Hype, Fraud, and Leonardo da Vinci

H ow did a painting that earlier this century was hanging over some guy’s stairwell in Louisiana, and sold for a pittance 16 years ago, become acclaimed as both the last and the lost Leonardo? Why is it now worth $450 million? Willful self-deception seems to have happened at several junctures. People want to have a transcendent experience. And they’re desperately attracted to fame. In the documentary The Lost Leonardo, art historian Frank Zöllner predicts that in a few decades the art world will be saying, “How could these idiots of the early 21st century see this as a Leonardo painting?”

Structured like a mystery tale, and steeped in skepticism, the doc directed by Andreas Koefoed scrutinizes the money trail that brought the supposed masterpiece Salvator Mundi to such fame that in 2017 it sold at auction to Saudi Arabia’s ruler Mohammad Bin Salman for $450 million. The previous record was $180 million; this is the most valuable painting on earth. And yet there isn’t a single solid reason to think it’s actually a Leonardo. There are several reasons to think it isn’t.

The painting in its unretouched state is something of a shambles. When last seen in public, the work had a beautiful sfumato and appeared brand-new, because it was: A restorer named Dianne Modestini dolled it up so much by painting over the painting that Thomas Campbell, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, guessed that 85 percent of it was a Modestini rather than a Leonardo. Before she went to work, Salvator Mundi had long cracks, was deeply faded, and had little of that Leonardo glow. What we are seeing is a Modestini, not a Leonardo, and she was given a stake in the picture by dealers who wanted very badly for it to become valuable.

Spotted by a scout in 2005, the painting was bought by him and a New York dealer for only $1,175 in an estate sale in Louisiana. Then began the process of hyping it. In London, the curator of the National Gallery convened a small group of experts who disagreed on whether the painting is a Leonardo; the master operated a workshop, and it might well have been by one of his assistants or even a second generation. Who knows? There’s no paper trail, no record of its provenance. But hope exerts a powerful energy. There are only about 15 known Leonardo paintings extant (experts quibble about whether some of them were done by his acolytes).

After one expert, Martin Kemp of Oxford, said the painting had certain aspects that made him think it was a probable Leonardo, the National Gallery made a breathtaking leap. It labeled Salvator Mundi unambiguously a Leonardo — not “attributed to” or “from the workshop of” — and this rebranding both sparked a sensation at the museum and made the painting immensely valuable. The documentary suggests that the curator who made this decision, Luke Syson, was not untempted by the frenzy he knew he would draw to himself and his institution by making this dubious move.

Thanks to the rocket boost of attention provided by the National Gallery, the New York art dealers sold it on for $83 million to a Swiss middleman named Yves Bouvier, who, in the guise of brokering a deal for the Russian oligarch Dmitri Rybolovlev, instead bought the painting himself, telling the Russian that the seller had driven the price all the way up to $127 million. When he learned he’d been taken for a $44 million markup, Rybolovlev was displeased. The most amazing detail contained in this saga is not that a painting was sold for nearly half a billion dollars but that Bouvier is still alive. He is even cheerfully interviewed in the film, happy to play the rogue. Rybolovlev set out to destroy him by litigation rather than via more traditional Russian methods.

Rybolovlev unloaded the painting via Christie’s, whose hype campaign was itself a thing of art — the art of marketing. The auctioneer dubbed the work “the male Mona Lisa,” sent a curator out to assert that there was no doubt whatsoever that it was a Leonardo, then put the painting on display with a camera parked next to it to film the reactions of viewers. Many were awed; some burst into tears, one was Leonardo DiCaprio. The reaction shots were the basis of a promotional video that added luster to the aura of this until recently near-worthless painting.

This film is somewhat overly focused on the sale and resale process, particularly on Bouvier’s small part in it. But a second, more stylishly directed documentary, Antoine Vitkine’s Savior for Sale: Da Vinci’s Lost Masterpiece?, which is being released next month, presses the matter forward a little. Anonymous sources in France tell Vitkine that Saudi Arabia did indeed, as merely hinted in the other film, bring the portrait to the Louvre in 2018 to receive its first full-scale inspection. Both docs say that the painting’s current owner, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, insisted that the painting be displayed next to the Mona Lisa for the Louvre’s exhibition, which marked the 500th anniversary of the death of the master. France had just made a huge deal to help the Saudis design a new art and cultural attraction in the desert, so there was a conflict of interest at its state-owned museum. Yet the Louvre’s experts ruled (using X-ray imaging and other tools) that the painting was not the sole work of Leonardo, according to the movie. Though a space was apparently set aside for it, Salvator Mundi did not appear in the Louvre’s exhibition and has not been seen by the public since it was sold.

Really, though, why would anyone think Leonardo would paint on such an inferior piece of wood, with a knot in the middle that would surely cause degradation? Why would the master anatomist paint a Christ whose second finger twists awkwardly around the forefinger? Didn’t its most beautiful aspects come straight from the brush of Dianne Modestini? Everyone who didn’t spend $450 million on this painting should breathe a sigh of relief.