Christie’s to Offer Last Leonardo Painting Left in Private Hands in New York this November

Christie’s bellwether postwar and contemporary evening sale in New York this November will be led by a different kind of blockbuster lot, one that is about 500 years older than anything that typically appears in the auction: Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, made around 1500 and presumed lost until discovered early this century. Believed to be the last Leonardo in private hands, it is estimated to sell for $100 million.

The work was revealed this morning at a flashy press conference at Christie’s New York headquarters at Rockefeller Center, where two doors slid open to reveal the gleaming portrait of Jesus Christ, the members of the press jostling to get pictures on their phones.

What was not discussed at the press conference, however, was the work’s involvement in a variety of legal complaints and international art-dealer intrigues.

In the early 2000s, the work was owned by a consortium of dealers including Warren Adelson, president of Adelson Galleries, and dealers Alexander Parish and Robert Simon, after Parish picked up a canvas at an estate sale that he believed to be a Leonardo copy. He paid just $10,000 for the work. After the work was restored, it was authenticated as a work by the man himself—a miraculous find—and it received its formal coronation when it was unveiled to the public at the National Gallery in London in 2011. Two years later, it was sold to dealer Yves Bouvier in a private sale brokered by Sotheby’s for between $75 million and $80 million.

Bouvier then sold it to the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $127.5 million, netting the dealer a margin of almost $50 million. Upon learning of the mark-up in the sale and others, Rybolovlev became suspicious of his art broker’s pricing decisions, and eventually filed a criminal complaint in Monégasque court alleging a scheme that overcharged him a total of $1 billion over 40 sales.

In addition, the consortium that originally sold the work threatened to sue Sotheby’s for its involvement in the sale, alleging that they got shortchanged. Sotheby’s filed its own complaint in federal court in Manhattan last November, asking a judge to rule that it was not liable for any potential misdeeds in the private deal between Bouvier and Rybolovlev.

When asked whether Salvator Mundi’s involvement in complaints filed across the world would affect its sale, or at least the optics of it, Christie’s postwar and contemporary chairman, Loic Gouzer, who secured the work, said, “We cannot comment about sellers, but it has every passport, every visa.”

Gouzer emphasized that the story is about the work itself, and, after noting at the press conference that there are fewer than 20 works by Leonardo known to exist, said, “Finding a new one is rarer than finding a new planet.”

Despite being half a millennium old, it’s being sold in the contemporary sale to complement the auction’s other blockbuster lot: Andy Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers (1986), a Warhol painting of Leonardo’s masterpiece silkscreened 60 times so that it stretches to the same massive size as the original. It holds an estimate of $50 million. (Both the Leonardo and the Warhol carry third-party guarantees.)