The most expensive painting ever sold went for $450 million

On 15 November 2017, Christie’s in New York sold Salvator Mundi, a portrait of Christ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, for $450.3 million including fees. In about eighteen minutes of bidding it became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction — by a margin that still looks absurd, more than doubling the previous record, Picasso’s Women of Algiers, which had fetched roughly $179 million in 2015.

The price is hard to separate from the picture’s story. The panel surfaced in 2005 at a New Orleans estate sale, a battered, overpainted thing widely taken for a workshop copy, and reportedly changed hands for around $1,175. Years of cleaning and restoration stripped away later additions, and a circle of scholars reattributed it to Leonardo himself — the rehabilitation that turned a sleeper into a record-breaker.

That ascent has never been free of doubt. Christie’s own catalog conceded heavy losses to the original paint, and The Art Newspaper has reported that over sixty percent of the top layer is gone, leaving experts to argue how much is Leonardo’s hand and how much is the restorer’s. The Louvre in Paris is widely reported to have hesitated to credit the work to Leonardo outright.

Britannica notes “there was not a consensus among Leonardo experts” on the attribution.

The buyer was later linked to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the painting was expected to anchor the new Louvre Abu Dhabi. A planned 2018 unveiling was abruptly cancelled, and it has not been shown publicly since — by some accounts stored aboard MBS’s superyacht Serene. The costliest canvas in history is also, fittingly, one of the most invisible.