Leonardo da Vinci's 'Male Mona Lisa' can be yours for just $100M (or more)

SAN FRANCISCO — Pictures don't do it justice.

In person, Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi is haunting, a 500-year-old portrait of Jesus Christ that seems to radiate from within while displaying a staggering mastery of anatomy, optics and craft.

And for somewhere (way) north of $100 million, it can be yours.

"This is the holy grail of Old Master paintings, some people call it the male Mona Lisa," says Francois de Poortere, head of the Old Masters department at Christie's, which will auction off the painting in New York on Nov. 15. "People are deeply taken by this work. You could buy it and just build an entire museum around it."

Salvator Mundi, which means "Savior of the World," is stopping in a few cities around the world for a brief series of public displays that include Hong Kong, London and New York.

It is said to be the only one of da Vinci's 20 known paintings (don't forget, this definitive Renaissance man was also an engineer, astronomer and set designer) in private hands. And while the Louvre Museum's Mona Lisa might be more famous, Mundi displays a unique radiance over that yellowing gem because it has been cleaned.

Who will buy this da Vinci? Museums would have to have a huge endowment in order to muster tens of millions so quickly, so billionaires are more likely candidates.

While art collectors will be eager, Mundi is may well go to "someone who is eager to have the best of the best," says de Poortere, noting that Bill Gates paid $30 million in 1994 for da Vinci's Codex Leicester, a compendium of sketches and notes that encapsulate the Florentine's humanistic brilliance.

De Poortere says the current owner of Salvator Mundi is a European collector, although Walter Isaacson's newly released book, Leonardo da Vinci, notes that it was bought a few years ago by a Russian fertilizer billionaire from a consortium of Swiss art dealers for $127 million. It's doubtful the next owner will pay less.

What's staggering about this painting — which experts believe da Vinci painted around 1500 when he was 48 and roughly when he also was working on the Mona Lisa — is that for centuries it vanished.

An expert hunch coupled with high-tech brought it back to the world.

In 1958, Mundi surfaced in England as a heavily darkened and overpainted version of itself and was attributed to another artist. It sold for £45, which is worth around £1600 today — or $2,100. How's that for a yard sale score?

The painting then wound up at an estate sale in the United States around 2005, where it sold to the consortium of dealers for a figure in the five figures, according to Christie's. But that group suspected they might have something special on their hands and commissioned New York art expert Robert Simon to painstakingly clean the work over a five-year time.

Then the heavens opened.

"A number of things started pointing to the fact that this was Leonardo's work," says de Poortere, who notes that many artists over the centuries had made copies of Salvator Mundi and attributed the lost original to da Vinci. 

Among the telltale signs: Beyond Jesus' lustrous curls (a Leonardo hallmark) and detailed hands (da Vinci spent hours dissecting cadavers and had a unique ability to render limbs lifelike), an X-ray also showed a pentimento, the term used to describe when an artist makes changes, such as moving a finger position, to an original work. 

"Anyone simply copying someone else's painting isn't going to bother to change the position of a finger," says de Poortere, who notes that Jesus' right thumb appeared to have been shifted by da Vinci.

Isaacson's biography (which has already been optioned by da Vinci namesake Leonardo DiCaprio, who plans to play the lead role) adds that infrared light scans revealed the artist pressed the palm of his hand against Jesus' left eye to create a blurred, or so-called sfumato, effect.

Sfumato is a technique da Vinci is known to have pioneered in an effort to render portraits more lifelike given that our eyes don't see everything in focus, but rather give preference to objects that are closer. In Salvator Mundi, Christ's hands, which are closer to the viewer, appear in sharp detail, while the face has a soft focus.

Salvator Mundi also packs a riddle. In Christ's left hand is a clear crystal orb, an object that when held up in front of a given subject would create an upside down image inside the orb.

And yet, da Vinci, as scientifically minded an artist as any who ever lived, chose not to render the garments on the other side of Christ's orb upside down.

Was this a rare oversight by the master? A decision simply to favor beauty over literalism? Or perhaps proof that it isn't a da Vinci painting after all?

De Poortere smiles, then shrugs.

"It's hard to say, but my feeling is that he just didn't think it would look good" to render something upside down within the orb, he says. "But just take one look at the exquisite blessing hand, the wonderful curls and that captivating gaze, and you know you're looking at something done by a genius."

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