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'Leonardo da Vinci artwork' sells for record $450m
A 500-year-old painting of Christ believed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci has been sold in New York for a record $450m (£341m). The painting is known as Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World).
It is the highest auction price for any work of art and brought cheers and applause at the packed Christie's auction room.
Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519 and there are fewer than 20 of his paintings in existence. Salvator Mundi, believed to have been painted sometime after 1505, is the only work thought to be in private hands.
Bidding began at $100m and the final bid for the work was $400m, with fees bringing the full price up to $450.3m. The unidentified buyer was involved in a bidding contest, via telephone, that lasted nearly 20 minutes.
Related: The Picture Under the "Mona Lisa"
"Masterpiece" Painting Sold for $165 Million to Help Fund Criminal Justice Reform
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday November 17 2017, @06:40AM (3 children)
Sacrilege. If it were a "cleaned and restored" guitar being sold it would have been practically worthless unless it still had the come stains of Eddie Van Halen or Yngwie Malmsteen on it.
It's why I rolled my eyes when Fender came out with their "classic reissue" guitars which had prematurely-oxidized hardware, all the guitar equivalent of factory-ripped jeans. Well, Fender guitars suck anyway. They are cheap pieces of shit with bolt-on necks and crappy tremolos. Real men play Gibsons, Gretsches, and Rickenbackers. Hell, it took Stevie Ray Vaughan strings the size of railroad ties to get half-decent tone from his Strats, but when you're doing 4 grams of coke every day you can get away with it.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @06:55AM
Sure, the art can be put on display to rake in some cash flow from the plebs, but that's not why this kind of serious cash is spent on artwork.
Rather, the deep pockets put their money in art because it has a lot of tax benefits, including the ability to transfer large amounts of wealth more easily. It's a financial instrument, for which loopholes have been explicitly carved out in law for the benefit of the monied interests.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @11:34AM
If you value the work per se then restoration is required to maintain it in the best condition possible for enjoyment of the work for the longest time to come.
If you value the historical artifact, then perhaps consider that the art may well be more valuable than the insights into some painter's life and methods an unrestored painting could provide. While his work may be exceptional, were the physical properties of his artifacts similarly exceptional? So exceptional that its worth letting a (presumably) masterful painting degrade?
The only argument here is that restorers may screw something up due to unk-unks, but how much could really be lost? It's a painting, not a dinosaur fossil.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Saturday November 18 2017, @02:38AM
I fear the price for a nice used 4004LK is not much lower than what the Leonardo painting went for...