The dirt and thick over-paint coating a Renaissance masterpiece can obscure the true shape of what lies beneath. But when it comes to Salvator Mundi, that infamous study of Jesus Christ attributed by many to Leonardo da Vinci, the layers of intrigue covering the picture now match the murky stages of its lengthy restoration.
Last week another hidden layer of the story was uncovered, with fresh evidence of the likely destiny of the missing, record-breaking $450m (£360m) work of art.
The blank, beatific portrait dates to 1500 and might not initially be suspected of having, so far, cast a shadow over the reputation of two great European museums – the Louvre in Paris and London’s National Gallery – or of prompting lawsuits and rows between art historians and leading auction houses.
Now, according to revelations in a BBC documentary about Saudi Arabia, Salvator Mundi is about to be deployed by a Gulf potentate as the centrepiece of a grand new museum, designed specifically, some say, to “art-wash” away a bad name for human rights.
The work’s notoriety since its staggering sale in 2017 and immediate disappearance, together with its association with Leonardo’s great Mona Lisa, are being banked upon, it seems, to put a new Louvre in Saudi Arabia on the cultural map.
For Renaissance art expert Alison Cole, the Art Newspaper’s editor-at-large, new clues about the painting’s whereabouts have confirmed her suspicions. “The revelation that the Salvator Mundi is planned as the anchor exhibit of a new ‘very large’ museum in Riyadh – in the expectation that it will have the same extraordinary pulling power as the Mona Lisa – comes as no surprise,” she told the Observer.
“It was described as ‘the male Mona Lisa’ by Leonardo expert Martin Kemp and the term was enthusiastically adopted by Christie’s when the painting was consigned to auction in 2017. Ahead of the sale, Francois de Poortere of Christie’s New York said: ‘This is the holy grail of Old Master paintings: some people call it the male Mona Lisa. People are deeply taken by this work. You could buy it and just build an entire museum around it.’”
Cole wonders, as does the Leonardo scholar Margaret Dalivalle, if De Poortere already knew something the rest of the world did not.
In the 19 August episode of the documentary The Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince, a Princeton University professor spoke of plans for a big museum discussed with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The prince was the secret bidder who took the painting to its world-beating price in New York in 2017 and now the Princeton academic Bernard Haykel is suggesting the “missing” portrait is secure inside a vault in Geneva, ready to step into the limelight as a key part of Prince Mohammed’s bold cultural strategy, known as Saudi Vision 2030.
Haykel claims he was also told by the Saudi culture minister, Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, that the picture has been there since its purchase. “It’s waiting for the museum to be completed and then it’ll hang in the museum,” he added.
A new Louvre in Riyadh would be a second Gulf “outlet” for the Paris museum. The neighbouring United Arab Emirates opened up its own Louvre in Abu Dhabi at the time of the Salvator Mundi’s auction, so some had expected the painting to reappear there first.
If the painting is instead to become the “anchor” of a Riyadh institution, that might be a fittingly nautical term: only five years ago the art writer and lecturer Kenny Schachter claimed a scoop when he wrote that the portrait was being kept on Prince Mohammed’s 134-metre superyacht, the Serene.
Speaking this weekend, Schachter was characteristically blunt, restating the “bulletproof” status of his source. He claimed the prince’s yacht had been a safe hideaway because, “like anywhere he rests his royal ass”, it would be climate-controlled. He still believes the painting is “within arm’s reach”, arguing: “There’s no way a brat as spoiled as him does not have the work at his fingertips.” Schachter justifies his disdain for the prince by pointing to Saudi’s murderous treatment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
If you want a reproduction of Salvator Mundi for yourself, you could go to a small museum in New York, dedicated to the controversial artwork and reopening this weekend after a break-in. Some of the branded memorabilia on sale – from underpants and playing cards to a Barbie-fied pink poster – are clearly ironic. All the same, this image of an impassive saviour raising his hand in benediction has by now reached the merchandisable heights of the face of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, or an outline of Che Guevara in a beret, if not of the Mona Lisa herself.
Someone with a much bigger wallet could instead track down one of around 27 early copies of Leonardo’s design for the portrait, all made in his workshop. Or it might be quicker to just get hold of one of the convincing later fakes that pop up. The genuine 500-year-old painting, known as “the Cook version” and now attributed at the very least to Leonardo’s assistants, remains much harder to locate.
It is called the “Cook” because in 1900 it was sold for £120 to Sir Francis Cook, a British merchant and collector, who accepted its attribution to the painter Bernardino Luini. It then made a splash in the modern world in 2005, when it was “rediscovered” and bought by a consortium of art dealers for $1,000, before being painstakingly restored over three years by the husband and wife team Mario and Dianne Modestini. A new television series, starring Julianne Moore as Dianne, is soon to tell this story. The drama, also produced by Moore, is largely based on the 2021 documentary The Lost Leonardo, in which both Cole and Schachter appeared.
Salvator Mundi became a household name when the National Gallery included it in a 2011 blockbuster show devoted to its putative creator. The London curators had moved in quickly, following the excitement of the first attribution of a painting to Leonardo for more than a century. The gallery has since claimed it had no knowledge of any upcoming sale, although disputes continue about the internal process of attribution and, in particular, about the wording of the show’s catalogue, which left little room for doubt about the level of Leonardo’s input.
A National Gallery spokesperson said recently that decisions about showing such a loaned work follow a period of weighing up “the advantage in including it – the benefit to the public in seeing the work, the advantage to the argument and scholarship of the exhibition as a whole”. But that defence is not persuasive enough for Ben Lewis, author of The Last Leonardo, an incendiary book that questions the gallery’s methods and notes that London’s prestigious rubber-stamping of it as a full Leonardo proved quite useful to Christie’s come auction time.
Meanwhile, legal wrangles have rumbled on involving Sotheby’s, a Swiss art dealer called Yves Bouvier and a Russian billionaire, Dmitry Rybolovlev, a former owner of Salvator Mundi, who this year lost one of these ongoing claims. This suit was against Sotheby’s, which he had accused of a fraud linked to his purchase of the painting and other works via Bouvier in 2013. Rybolovlev, by the way, is also thought to have kept Salvator Mundi in storage in Geneva until its spectacular auction in 2017.
The Louvre may have struck lucrative franchise deals in the Gulf, but it too has not escaped controversy. In 2019, Salvator Mundi was to have been displayed in Paris for the first time since its sale. Prince Mohammed had wanted his work hung next to the Mona Lisa, it was claimed in a French documentary – and, despite the museum’s denials, Cole and the Art Newspaper later got sight of a suppressed booklet, produced by the Louvre, that detailed a scientific examination of the painting, looking at similarities with sketch lines visible behind the enigmatic smile of La Gioconda.
At the last minute, though, the painting was withdrawn from the show. It is now thought President Macron had refused to place the works side by side.
Tainted with dishonour and doubt, perhaps Salvator Mundi might prove just the right “anchor object” for a museum in Riyadh intended to distract international attention from a chequered human rights record.
And while the portrait’s financial value remains disputed, by now the number of words of conjecture, criticism and academic analysis it has generated make it worth at least its own small library.
• This article was amended on 25 August 2024. An earlier version described Kenny Schachter as an “art writer and dealer”; he is no longer an art dealer.
