What happened to the “Salvator Mundi”?

EVEN BY THE standards of blockbuster shows, “Leonardo da Vinci” promised to be one to remember. The exhibition, which ran for four months from October 2019, marked the 500th anniversary of the master’s death and was hosted at the Louvre, a museum which owns more of the painter’s work than any other institution. Two years earlier a recently rediscovered artwork of Jesus Christ by da Vinci had fetched $450m at auction, a record sum. Dubbed the “male Mona Lisa”, “Salvator Mundi” would be displayed beside its female counterpart for the first time at the Louvre. That’s what the buyer hoped, at least: when the show opened, there was no sign of the picture even though it was included in the exhibition catalogue (which had been printed some time beforehand).

The painting came from nowhere and has now effectively disappeared again. Antoine Vitkine, a French journalist and film-maker, explains why in “The Saviour for Sale”, a controversial new documentary. To make sense of a complex story, Mr Vitkine opts for a chronological narrative, but each segment is centred on a particular individual: “The Dealer”, “The Mercenary” and so on. He begins with Robert Simon, a New York art dealer who in 2005 paid $1,175 at an attic sale in New Orleans for a dirty painting he hadn’t even seen. After a painstaking restoration, some began whispering that it might be by the master himself.