has a lesser market appeal, and then try from that to come up with a single value. PETERSON-WITHORN: Exactly. Leonardo da Vinci: Facts, Paintings & Inventions - HISTORY Or is it? Why Would Anyone Pay $450 Million for the 'Salvator Mundi'? Because It depicts the dramatic scene described in several closely connected moments in the Gospels, including Matthew 26: . It's worth at least what Gates paid for it. 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. There was a bit of an odd snag with the purchase, and Forbes reported on it in 1994. And that's the number we're using to value it. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Bin Salman himself visited President Emmanuel Macron in Paris while the loan was dangling in the balance. Leonardo da Vincis total output in painting is really rather small; there are less than 20 surviving paintings that can be definitely attributed to him, and several of them are unfinished. 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.. [13][14], Among the listed top 89, only six are paintings by non-Western artists. Following the French Revolution it was moved to the Louvre. If one drawing sold for $12 million, that would mean that he could sell off this whole book clipped to pieces and earn something like $4 billion. Updates? Among Leonardos pupils at this time were Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Ambrogio de Predis, Bernardino de Conti, Francesco Napoletano, Andrea Solari, Marco dOggiono, and Salai.