Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” Sells for $450.3 Million, Shattering Auction Highs
- The hammer price was a round $400,000,000, which means that the buyer's premium alone was more than $50 million. By convention, the buyer's premium goes to the auction house for its troubles, but you can be sure that Christie's grossed much less than $50,312,500 last night. The seller will have negotiated "enhanced hammer," which means that the Rybolovlev family will be receiving significantly more than $400 million. On top of that, the lot had a third-party guarantee, which means that Christie's has to split its profits with the guarantor. That said, even after a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign, Christie's surely made a healthy profit on this lot.
- The last time this painting was sold by an auction house was only four years ago, in 2013, when Sotheby's sold it privately to Yves Bouvier for $80 million. That decision, to go with a private sale rather than a glitzy public auction, now looks very, very stupid.
- Bouvier then flipped the work to Rybolovlev for $127.5 million. When Rybolovlev found out how much Bouvier made on the deal, he was furious, and basically gave up art collecting entirely. His decision to sell the painting was made in anger, out of pique that he had been ripped off. Now it seems he has made more money off one painting, in four years, than most art collectors dream of making in a lifetime. There's probably a moral here, but I have no idea what it is.
- The difference between the 2013 sale and the 2017 sale isn't just four years and $300+ million, it's also the difference between a private sale and a public sale. A public sale, at least when it's orchestrated by Christie's in the way that this one was, involves glitz and expensive marketing videos and hour-long lines and lighting worthy of a Thomas Kinkade store; it also ensures the ratification of maximum publicity for the final sale price. Which is to say: Rybolovlev didn't own a $450 million painting, he owned an $80 million painting which he overpaid for by almost $50 million. But the new owner absolutely owns a $450 million painting, the only one in the world.
- That said, he doesn't own a very good painting. Even if some part of it was actually painted by Leonardo 500 years ago, most of it wasn't, and there's nothing in the 2017 version of the painting which would, from a connoisseur's perspective, place Leonardo in any kind of artistic pantheon.
- Which explains, at least in part, why a centuries-old painting was sold in a Contemporary Art sale, rather than in the Old Masters sale where you'd think it belonged. The world of Old Masters is, still, a place where connoisseurship matters. In the Contemporary Art world, by contrast, the only people driving valuations are collectors. Christie's realized that they could bypass the cognoscenti and going straight to the art-buying public. That strategy, it turns out, can pay off handsomely. Especially since, at these levels, it's fair to say that Christie's has a personal relationship with every human being on the planet who's willing and able to pay $400 million for a painting. You can be sure that all of them were contacted by the auction house at some point over the past month. And you don't need to know anything about art to spend $450 million on a painting; all you need is $450 million.
by Felix Salmon | Read more:
Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images via NY Times
