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. But even then, many Leonardo experts were dubious that the painting had more than a few brush strokes by him, and those doubts have ramped up ever since. A Leonardo da Vinci painting has sold for a record-breaking $450 million this week, at Christie's auction house in New York. The earliest sale on the list below (Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh) is from March 1987; with a price of 24.75 million (74.1 million in 2021 currency). Nineteen million on the telephone. Twenty-eight million. This episode was reported by Michela Tindera, produced by Michela Tindera and Jonathan Palmer, with additional research by Sue Radlauer. Thanks for joining me. 1. Early Life: Verrocchio's Pupil. Also of note is the decorative ceiling painting (1498) he made for the Sala delle Asse in the Milan Castello Sforzesco. 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. Gifted with a curious mind and a brilliant. Oprah Winfrey had bought the painting in November 2006 at Christie's for nearly $88 million. That he gave up both projects seems to indicate that he had deeper reasons for leaving Florence. So Gates sort of went out and bought the ultimate book. During his second period in Florence (1500-1508), he painted his most famous work, the Mona Lisa (ca. Two years later, some colourful characters entered the game. Amidst all these delightfully tangled histories, nothing rivals the Salvator Mundi. A tempera and oil mural on plaster, "The Last Supper" was created for the refectory . 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. When it sold in 1994, it was also expected to sell for $10 million, but ended up selling for three times that. Twenty-eight million dollars, then. PETERSON-WITHORN: Exactly. At 18 million in this room. Four hundred million selling here at Christies. Using monthly averages gives slightly different numbers, most significantly for paintings sold early or late in a year with significant inflation. 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. The first is da Vinci's "The Last Supper," painted during his time in Milan, from about 1495 to 1498. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Among Leonardos pupils at this time were Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Ambrogio de Predis, Bernardino de Conti, Francesco Napoletano, Andrea Solari, Marco dOggiono, and Salai. 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. What by Leonardo can we compare it with? So, I think we could legitimately set the floor at that price. Love film and TV? While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is one of the most intriguing personalities in the history of Western art. Self Portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. 1 for US$44.4 million (equivalent to US$50.8million in 2021). Leonardo devoted 12 yearswith interruptionsto this task. This is a list of the highest known prices paid for paintings. Omissions? 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. [note 1] Where necessary, the price is first converted to dollars using the exchange rate at the time the painting was sold. I'm an art dealer in New York. 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. 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. Moreover, he was no doubt enticed by Duke Ludovico Sforzas brilliant court and the meaningful projects awaiting him there. (According to contemporary sources, Leonardo was commissioned to create three more pictures, but these works have since disappeared or were never done.) Despite the excitement over the sale of the only Leonardo in private hands queues of people had formed around Rockefeller Center in New York to see the canvas many in the art world had wondered if the piece would find a buyer. 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. The Burlington House Cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci. CHASE PETERSON-WITHORN: Hi, Michela. TINDERA: Okay, so our $4 billion estimate isn't all that realistic. According to the Christie's auction catalogue for the 1994 sale, the Codex was described as being in good and stable condition. But as it turned out, he also had his own personal connection to the Codex. 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. We felt that offering this painting within the context of our postwar and contemporary evening sale is a testament to the enduring relevance of this picture.. This painting depicted St. Anne, her daughter the Virgin Mary, and the infant Jesus. The Virgin and Child with St Anne by Leonardo da Vinci. SIMON: My feeling was that the Codex was quite a bit more valuable than any single drawing would be. 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. TINDERA: I'm Michela Tindera, and this is Priceless. 