The quality of the painting itself divides people. The US art critic Jerry Saltz rails in The Lost Leonardo that “it’s not even a good painting”, much less a great Leonardo, while true believers gush that seeing it in person is a transcendent experience. (Maybe so, but in the films and other reproduced images it does have a more cloying look).
Some of the most eye-opening commentary in both films isn’t even about art. 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. 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.
‘Colourful characters’
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. In both films, Luke Syson, the curator of the show, stands by his decision. But many experts on camera and elsewhere in the press think he leapt to an early conclusion. Alison Cole, editor of The Art Newspaper, has written extensively about the painting and saw it at the National Gallery. She tells BBC Culture, “Since then, Dianne Modestini continued to work on it. But when I saw it, it didn’t sit comfortably with me as an autograph Leonardo.” Nonetheless, the exhibition went a long way toward legitimising a shaky attribution.
Two years later, some colourful characters entered the game. Yves Bouvier, a Swiss art dealer, bought the painting from the New York dealers supposedly on behalf of his client, a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev, for $83 million. Within two days he sold it to Rybolovlev for $127.5 million. In The Lost Leonardo, a grinning Bouvier says his exploits are just business as usual: “you buy low and you sell high.” (Swiss authorities investigated him for defrauding Rybolovlev over several artworks, but this year closed the case without charging him.) By the time the oligarch learned that he had been duped out of an extra $44 million, the painting was on its way to Christie’s.
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. 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. At the time bin Salman was trying to burnish Saudi Arabia’s image by loosening a few restrictions. 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.
It came close. The Louvre very much wanted to include it in its grand exhibition to celebrate Leonardo’s 500th anniversary in 2019. Bin Salman himself visited President Emmanuel Macron in Paris while the loan was dangling in the balance. 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. 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.