Or, How to Turn a $1,000 Art-Auction Pickup Into a $450 Million Masterpiece.
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After Leonardo da Vinci (Italian 14521519), read the description.
Christ Salvator Mundi.Oil on cradled panel.
Among the people to choose the listing for Lot 664 was a Rockland County art speculator named Alexander Parish.
A major part of what I do, Parish told me, is educated gambling.
Parish felt very good about Lot 664.
My first reaction was that it was a very intriguing painting, Simon recalled.
It seemed possible that another period copy dating to the Renaissance would exist.
But it became apparent that no one else was interested.
His winning bid came in at $1,000.
It has been owned by a Swiss tycoon, a Russian oligarch, and Saudi royalty.
Gingerly, the dealer slid the picture from its cardboard container.
Then he placed it back in the box and drove it into Manhattan, where Simon was waiting.
The worthof their latest acquisition would be determined by the dealers ability to connect it to Leonardos inner circle.
As Simon waited, Modestini placed the painting on her easel.
I could recommend a student restorer at NYU, she said to Simon.
I think this needs a grown-up, the dealer shot back.
Two things immediately stuck out to her.
One was that the original panel had fissured, resulting in two uneven steps near Christs face.
The second major discovery concerned Christs blessing hand.
When hed examined the resulting images, he had seen a ghostly shape behind the blessing hand.
Modestini was not blind to the significance.
If Parish and Simon had somehow managed to stumble upon the latter, theyd be lucky absurdly so.
Theyd also find themselves playing an entirely different game than the one theyd set out to play.
Modestini concurredthat, in the parlance of the industry, the picture had potential.
She told Simon shed help restore it, but first it would need the attention of a panel specialist.
She suggested Monica Griesbach, a former student of hers.
The damage, it was considerable, she told me.
The planing was only the start of it.
When she chiseled off the auxiliary panel, the entire painting came apart in her hands.
In total, there were seven separate pieces, she said.
Worms had tunneled through the wood.
And the painting did actually come back together nicely, she told me.
Very few 500-year-old paintings have survived to the present day in perfect condition.
Sometimes restoration is just a matter of removing surface coatings that have degraded or darkened.
Often it requires more substantial work, including in-painting, which fills in damaged areas.
And yet restoration, like authentication, is a subjective science.
And if her efforts on the painting happened to yield insight into its authorship, so much the better.
Equally time-consuming was the muddy background.
Just the way the paint was handled no other artist could have done that.
The artist who painted her was the same hand that had painted theSalvator Mundi.
No specific technique used by theSalvator Mundis restorers was particularly unusual.
What sets the painting apart, one prominent art-world figure told me, is the scale of the restoration.
Well, yes, but that loss was 5 to 10 percent of a very large painting.
And that should be a key area of debate: Where does conservation become invention?
The 500-Year Recap
1500: Possibly painted for Louis XII of France.
1625: Acquired through marriage by Charles I of England.
1651: Sold to a mason named John Stone.
1666: Returned to the Crown under Charles II.
16661900: Whereabouts unknown.
1900: Sir Francis Cook acquired aSalvator Mundi.Was it the same one?
1958: Warren E. Kuntz bought Cooks painting at a London auction.
Kuntz gave it to his nephew Basil Clovis Hendry.
2005: Alexander Parish and Robert Simon bought the painting at auction.
20056: Restored by Dianne Modestini.
2007: The Mets Keith Christiansen and art historian Mina Gregori gave it their thumbs-up as a Leonardo.
2008: Sir Nicholas Penny of the National Gallery in London brought scholars together to view the painting.
2010: Warren Adelson came on as a third investor.
2011: The National Gallery includedSalvator Mundiin its Leonardo exhibition.
2012: The Dallas Museum of Art put an offer on the painting.
2013: Yves Bouvier purchased the work from Simon, Parish, and Adelson for $83,000,000.
2013: Bouvier immediately flipped the work to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $127,500,000.
The painting was to go to the Louvre Abu Dhabi but never made it.
It missed its scheduled debut in September, and its whereabouts are unknown.
While Modestiniwas restoring theSalvator Mundi,Simon was researching its provenance.
The picture had been auctioned by Sothebys in 1958 for 45 to a buyer identified only as Kunz.
Simon held up an image of his pre-restoredSalvator Mundito a black-and-white photograph of Cooks picture.
They were the same, down to that strange clowns face repainting job.
It was Hendrys family who put the painting up for sale after his death in 2004.
But before 1900, the paintings history is much murkier.
A painting believed to be theSalvator Mundiis mentioned in an inventory by one of Leonardos students in 1525.
Charles I was beheaded in 1649, and his collection was sold after his execution to satisfy royal debts.
And Simon found it significant that hisSalvatorhad been painted on walnut.
A lot of the other Italian artists of the time preferred poplar, he said.
Simon presents his own journey to belief as a reluctant awakening.
I was a doubter, he told me.
I didnt start out like a lot of other people might, saying, Its a Leonardo.
I did a lot of what Id call triangulation in coming up with a price, Simon told me.
And no art trophy was going to be bigger than a Leonardo.
Da Vincis appeal, Simon told me, is broad.
It goes beyond the art collector or the museum.
Hes treasured by everyone.
Hes a different animal.
The buyer wouldnt just own a painting; hed have a claim to the patrimony of Western civilization.
