1/14/2024 0 Comments Da vinci monster strikeMeticulous restoration by the distinguished conservator Dianne Modestini, followed by inclusion in the 2011-12 exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, at the National Gallery, in London, had seemed to vindicate Simon’s hunch purchase. Years earlier, I’d become aware of talk in the Old Master trade that an overpainted, under-catalogued “sleeper” of Christ as Saviour of the World bought by Parish and Simon at a routine estate auction in 2005 might turn out to be a long-lost Leonardo. Like Charles Dickens’s famous Jarndyce and Jarndyce suit in Bleak House, the litigation between the two men has dragged on for seven years now and shows no sign of reaching a definitive resolution. The discovery of this $47.5m overpayment and other multi-million mark-ups prompted Rybolovlev to sue Bouvier, claiming losses of almost $1bn from his agent’s secret profits. Several months later, unbeknownst to me, the article was noticed by the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who had bought the Salvator Mundi for $127.5m through his trusted Swiss art adviser and agent, Yves Bouvier, back in 2013. But this is what happened, after I revealed in March 2014, in the New York Times, that the Salvator Mundi had been sold by the New York dealers Robert Simon and Alexander Parish for between $75m and $80m in a private sale brokered by Sotheby’s the previous year. It’s not often that journalists become part of the story that they themselves are covering. I struggled to make sense of that result then. I was in that packed and rapt Manhattan auction room on 15 November 2017, reporting the sale for the New York Times. Until then, no artwork had sold for more than $200m at auction. Moments later, the heavily restored panel painting of the Salvator Mundi, catalogued by Christie’s as a rediscovered masterwork by Leonardo da Vinci, was knocked down to thunderous applause for $450.3m with fees, more than four times its estimate of $100m. The audience gasped and whooped as if they’d just seen a rocket explode high above their heads. Eventually, after more than 18 minutes of grinding competition between clients on telephones, the buyer saw off the opposition with a winning “jump” bid of $400m, topping the previous by a monster $30 million. It was like being at a very expensive, very exclusive firework display.
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