Here's how much the artwork is worth! Oprah Winfrey had bought the painting in November 2006 at Christie's for nearly $88 million. On permanent display at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa was assessed at US$100 million on 14 December 1962. Yves Bouvier, a Swiss art dealer, bought the painting from the New York dealers for $83 million, reportedly on behalf of his client, a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev, though this is disputed by Mr Bouvier. That estimate sort of got you thinking in another direction, though, right Chase? Fifty-fivefive-point-five million dollars to start it. It next appeared at a Sotheby's in England in 1958 where it sold for 45 - about $125 at the time. He told us via email that his guess would be, "over $100 million." So if Saudi Arabia decides that culture is going to be the way it opens up and the Salvator Mundi is going to be a key player in that strategy and the Louvre is offering to exhibit it, then all those things are tied up together.". And Lewis points out that as the art market has enlarged, our world view itself has changed. And then amid all of this, he buys this one-of-a-kind Leonardo da Vinci manuscript at a Christie's auction for $28 million. Christies CEO, Guillaume Cerutti, said he did not know whether the buyer would reveal themselves. This portrait was painted in Florence from 1474 to 1478. On the last telephone, 18 million. The Burlington House Cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci. That's why these valuations can be so tricky. Most art world observers thought the Salvator Mundi would be the centrepiece of a new museum or art centre in the region, but the painting has not been glimpsed in public since. Finding a new one is rarer than finding a new planet, he said. Early Life: Verrocchio's Pupil. In this period, he painted very little and instead focused on his scientific activity, specifically his study of anatomy. Alison Cole, editor of The Art Newspaper, has written extensively about the painting and saw it at the National Gallery. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of their time. One of my hats I wearI'm a capitalist. According to the provenance in the auction catalogue, a few Italian artists own the Codex after da Vinci's death, including a painter named Giuseppe Ghezzi, who apparently sold it in 1717 to Thomas Coke, a man who eventually became England's Earl of Leicester. And seeing these works enjoyed by people all over the world. He also pulled together a list of artwork that he found it to be similar to. Last Supper (c. 1495-98) Leonardo da Vinci: Last Supper Images Group/REX/Shutterstock.com. On the telephone in this room at $28 million. As a master artist, Leonardo maintained an extensive workshop in Milan, employing apprentices and students. It stayed with the Earl of Leicesters estate until 1980, when it finally went up for auction. He currently resides in Vinci, Italy. [11][12] Prices realised for just his nine paintings listed below, when adjusted for inflation to 2017, add up to over US$900million. It may have been that the rather sophisticated spirit of Neoplatonism prevailing in the Florence of the Medici went against the grain of Leonardos experience-oriented mind and that the more strict, academic atmosphere of Milan attracted him. The series is full of conspiracy theories about the never-solved robbery. 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Here are 20 of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous paintings: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Renaissance artist, inventor, polymath, musician, and architect who painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and drew the iconic Vitruvian Man. a 2011 exhibition at the National Gallery in London, Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of the Art World, Kim Kardashian was photographed next to it. Previewing the lot last month, Christies described the painting of Christ holding a crystal orb in his left hand and raising his right in benediction as the biggest discovery of the 21st century. Leonardo da Vinci, (Italian: "Leonardo from Vinci") (born April 15, 1452, Anchiano, near Vinci, Republic of Florence [Italy]died May 2, 1519, Cloux [now Clos-Luc], France), Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist And it was, you know, a thrilling project to be involved with. The Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci. Top 10 most expensive works of art sold at auction - in pictures, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, Moment Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi sells for record-breaking $400m - video, Salvator Mundi painting by Leonardo Da Vinci before and after restoration, Leonardo's Vitruvian Man can go to the Louvre, court rules, Leonardo and Raphael art swap marks end of France-Italy spat, Short of imagination: Germaine Greer scorns Leonardo da Vincis art, Leonardo da Vinci events marred by Italy and France row, Rare Leonardo da Vinci notebook to go on show at British Library, World's most expensive painting is authentic Leonardo, insists expert, Louvre Abu Dhabi postpones display of Leonardo's Salvator Mundi, Leonardo scholar challenges attribution of $450m painting, Leonardo's earliest surviving work? for the highest price sold. 1 (Royal Red and Blue)", "Claude Monet (18401926), Odalisque couche aux magnolias", "Basquiat Tops Phillips Contemporary Sale at $85 Million", "Titian masterpiece Diana and Callisto saved for nation", "No. Most experts today agree the painting was probably produced by assistants in Leonardo's workshop, where he added some finishing touches a common practice. ARCHIVAL CLIP-STEPHEN MASSEY, CHRISTIES: The Leonardo da Vinci Codex Hammer. Most observers agree that it is likely