The asking price, the paintings owners would later decide, should be no less than $100 million.
But first the art world would have to accept the paintings origin story.
In 2007,Simon began surreptitiously showing theSalvator Mundito a hand-selected group of scholars.
I showed it to her, Simon recalled.
She said, Its him.
A few months later, Simon arranged for the painting to receive a fuller evaluation at the Met.
The moment where I allowed myself to think,Am I a guy who owns part of a Leonardo?
Penny knew of theSalvator Mundi hed seen the painting at Simons gallery on a business trip to New York.
Including a never-before-seen Leonardo in the show would be a major coup for the new director.
Simon had flown to London in business class with theSalvator Mundia few rows away in the coat closet.
The museum, the person continued, emphatically did not want to prove or even argue the attribution.
I left the studio thinking Leonardo must be heavily involved, Kemp later wrote.
This was almost certainly understating it.
On that notion, there would eventually be heated disagreement.
Others have aired plausible guesses about the true identity of the painter.
Landrus believes the paintings author is Bernardino Luini, the same artist that initially occurred to Parish.
In January, the museum pushed back its closing time until 10 p.m. for accommodate additional patrons.
To some critics, seeing theSalvator Mundiin the context of the established Leonardo canon proved clarifying.
Just look at it.
Its mere presence in the show would add millions of dollars to its value.
Was it on the market?
Kemp later wrote, summing up the whispers surrounding the piece.
Would exhibiting it mean that the National Gallery was tacitly involved in a huge act of commercial promotion?
In retrospect,it almost certainly was.
Standing in front of the painting, I was totally smitten, Anderson recalled.
He asked Simon whether other museum heads had been given an opportunity to purchase the painting.
Robert wasnt interested in sharing that information, Anderson told me.
And I didnt press him.
Dealers tend to take confidentiality as seriously as any psychiatrist.
Buyers get skittish: Did other people, with more practiced eyes, see something they didnt?
It becomes burned, its value severely diminished.
Still, as Anderson put it to me recently, I was willing to roll the dice.
He and Simon promised they would speak again after the National Gallery exhibition.
Which they most certainly were.
The room was fascinated.
You started to get all this energy about what we might be able to do.
We were methodical, Anderson told me.
But ultimately the museum couldnt come close to the $100 million asking price and talks collapsed.
The negotiations left Simon, Parish, and Adelson exasperated.
It had been a long road, Parish told me.
We were out of pocket on all these costs.
It was time the painting got run up the flagpole time to explore the possibility of a private sale.
The audience for such a sale was limited.
A mining-ore baron, Rybolovlev seemed to attract controversy wherever he went.
Hed been jailed and tried for the murder of an archrival (he was eventually acquitted).
I did not want to give him my personal guarantee on this painting.
Bouvier says a young woman, possibly a girlfriend, translated for Rybolovlev.
(Rybolovlev doesnt speak English, and Bouvier has no Russian.)
Its so beautiful, the Russian said.
Bouvier reiterated his warning about the authorship of the painting.
I said, Youre sure you want to buy this?
He said, Yes, yes, I am sure.
According to Bouvier, a deal was struck on the spot.
He would acquire the painting for Rybolovlev for $127.5 million.
(Bouvier disputes Rybolovlevs account.)
Then, on May 15, Bouvier sold Rybolovlev the painting.
Simon, Adelson, and Parish would also end up frustrated with the transaction.
They had no idea their painting would be immediately sold at a higher price to a different buyer.
Simon, Adelson, and Parish are prevented by a nondisclosure agreement from discussing the dispute.
On a warm morningthis spring, I visited Simon at his gallery on 80th Street.
Anyway, he continued, the two sides approach was hardly appropriate in this context.
Some of the best scholars in the world had determined that theSalvator Mundiwas a genuine Leonardo.
(Kemp later expressed a similar sentiment to me: You see this with coverage of celebrities.
Reporters enjoy knocking things down, dont they?)
While the painting was still in Rybolovlevs hand, these issues faded into the background.
The move made good sense, given the course theSalvator Mundihad taken in previous years.
The owners before [Rybolovlev] had run into headwinds, another art-world insider told me.
Major museums were hesitant; the sellers werent able to place it right away.
It became all about the marketing, and it was brilliantly marketed.
People are deeply taken by this work, proclaimed Christies executive Francois de Poortere.
You could buy it and just build an entire museum around it.
His words proved prophetic.
An image of the painting against a blue background smiled back at attendees.
The crown prince had reportedly bought it as a gift for the newly opened Louvre Abu Dhabi.
It is supposed to be a state-to-state gift, the person said.
Like when France gave the Statue of Liberty to the United States.
The other, Christies says, came from another part of the world.
The works on display at the Louvre Abu Dhabi are largely loans from other institutions.
TheSalvator Mundiwas supposed to be the cornerstone of its permanent collection and was set to be unveiled in September.
Instead, Abu Dhabis Department of Culture and Tourism has refused to discuss its whereabouts.
Into this information vacuum have rushed conspiracy theories.
According to several people with knowledge of the situation, the most plausible explanation is also the most straightforward.
And the art press, which should be addressing this in depth, has been very quiet.
No wonder: Most of their advertising is from Sothebys and Christies.
And wed have been doing that thinking in a calm place.
But, Syson added ruefully, something else happened: a melodrama of money.
