Salvator Mundi

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. Or is it? No one in the art world knows for sure where the painting is. Most observers agree that it is likely stashed in the Middle East, but some have speculated that it is stored in a tax-free zone in Geneva or even on the Prince's half-a-billion-dollar yacht. Is it even a Leonardo at all? 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). 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.

Veiled in layers of mystery and international intrigue, the story of the Salvator Mundi is an ongoing, endlessly fascinating saga, told in two new documentaries, The Lost Leonardo and Saviour for Sale: Da Vinci's Lost Masterpiece?, which play out with all the drama and suspense of a detective story. They arrive in the wake of Ben Lewis's high-profile 2019 book, The Last Leonardo, and dozens of articles. 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. 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.

"When we chose the title," Andreas Dalsgaard, a producer and a writer of The Lost Leonardo, tells BBC Culture, "the inspiration was partly that the painting is lost right now and the truth is lost, but it was also inspired by movies like the Indiana Jones movies that are full of treasures and treasure hunts."

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. They brought it to Dianne Modestini, a highly respected restorer, who removed decades of grime and overpainting, and was the first to suspect it might be a true Leonardo. 

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. She is a captivating, elegant presence on screen, with a whispery voice and wide eyes behind signature black or red-framed glasses. 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. But many experts think she did a drastic over-restoration. In the film, the art historian Frank Zöllner, who has compiled a catalogue raisonné of Leonardo's paintings, wryly calls the Salvator Mundi "a masterpiece by Dianne Modestini," who made it "more Leonardesque than Leonardo had done." For her part, Modestini has documented her work and the scientific studies of the painting, and published them online.

Most experts today agree the painting was probably produced by assistants in Leonardo's workshop, where he added some finishing touches – a common practice. 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."

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 for $83 million, reportedly on behalf of his client, a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev, though this is disputed by Mr Bouvier. 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.) Soon, 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.

"The Louvre is supported by the government, the ministry of culture and ultimately Macron," Cole tells BBC Culture. "And it is involved therefore in the politics around culture. So if Saudi Arabia decides that culture is going to be the way it opens up and the Salvator Mundi is going to be a key player in that strategy and the Louvre is offering to exhibit it, then all those things are tied up together."

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. Because the Louvre cannot comment on privately-owned works it has not displayed, the book can't be published, and at first, Cole says, the museum denied its existence.

Scandals and conspiracies

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 documentary covers much of the same ground as The Lost Leonardo, but less stylishly, with too many stock establishing shots of cities. It suffers from not having Modestini or some other compelling central figure. 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. 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 source says he advised the government that "exhibiting under the Saudi conditions would be like laundering a piece that cost $450 million". The Louvre and the National Gallery refused to comment for either film.

The two documentaries arrive at a time when films, podcasts and pop culture itself seem fascinated by art crimes, mysteries and forgeries. 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. Knowingly or not? That is still a question. 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. The series is full of conspiracy theories about the never-solved robbery.

And Lewis has a new eight-episode podcast, Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of the Art World, which promises stories of "the ugliest crimes, the biggest scandals and the murky in-between." The subjects range from Inigo Philbrick, criminally charged with defrauding clients by selling more than 100% of shares in artworks, to a golden Egyptian coffin whose smuggled past came to light after Kim Kardashian was photographed next to it at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute gala. The Met has since returned the coffin to Egypt. 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.

Many factors seem to have converged to create this flourishing moment for true art crime. There is so much information in the public sphere that everyone can have the illusion of being an insider. There are more and more platforms for telling stories. And Lewis points out that as the art market has enlarged, our world view itself has changed. 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". 

Amidst all these delightfully tangled histories, nothing rivals the Salvator Mundi. 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. "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. "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. Because at the end of the day, it's an entertaining story."