stashed in the Middle East, but some have speculated that it is stored in a tax-free zone in Geneva or even on the Prince's half-a-billion-dollar yacht. However, weeks after the grand opening of his museum, where he planned to showcase the Codex and other art he had collected over the years, Hammer died at the age of 92. The Netflix series This Is a Robbery delves into the 1990 theft of masterworks including a Rembrandt from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. And so, the first place we looked were the auction records for the Codex from the 1980 and the 1994 sales. Robert Simon told us that he thought it would not sell for less than $150 million. He Died in May 2, 1519 in Amboise, Kingdom of France.His Famous works includes Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Vitruvian Man Style/Period: High Renaissance Biography. That sold for $3.6 million at Sotheby's in New York in 1986. Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and engineer who is best known for his paintings, notably the Mona Lisa (c. 150319) and the Last Supper (149598). Head of anApostle. Whoever cut it up would be pilloried forever. But many experts on camera and elsewhere in the press think he leapt to an early conclusion. Later in 2002, Thomson donated his private collection, including the Rubens, to the. Billionaires just live in a different world. That included footing the bill for not only the Codex he purchased for the $5 million in 1980, but also the tens of millions of dollars spent creating his own art museum in Los Angeles. The first question we're asking, but we're going to ask it again is, What are we actually looking at? If it's a first edition of Moby Dick, that's a great thing to have. It's on the last telephone at $28 million. Rybolovlev resold Gauguin's Otahi before 2017 for less than $50 million. Portrait of a Man in Red Chalk Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Months earlier, he had appeared on the cover of Forbes, and he was a member of our very first Forbes 400 ranking. In 1472 Leonardo was accepted into the painters guild of Florence, but he remained in his teachers workshop for five more years, after which time he worked independently in Florence until 1481. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. According to some sources, the painting had been sold by Argentinian art collector Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier for $300 million,[9] but the price was not confirmed by any of the parties involved.[10]. TINDERA: That's right. The triptych had probably been reassembled by the Italian collector Francesco De Simone Niquesa, but were resold to a person in the US before 2013, This is the small version of the painting; the large version is at the. He needed to do that because in order to pay the inheritance taxes on a previous Earl of Leicester, who died in 1976, they needed to sell off some stuff. He applied his creativity to every realm in which graphic representation is used: he was a painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. It looks interesting. And then there's also rarity, or how rare this exact copy or version of a book or manuscript is. The buyer was anonymous, but the New York Times soon revealed him to be acting for bin Salman, a discovery that catapulted the painting into the geopolitical realm. In the film, the art historian Frank Zllner, who has compiled a catalogue raisonn of Leonardo's paintings, wryly calls the Salvator Mundi "a masterpiece by Dianne Modestini," who made it "more Leonardesque than Leonardo had done." But one tries to lay out in a rational way, why one has a higher value than the other, why one has a lesser market appeal, and then try from that to come up with a single value. On November 20, 2014 at Sotheby's, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art bought her 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. PETERSON-WITHORN: Given Simon's connections to the Salvator Mundi, and his experience running a gallery of Old Masters works, he seemed like an excellent source to speak with for this valuation. And if Gates himself had the Codex appraised since he bought it. Updates? [5], The list is incomplete with respect to sales between private parties, as these are not always reported and, even if they are, details like the purchase price may remain secret. Knowingly or not? TINDERA: So keeping all of those things in mind and knowing what he does about the Codex today. In cases like these, that's why we have to turn to the experts who know more about this than us. In New York last night, he said he had never doubted the piece would break records. A jump to $400m. That he gave up both projects seems to indicate that he had deeper reasons for leaving Florence. So I thought, "What if Gates cut up all the drawings into individual little works of art and sold them off that way? [13][14], Among the listed top 89, only six are paintings by non-Western artists. That these tales can work in a podcast, where no one can even see the work being described, suggests how much the allure of today's art-crime stories is in the skulduggery and mystery, not aesthetics. SIMON: And if you look at the illuminated manuscripts that are from, you know, missiles, and you know, these are Renaissance manuscripts, many of them have been broken apart. Biography Of Leonardo da Vinci: How Old Is Leonardo da Vinci | Net Worth | People ProfilesPeople Profiles is a channel that dives deep into the lives of some. From about 1483 to 1486, he worked on the altar painting The Virgin of the Rocks, a project that led to 10 years of litigation between the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, which commissioned it, and Leonardo; for uncertain purposes, this legal dispute led Leonardo to create another