The Salvator Mundi is the most expensive painting ever sold and perhaps the most contested object in the art world. Its path runs from a junk-sale wreck to a Saudi crown prince's possible superyacht, through a restoration so extensive that scholars argue over how much of it is Leonardo's hand. The Louvre studied it exhaustively — then quietly declined to hang it.
The full dossier: a panel of Christ as 'Saviour of the World' attributed to Leonardo around 1500, lost for centuries, brutally overpainted, and now the record-holder for the highest price ever paid for any artwork.
The trailer for the 2021 documentary that treats the painting as a thriller — part art history, part financial intrigue, part geopolitics — and asks who really benefits when a picture becomes worth half a billion dollars.
The Art Newspaper's blow-by-blow timeline — from Leonardo's studio to the 2017 Christie's auction to the painting's disappearance — mapping every sale, feud, and reversal along the way.
A full documentary on how dealers spotted a possible Leonardo under layers of crude overpaint, and how conservator Dianne Modestini spent years cleaning it — the restoration at the heart of every argument about it.
Background on the acclaimed documentary and the people in its orbit — the 'Leonardo believers,' the dealers, the auction house, the oligarch, and the Saudi buyer — and how a painting became a pawn in something much larger.
A Gresham College lecture digging into the hard evidence — the pentimento in the blessing hand, the walnut panel, the infrared scans — and the uncomfortable question of whether science can ever settle who held the brush.
The British Academy weighs the attribution debate and the painting's strange afterlife — bought for a fortune, then withheld from the Louvre's blockbuster Leonardo show and spirited out of sight entirely.