Why was Salvator Mundi sold into private collection?
And was it fair?
Ok, so after a truly crazy auction at Christie’s New York last week, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi ended up being sold for a cheeky sum of $450m, which smashed the previous record set in September 2015 for Willem de Kooning’s Interchange of around $300m.
Yep, that’s a shitload of money but many people are asking themselves why?
In part it helps to understand the -brief- history of the painting a bit.
So it was probably commissioned around 1500, and some sources say it may have been painted for Louis XII of France and his consort, Anne of Brittany. Fantastically enough, in the 17th century it ended up in the Royal Collection of King Charles I of England. After the death of Charles in 1649 it was included in the inventory and it was evaluated and valued at £30!! As part of the collection the canvas was bought, sold, re-bought, inherited and passed over by many kings, dukes and countesses. Eventually the collection was sold off and the painting was sold too and then returned where it stays hidden and forgotten until the beginning of the 20th century. By then nobody thought it could be a Leonardo and it was actually considered to be by a pupil of a pupil of Leonardo’s named Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio - so two generations away. This was due to the fact that when it was re-discovered it was almost entirely painted over and pretty much looked like a dark, dirty wreck. No wonder that while in the Cook Collection in 1958 the work was actioned for £45!
Finally in 2005, the painting was acquired for less than $10,000 (€8,450) by an Old Masters specialist and a handful of other art dealers who took an interest in it. They had long suspected that it could be a Da Vinci original under all that paint-over mess. And they were right.
In 2011 it was first exhibited and recognised as a Leonardo Da Vinci original at the National Gallery and later sold through Sotheby’s to a Swiss dealer and forward onto a Russian private collector for $127.5 million.
Ok, so from the moment that it was officially recognised by consensus as a Da Vinci the price soared and the interest took on epic proportions. This is obviously due to the fact that not only Leonardo Da Vinci is THE Leonardo Da Vinci, but also because he produced only a really small number of finished works throughout this lifetime. He found it very hard to finish a piece so because of that we now have a total count of finished works of around 20 paintings from which only 15 survived. Even more confusing, he never signed his work — which makes authentification a very complex and complicated process and disputes over consensus tend to go wild (thanks Leo!). This makes any painting proved to be an authentic Da Vinci a true treasure. In the words of art critic and historian Alastair Sooke “it is like discovering a new planet”.
My issue with this auction is exactly this. It IS a miracle when a piece by Leonardo is re-surfacing from the depths of oblivion so why sell it to a private collector instead of a museum?
Interestingly enough, no other original finished piece by Da Vinci resides within a private collection. All of the paintings are on display in galleries and museums around the world and I think that is for a good reason: he is undoubtedly our world’s greatest prime example of the Universal Genius and his genius should be shared and open to the public view. Leonardo should belong to the world, not reside in an anti-nuclear private basement on a remote island somewhere where it won’t even be viewed by anyone for the next few decades probably. So why did Christie’s agreed to sell it into a private collection?
Why?
Well, this is where it gets sad.
No museum or gallery had the money to buy it.
In 2012, Art in America quoted sources of industry specialists that report that the painting was being offered to museums for TWICE the sum of the pre-sale estimate of $100 million. The BBC reported another estimate of £125 million, which would also be about $200m. Such sum would require joined donations from a number of museum contributors and frankly, museums just couldn’t raise the money in time.
There is some speculation that they didn’t even want to because of the level of damage the canvas had suffered. According to Dianne Dwyer Modestini, the prime restorer of the canvas, the damage was so substantial that the museums showed reluctance to bid. She reports that the canvas was visibly sliced in half from the left of Jesus’s face all the way down to his chest, resulting in a lot of deterioration to his hair and face (the Da Vinci signature traits)— sometimes to the point of the surface wood showing though.
I honestly don’t know what to say about this. It is well known that in some cases damage actually contributes to higher price and richer history and I’m sure the leading museums of the world would have made a great job at not only restoring but even curating the accidents as part of the painting itself. We’re talking about a Leonardo Da Vinci here, I honestly don’t think damage to the canvas would have stopped museums from wanting to purchase the Holy Grail of art discoveries in decades. Not when the piece displays some of the major Da Vinci signatures and themes like the sfumato technique, the portrait, the hand gestures, the quiet aura and mysterious gaze.
But if this makes it easier to accept why we probably won’t get the opportunity to pay a ticket to see it, then yeah sure - they didn’t want to buy it because it looked kinda crappy.
So after the museums couldn’t buy it, the auction house was open to start the bidding for private collectors and the numbers naturally surged.
Not to mention that Christie’s decision to auction this classical Renaissance Old Masters piece at a contemporary art sale along Andy Warhol kinda exposes another dimension of frivolous and somewhat irresponsible handling of this piece.
This issue is increasingly becoming a major problem in my view because in recent years we’re progressively witnessing the hammer of the leading auction houses slam down at increasingly outrageous prices. This is simply showing that culture is becoming more and more a luxury of the top rich while museums and the public is being left out. Think about it this way: a multi millionaire oligarch will afford to pay any sum whatsoever to purchase a Rembrandt or a Da Vinci. But restricting the bidding to these ridiculous sums only cuts museums and galleries out and lets the big dogs fight themselves over who gets to have it as a mantelpiece.
How fair is that from a cultural point of view?
The world had just been given a miracle discovery just to have some rich few take it away again.
I don’t treat it as an issue about commodification of art, because you see, art (especially in the Renaissance period) was not looked upon as Art, but as a mere business, an industry meant for trade. It was a commodity, and a profession close in urgency to all the other gilds, from masons to leather makers. It was commissioned, made for the wealthy few or the State and Church and strictly bound by contracts and canon. It was not made in the modern philosophy of “Art for Art’s sake”. Seeing it like that, this painting is merely fulfilling its original purpose — to be bought and sold. My problem is with the overly exclusive facet of the selling. Not to overlook the fact that some little thing called the gallery emerged around the second half of the eighteenth century and now objects have another significance next to the monetary one. With the historical and artistic value this piece has it should be sold to institutions that take upon themselves to display it. To museums or galleries, or even so, to private collectors that are willing to lend it for the purpose of exhibit. For me, that’s the real issue: it must be opened to the world, no matter who legally owns it.
Would it therefore be possible for the art market to set a clause of public display upon purchase when the object is deemed of such high universal value?
I mean, don’t get me wrong here, the painting deserves a high-ass price — I honestly think it’s worth is practically invaluable but there are some issues to consider before putting it on the market.
Moreover, I wonder how high the prices can rise in a market where we seem to have a new record being set every auction season and how long this can last.
