D.he story about the painting “Salvator Mundi” is also fascinating because it can be told like a parable of our time. It’s about believing in the beautiful – art – and probably also about a form of longing for salvation, which is instrumentalized by deceit and greed for money, by power and political interests. For several years two documentary directors set out on the trail of the most expensive painting in art history to investigate the miracle of its rise from the inferior lot of a provincial auction to the allegedly last Leonardo for 450 million dollars.
After “The Last Da Vinci – The Most Expensive Work of Art in the World” by French director Antoine Vitkine was broadcast on French television last April and at the end of November also on 3sat, the documentary “The Lost Leonardo” by the Dane Andreas Koefoed can now be seen in the cinema . The decisive protagonists of this art spectacle – such as the dealer Robert Simon, the painting restorer Dianne Modestini, the dealer and financier Yves Bouvier, experts like Martin Kemp, the curator of the London National Gallery Luke Syson – inevitably appear in both films. It is surprising how frankly they report twice in front of the camera.
Andreas Koefoed divides his documentation into three acts: “The Art Game”, “The Money Game” and “The global Game”. The story of this painting has to do with theater, but also with gambling, in which those involved can bet on the same card and win or lose a lot: money or ego. Koefoed tells it with brilliant research like a thriller. The story and all the protagonists are exciting enough that he could have saved himself the sometimes flat illustrations with simulated mini-scenes – in the style of a dealer walking across the street with a picture in a plastic bag.
A sleeper, as the insider term goes, is a painting that is offered at auctions and its selling price is underestimated. It has the potential for re-evaluation through a more prominent write-up. Such a sleeper was bought by two art dealers, Robert Simon and Alexander Parish, at a small auction in New Orleans in 2005 for $ 1,175. The partially faded, but badly painted over in the face area, Christ painting with the blessing hand was written out as a copy after Leonardo da Vinci by “Salvator Mundi”.
“It’s not about love for art, it’s about money”
There are at least two reasons this sleeper has gradually become the renaissance artist’s record painting. British art journalist Georgina Adams names one of them: “Everyone wanted it to be a Leonardo, so everyone cast the most optimistic look at the painting.” In fact, there are suspicions that a Salvator Mundi was once painted in Leonardo’s studio. The other, less edifying reason gives Robert K. Wittman, the founder of the FBI’s art crime department: “This is not about the love of art, but about money.”
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