Da Vinci painting fetches record R450m at auction
New York — A 500-year-old painting believed to be by Leonardo da Vinci sold for $450.3m in New York on Wednesday, blazing a new world record for the most expensive work of art sold at auction, Christie’s said. Salvator Mundi, or Savior of the World, which depicts Jesus Christ, more than doubled the previous record of $179.4m paid for Pablo Picasso’s The Women of Algiers (Version O) in New York in 2015. Lost for years only to resurface at a regional auction in 2005, it is one of fewer than 20 Da Vinci paintings generally accepted as being from the Renaissance master’s own hand, according to Christie’s. All the others are held in museum or institutional collections. Wednesday’s price was all the more extraordinary given that the oil on panel fetched only £45 in 1958, at the time believed to have been a copy, before subsequently disappearing for years. Dated to around 1500, the work sold after 19 minutes of frenzied bidding — an incongruous Old Master in Christie’s evening postwar and ...
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