version of the work in about 1508. "A Botticelli Portrait Sells for $92 Million at Sotheby's Auction", "Christie's 'Secret Weapon' in Rockefeller's 'Sale of the Century' | Auctions News | THE VALUE | Art News", "Claude Monet (18401926), Nymphas en fleur", Greatest German Renaissance Madonna sold by prince, Vincent van Gogh (18531890) Laboureur dans un champ, U.K. Buys Titian Diana Painting for 50 Million Pounds, Titian deal paves way for next acquisition, "Mark Rothko: No. (or simply Leonardo) (Leonardo diser Piero ser da Vinci) (Italian, 1452-1519). His father, Ser Piero, was a Florentine notary and landlord, and his mother, Caterina, was a young peasant woman who shortly thereafter married an artisan. There is hardly a person on this planet that doesn't know about this artwork. All episodes of the Art Bust podcast are available now. She tells BBC Culture, "Since then, Dianne Modestini continued to work on it. TINDERA: In his appraisal Simon selected five comparable works all from the Renaissance era. The Louvre very much wanted to include it in its grand exhibition to celebrate Leonardo's 500th anniversary in 2019. As he would throughout his life, Leonardo set boundless goals for himself; if one traces the outlines of his work for this period, or for his life as a whole, one is tempted to call it a grandiose unfinished symphony.. He was the auctioneer at the 1994 Christie's sale. Twenty-eight million. Also of note is the decorative ceiling painting (1498) he made for the Sala delle Asse in the Milan Castello Sforzesco. By 1508, Leonardo returned to Milan, working for the French rulers of the city. We know quite a bit about Leonardo's life from a mini-biography by Giorgio Vasari, a Leonardo fanboy and the world's first art historian.Born a nobody, Leonardo was a charismatic and complicated man self confident and not, driven and not, distracted and not. Everyone spoke with the caveat that we could never really know what the Codex is worth unless it actually goes up for auction. In 1472 Leonardo was accepted into the painters guild of Florence, but he remained in his teachers workshop for five more years, after which time he worked independently in Florence until 1481. A Leonardo da Vinci painting has sold for a record-breaking $450 million this week, at Christie's auction house in New York. Using monthly averages gives slightly different numbers, most significantly for paintings sold early or late in a year with significant inflation. MASSEY: Twenty-seven million. In contrast, there are currently only nine pre-1875 paintings among the listed top 89, and none created between 1635 and 1874. The bidding then resumed: $353m, $355m. Leonardo spent 17 years in Milan, until Ludovicos fall from power in 1499. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to ourFacebookpage or message us onTwitter. Among Leonardos pupils at this time were Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Ambrogio de Predis, Bernardino de Conti, Francesco Napoletano, Andrea Solari, Marco dOggiono, and Salai. The painting disappeared from 1763 until 1900, when it was bought by Sir Charles Robinson as a work by Bernardino Luini, a follower of Leonardo. Well, as we mentioned, the most expensive painting ever sold at auction was the Salvator Mundi for $450 million. So Gates buying Leonardo da Vinci's notebook is the equivalent of a typical 66-year-old splurging ona new iPad. When Bill Gates bought the manuscript, rather than naming it the Codex Gates after himself, he decided to rename it the Codex Leicester after an earlier owner. Veiled in layers of mystery and international intrigue, the story of the Salvator Mundi is an ongoing, endlessly fascinating saga, told in two new documentaries, The Lost Leonardo and Saviour for Sale: Da Vinci's Lost Masterpiece?, which play out with all the drama and suspense of a detective story. MICHELA TINDERA: So its 1994, and were listening to an auction in a salesroom at Christie's in Manhattan. This episode was reported by Michela Tindera, produced by Michela Tindera and Jonathan Palmer, with additional research by Sue Radlauer. Six million dollars, thank you. Trained in Florence as a painter and sculptor in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488), Leonardo is also celebrated for his scientific contributions. Two of his most important worksthe Battle of Anghiari and the Leda, neither of them completedhave survived only in copies. TINDERA: On sale is a one-of-a kind Leonardo da Vinci manuscript known as the Codex Hammer. Ludovicos fall in 1499 sealed the fate of this abortive undertaking, which was perhaps the grandest concept of a monument in the 15th century. A lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci may have been found in a Scottish farmhouse, reported The Daily Mail. Leonardos parents were unmarried at the time of his birth. This is the mirror where we flip it around, and now here it is in English. No one in the art world knows for sure where the painting is. A Malevich Suprematist Composition sold for $85.8 million at Christies, breaking the record for a work of Russian art. Alan Wintermute, a senior specialist in old master paintings at Christies in London, called it the holy grail of old masters. JoinBBC Culture Film and TV Clubon Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. The work of Leonardo is just as influential to the art that is being created today as it was in the 15th and 16th centuries, he said. There is so much information in the public sphere that everyone can have the illusion of being an insider. But there would, there are people in the world that would probably do that. The Wikipedia template uses a yearly average inflation. Author of. Before the auction opened, the 500-year-old Leonardo da Vinci painting was estimated to sell