Time to think of another Christmas present for your ma, because Leonardo Da Vinci‘s Salvator Mundi is officially off the market. Yep, someone’s gone and snapped up the 66cm, 1490 painting of Jesus Christ for the very chill and reasonable amount of $592 million.
That’s $592,000,000 – FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY-TWO MILLION DOLLARS – for this:
Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece Salvator Mundi achieves $450,312,500, a #worldauctionrecord for any work of art sold at auction. pic.twitter.com/snKxm7t3cb
— Christie’s (@ChristiesInc) November 16, 2017
It is, in fact, the most expensive painting ever sold, eclipsing the previous record of a Picasso that sold at auction for $236 million in 2015, and a Paul Gauguin painting that scored $395 million in a private sale in the same year.
Salvator Mundi (or “The Saviour of the World“) depicts Christ holding a crystal ball, and astoundingly was thought to be a copy until 2007. It sold for just $60 in the 1950s, after once being part of Charles I‘s art collection. It’s also the last da Vinci painting to be privately owned – the other remaining works, which number fewer than 20, are all in museums and galleries.
In a truly wild trailer for the painting and its auction, which took place at legendary auction house Christie’s, you can see famous people including fucken Leonardo DiCaprio and Patti Smith staring in awe at the artwork. The lives of people wealthy enough to drop squillions of dollars on art truly are of another realm.
As for the rest of us, all we can hope is that it turns out that Salvator Mundi actually is a fake (some people reckon that because the images inside the crystal ball aren’t accurately flipped, it couldn’t possibly be the work of confirmed genius da Vinci), and maybe snap it up at the next auction for a tenner.
A gal can dream!