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. But if our maximum value isn't $4 billion, then what is it? 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. So Gates buying Leonardo da Vinci's notebook is the equivalent of a typical 66-year-old splurging ona new iPad. Leonardos artistic inclinations must have appeared early. 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. We asked Robert, if the Codex if it went up for sale again, could it compete with the Mundi's price? Bouviers mark-up led to Rybolovlevs criminal complaint in a Mongasque court, alleging a scheme for overcharging him. So it's difficult to get much better than someone who has actually appraised an item. "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. It came close. Or is it? He created something he called the Codescope, which was software built to help museum-goers actually read da Vinci's backwards scrawl. We know quite a bit about Leonardo's life from a mini-biography by Giorgio Vasari, a Leonardo fanboy and the world's first art historian.Born a nobody, Leonardo was a charismatic and complicated man self confident and not, driven and not, distracted and not. PETERSON-WITHORN: Thanks for listening to Priceless. After his death, Hammer's estate became tied up in a series of new lawsuits that began with the niece of Hammer's late wife suing for a piece of his art collection and other assets. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. 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. LONDON A tiny Leonardo da Vinci sketch sold on Thursday at Christie's for 8.9 million with fees, or about $12.2 million, a record price for a Leonardo drawing at auction . On permanent display at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa was assessed at US$100 million on 14 December 1962. PETERSON-WITHORN: And in fact, that fall he had just appeared atop our Forbes 400 ranking of the richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of $9.35 billion. ", Auction Records Fall at Phillipss Sale of Contemporary Masters, "Fernand Lger (18811955), Contraste de formes", "Warmer Response at Sotheby's 2nd Night of Auctions", "Hong Kong Billionaire Lau Sets Two Records in 24 Hours", Led by $66M Van Gogh, Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Sale Robustly Kicks Off Season, "Willem de Kooning (19041997), Untitled XXV", "Wang Meng painting auction for $62 million", "A Petite $69 Million Picasso Leads Sotheby's Solid $189 Million Impressionist Sale in London", "Property from a Distinguished Private Collection Pablo Picasso Femme Au Bret Et La Robe Quadrille (Marie-Thrse Walter)", Getty breaks record with $65.1-million purchase of Manet's 'Spring', As Stocks Fall, Art Surges at a $315.8 Million Sale, Claude Monet's "Le Bassin aux nymphas" auction results, A Zao Wou-Ki painting sold for $65 million, breaking records for a work by an Asian artist, Zao Wou-Ki's "Juin-Octobre 1985" auction results, The Most Expensive Paintings ever sold list by theartwolf, Oeuvres d'art les plus dispendieuses au monde, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_most_expensive_paintings&oldid=1140779647, Private Collection, New York, United States, This page was last edited on 21 February 2023, at 19:17. 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. The London art dealer Philip Mould called the idea of including Salvator Mundi in a contemporary sale inspired. The Louvre very much wanted to include it in its grand exhibition to celebrate Leonardo's 500th anniversary in 2019. The Salvator Mundi can be exhibited, and if it goes to a museum in Saudi Arabia, and people travel there and go to see it, I mean, it would have in terms of that income value I was talking about, it would have, you know, a phenomenal one, you know, perhaps quite in excess of the $450 million that it brought at auction. [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. But many experts think she did a drastic over-restoration. 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.. A Leonardo, even one as dulled as this, could prove an amusing conversation piece. Last Supper (c. 1495-98) Leonardo da Vinci: Last Supper Images Group/REX/Shutterstock.com. It depicts the dramatic scene described in several closely connected moments in the Gospels, including Matthew 26: . 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. The Top 10 Most Expensive Paintings Ever Sold At Auctions 10. Rybolovlev resold Te Fare in February 2017 at Christie's in London for $25 million. Leonardo grew up on his fathers familys estate, where he was treated as a legitimate son and received the usual elementary education of that day: reading, writing, and arithmetic. [5], The list is incomplete with respect to sales between private parties, as these are not always reported and, even if they are, details like the purchase price may remain secret. Two of his most important worksthe Battle of Anghiari and the Leda, neither of them completedhave survived only in copies. Five are traditional Chinese paintings by Qi Baishi, Wu Bin, Wang Meng and Xu Yang. 