Just a couple of months after Made You Look, here is another documentary about the art world. As you can see for yourself it’s about the famous Salvator Mundi painting, supposedly a long lost work by the hand of Leonardo da Vinci himself. I’d already read about this in the news but the full story here has plenty of detail that I wasn’t previously familiar with which makes it immensely interesting to me. Moreover I am fascinated that filmmaker Andreas Koefoed was able to secure the cooperation of many of the parties involved, including the Swiss businessman Yves Bouvier who is rather shady individual to say the least. Beyond the fascinating story of the painting itself, this also shows how money and political power shape the art world.

The story of this painting begins here with a pair of American art dealers buying it for $1,175 at an auction and realizing that it could be worth much more. They send it to a restorer Dianne Modestini as it has been heavily damaged. She cleans the overpainting on it, meaning previous attempts to restore it, and comes to believe that it is by the hand of the master himself and not one of his students or followers. She completes her own extensive restoration work and the owners present to a curator at the British National Gallery. A group of five experts vaguely agree that this could indeed be by Leonardo Da Vinci himself without making a formal determination and the owners then try to sell it as one with an asking price of $200 million. However there is too much doubt about its authenticity and the price is too high. Eventually a Swiss businessman Yves Bouvier buys it on behalf of a Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is probably mostly interested in it as a way to safeguard wealth. Rybolovlev soon realizes the large markup that Bouvier charged for the purchase and threatens him with all kinds of consequences. Bouvier is forced to quickly sell all of the art that he is holding on Rybolovlev’s behalf and so this painting is marketed and then auctioned by Christie’s. At the auction, it is bought by a mysterious buyer at the price of $400 million with another $50 million, breaking all previous records.

You can get the whole story from pretty much any article about the painting or just Wikipedia and by now everyone knows that the mysterious buyer is really Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. But it is amazing to see the faces and hear the real voices of so many of the people involved in this. As I noted Bouvier appears himself and is unrepentant about earning a markup of some 50% in reselling the painting. Other critics and experts warn that the final painting is at least 80% by Modestini. She herself is insistent that she believes it is by Leonardo Da Vinci and asserts that she was well paid for her restoration work and was never a part owner in the painting and never received any commissions from the subsequent sales. Everyone pretty much agrees that the original painting dates from the right time and place but it’s impossible to definitively agree that it comes from the hand of the master himself and that makes all the difference to its value. The documentary does show how its value is elevated every step of the way by deliberate marketing efforts: showing it at the British National Gallery, having Christie’s promote it through a world tour and an advertising campaign that features Leonardo DiCaprio and so on. The question of how much of the value is real and how much is due to smoke and mirrors is impossible to answer.

Also fascinating is the interplay between politics and art as the painting becomes a matter of state between France and Saudi Arabia. France wants construction contracts and arms sales while Saudi Arabia wants the Louvre to give the painting its official endorsement and legitimize its own rebranding as a cultural powerhouse. In the end the deal fell through with an embarrassing empty spot in the exhibition hall where the painting was supposed to appear. As both countries refused to cooperate with this documentary, this doesn’t add all that much that you couldn’t read up on elsewhere. But it is still interesting to see Modestini for example realizing how close the Louvre came to acknowledging the painting as by Leonardo Da Vinci before pulling the plug at the last moment. I also loved how they point out that even the present elevated status of the Mona Lisa itself is partially a result of a deliberate PR effort by France, when their then Minister of Culture André Malraux had Jacqueline Kennedy take the painting on tour in the United States.

Anyway this is another really good documentary about the art world. It points out that it’s difficult for even the world’s top experts to make definitive statements based on so little information and their opinions are inevitably biased by the large amounts of money in play. Certainly neither Dmitry Rybolovlev nor Mohammed bin Salman paid such fantastical sums for the painting due to its artistic merits so the fact that the Salvator Mundi is by far the most valuable painting in the world doesn’t even mean that it is a particularly good painting.