for $100 million. TINDERA: Robert Simon is perhaps best known in the art world for having a very close connection to a painting that is synonymous with money, power and controversy: the Salvator Mundi. For those who don't know it, it's a painting of Christ that sold at a Christie's auction in 2017 for $450 million, which is by far the most expensive work of art that's ever sold at auction. The only non-Western modern artwork listed is that of the Chinese-French painter Zao Wouki's oil painting Juin-Octobre 1985, which was sold for $65 million in 2018. It is believed to have been compiled between 1506 and 1510. [3] Leonardo da Vinci: Last Supper. PETERSON-WITHORN: And the fifth was a drawing by Michelangelo called The Holy Family with the Infant St. John the Baptist, which also sold to the Getty Museum in 1993, for $6.3 million. SIMON: These went into the mix. [15] Not listed here in this list is Chinese painter Wang Shaofei's The High Sun, which was appraised for $74 million in 2017.[16]. TINDERA: Gates is up against a group from a bank in Milan thats sitting in the front of the Christie's salesroom. This painting depicted St. Anne, her daughter the Virgin Mary, and the infant Jesus. Leonardo da Vinci. And one of the other, one of the principles and differences between, say an auction estimate and an appraisaland this is for what we call fair market value appraisalis that we come up with a single value, understanding that it's very rare that we kind of hit the bull's eye, but that is the opinion of the appraiser. But we need a lot more information than that before we make our estimate. An artist by disposition and endowment, he considered his eyes to be his main avenue to knowledge; to Leonardo, sight was mans highest sense because it alone conveyed the facts of experience immediately, correctly, and with certainty. TINDERA: Simon also included another work by da Vinci: a sheet of studies including sketches of a child embracing a lamb. And that was the process. It's now been determined that his painting is not, in fact, a da Vinci. But now the Salvator Mundi has become the poster boy for the volatile mix of money, power and geopolitics that defines the art world today. 1503-1519). Still, it was a record-breaking event. Five are traditional Chinese paintings by Qi Baishi, Wu Bin, Wang Meng and Xu Yang. He also considered a painting done by Renaissance artist Pontormo, which was purchased by the Jay Paul Getty Museum for $35.2 million at Christie's in 1989. She spent years restoring the painting, and passionately defends its authenticity in precise detail, pointing out the pentimento under Christ's thumb or a curve of his mouth that could only be Leonardo's. Its the zenith of my career as an auctioneer. CBS CLIP, BILL GATES: Well, that's simply based on taking the stock I own in Microsoft and doing some type of multiplication. The paintings transferred to the dealers include a late, Alan Bond could not pay off the painting, and. So of course, da Vinci never called it the Codex Leicester or the Codex Hammer. But as it turned out, he also had his own personal connection to the Codex. He decided that the Codex's fair market value was $50 million. I wana write a poem about it. They brought it to Dianne Modestini, a highly respected restorer, who removed decades of grime and overpainting, and was the first to suspect it might be a true Leonardo. She was universally considered to be the painter's sitter. His Last Supper (149598) and Mona Lisa (c. 150319) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. When asked whether Salvator Mundis involvement in the Rybolovlev-Bouvier case might overshadow its sale, Christies postwar and contemporary chairman, Loc Gouzer, who secured the work with a $100m guarantee, said: We cannot comment about sellers, but it has every passport, every visa.. In 1482 Leonardo moved to Milan to work in the service of the citys dukea surprising step when one realizes that the 30-year-old artist had just received his first substantial commissions from his native city of Florence: the unfinished panel painting Adoration of the Magi for the monastery of San Donato a Scopeto and an altar painting for the St. Bernard Chapel in the Palazzo della Signoria, which was never begun. 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(According to contemporary sources, Leonardo was commissioned to create three more pictures, but these works have since disappeared or were never done.) The figure more than doubles the existing record for an artwork sold at auction: a $179.4 million bid for a Picasso in 2015. On permanent display at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa was assessed at US$100 million on 14 December 1962. He had just gotten married to Melinda Gates on New Year's Day of that year and was in the middle of building his multi-million-dollar mega mansion, Xanadu 2.0. Thanks for having me. The saleroom erupted in cheers and applause. For example, on June 25, 2019, the American hedge fund manager J. Tomilson Hill bought a recently rediscovered Judith and Holofernes (1607) attributed to Caravaggio, two days before it would have been auctioned in Toulouse. Leonardo da Vinci was a Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, military engineer and draftsman the epitome of a true Renaissance man. The artwork alone garners thousands of visitors from around the world to the famous gallery it is placed in - the . In The Lost Leonardo, a grinning Bouvier says his exploits are just business as usual: "you buy low and you sell high." TINDERA: Okay, so our $4 billion estimate isn't all that realistic. This possibly-Leonardo treasure's route to fame began when it surfaced at an obscure New Orleans auction house in 2005 and was bought by two New York dealers for a measly $1,175.