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 pulled together a list of artwork that he found it to be similar to. The case led to the resignation of Monacos then justice minister, Philippe Narmino. Ford House couldn't refuse", "Secret $100 Million Czanne Sale in Detroit artnet News", "Chteau Ptrus Makes a Record-Breaking Saleof Art", Roman Abramovich brings home the $86.3m Bacon and the $33.6m Freud, "Femme assise prs d'une fentre (Marie-Thrse), 1932", Auction; `Blue' Picasso Breaks Record at $51.7 Million, Works by Johns and de Kooning Sell for $143.5 Million, "Russian Billionaire Takes 74% Loss on $85 Million Gauguin", "Now hanging at the Art Institute: Chicago billionaire Ken Griffin's new, $100 million Basquiat canvas", "Ken Griffin Buys Basquiat Painting for More Than $100 Million", The Getty secures masterpiece portrait by Titian, Mark Rothko painting sets post-war auction record, Hopper Painting Sells for Record $91.9 Million at Christies, "ARTnews: Cohen Buys Two Works from Wynn in $120M Deal", David Hockney Painting Sells for $90 Million, Smashing Record for Living Artist, "Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale Fine Art Auction Search Results Christie's", "Revealed: $72.8m Rockefeller Rothko has gone to Qatar", https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-heirs-of-a-jewish-banker-are-taking-a-japanese-company-to-court-over-an-allegedly-nazi-looted-van-gogh/ar-AA15sviM?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=cc9460cf2a05415db49f7eb48ba01da2, "How Robert Rauschenberg 'rewrote the rules of the game', "Report: Alice Walton Was Buyer of Record-Breaking $88.8 M. Rauschenberg at Christie's", A Warhol Leads a Night of Soaring Prices at Christies, Andy Warhol's "Triple Elvis" auction results, "Basquiat's In This Case headlines Christie's inaugural 21st Century Evening Sale at $93,105,000". "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. So it doesn't really look like a notebook anymore. Something like the first printing in North America, or the first time a new word was used in print. Amid all of that the Codex went back to Christie's in 1994, where it was once again expected to bring $10 million. She tells BBC Culture, "Since then, Dianne Modestini continued to work on it. 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. So of course, da Vinci never called it the Codex Leicester or the Codex Hammer. 1 (Royal Red and Blue)", "Claude Monet (18401926), Odalisque couche aux magnolias", "Basquiat Tops Phillips Contemporary Sale at $85 Million", "Titian masterpiece Diana and Callisto saved for nation", "No. The artwork alone garners thousands of visitors from around the world to the famous gallery it is placed in - the . No one in the art world knows for sure where the painting is. But just weeks before the auction happened, a devastating earthquake struck Italy and the government ended up skipping the sale. 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 Christies in New York for $450.3m, including auction house premium, shattering the world record for any work of art sold at auction. An artist by disposition and endowment, he considered his eyes to be his main avenue to knowledge; to Leonardo, sight was mans highest sense because it alone conveyed the facts of experience immediately, correctly, and with certainty. The two documentaries arrive at a time when films, podcasts and pop culture itself seem fascinated by art crimes, mysteries and forgeries. At the time bin Salman was trying to burnish Saudi Arabia's image by loosening a few restrictions. Well, as we mentioned, the most expensive painting ever sold at auction was the Salvator Mundi for $450 million. A jump to $400m. Six million dollars, thank you. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. 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". And then amid. Cole was the first to report, in March 2020, the existence of a 46-page booklet the Louvre prepared for publication but never released, which asserts that the piece is an authentic Leonardo. He used his superb intellect, unusual powers of observation, and mastery of the art of drawing to study nature itself, a line of inquiry that allowed his dual pursuits of art and science to flourish. There are Leonardo's drawings of the head and bust of Leda; a famous drawing was done in 1506 by Raphael; a red chalk drawing which may have been done by an assistant to Leonardo; a picture by Bugiardini which was based upon Leonardo's original cartoon (done in 1504); another copy probably by Francesco Melzi and based on Leonardo's second cartoon Now There's No Sign of It", "Leonardo da Vinci Painting 'Salvator Mundi' Sells for $450.3 Million", "Billionaire Griffin Pays $500 Million for Two Paintings", Welt-online: Das Rtsel vom teuersten Bild aller Zeiten, "Qatar Purchases Czanne's The Card Players for More Than $250 Million, Highest Price Ever for a Work of Art", "Lawsuit Reveals Gauguin Painting Was Not World's Most Expensive", "Gauguin Painting Is Said to Fetch Nearly $300 Million", "Russian Billionaire Seeks to Pull Sotheby's Into Art-World Fight", "The tangled history of Klimt's '$170m' Water Serpents", "The Billionaire, the Dealer, and the $186 Million Rothko", Portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit by Rembrandt, an exceptionnal acquisition exhibited at the Muse du Louvre, "Buyer of record-setting Picasso painting revealed", "Picasso and Giacometti Artworks Top $120 Million Each at Christie's Sale", "Netherlands to buy Rembrandt Standard Bearer self-portrait", "The Netherlands Is Ready to Spend $198 Million to Bring a Rembrandt Self-Portrait Back Home for Good", "Chinese Taxi Driver Turned Billionaire Bought Modigliani Painting", "With $170.4 Million Sale at Auction, Modigliani Work Joins Rarefied Nine-Figure Club", A Pollock Is Sold, Possibly for a Record Price, "Auction Sales Down at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips, in a Challenging 2016", "Agnes Gund Sells a Lichtenstein to Start Criminal Justice Fund", "Steve Cohen buys Roy Lichtenstein's 'Masterpiece' for $165 million", Lauder Pays $135 Million, a Record, for a Klimt Portrait, $616 Million Poorer, Hedge Fund Owner Still Buys Art, "The Gustav Klimt Painting Oprah Reportedly Sold for $150M Has Quite a Story", "Francis Bacon triptych smashes art auction record", Buyer of $142.4 Million Bacon Triptych Identified as Elaine Wynn, "Bacon's Study of Freud Sells for $142.4 Million", "Qi Baishi Just Became the First Chinese Artist to Break the $100 Million Mark at Auction", An Art Mystery Solved: Mogul Is 'Scream' Buyer, "A $100 Million Mystery: A Russian, His Art, and His Big Losses", "Planting a Johns 'Flag' in a Private Collection", "Who Bought the Brody Picasso for $106m? It is believed to have been compiled between 1506 and 1510. CBS CLIP, BILL GATES: Well, that's simply based on taking the stock I own in Microsoft and doing some type of multiplication. TINDERA: Slicing up and selling off a beautiful manuscript or book is not without precedent, though, Robert explained to us. One of my hats I wearI'm a capitalist. His Last Supper (149598) and Mona Lisa (c. 150319) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. PETERSON-WITHORN: Given Simon's connections to the Salvator Mundi, and his experience running a gallery of Old Masters works, he seemed like an excellent source to speak with for this valuation. 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 Whoever cut it up would be pilloried forever. St John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci. TINDERA: Robert pointed out one other unique distinction. Leonardo da vinci was an Artist, Scientist and Inventor.He was Born in April 15, 1452 in Vinci, Italy. But, it makes up only about 0.1% of Gates' $134 billion fortune, which we estimated for the Forbes 400 this year. 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.. It may have been that the rather sophisticated spirit of Neoplatonism prevailing in the Florence of the Medici went against the grain of Leonardos experience-oriented mind and that the more strict, academic atmosphere of Milan attracted him. But Christie's declined to comment, and a spokesperson for Gates never responded to our questions. Please select which sections you would like to print: Director, Central Institute for the History of Art, Munich, 194770. 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. 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. Portrait of a Man in Red Chalk Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. And so, the first place we looked were the auction records for the Codex from the 1980 and the 1994 sales. Billionaires just live in a different world. After the sale, Pylkknen said the sale had been his ultimate privilege. We should note here that we did reach out to Christie's, as well as Bill Gates to ask if they had any comments on the value of the Codex today. TINDERA: Right. The disciples, devastated by Christ stating one of them would cause his death, convey their feelings dramatically through their body language. TINDERA: That average of every expert opinion worked out to about $130 million. According to some sources, the painting had been sold by Argentinian art collector Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier for $300 million,[9] but the price was not confirmed by any of the parties involved.[10].