Inside the History-Making, $450 Million Leonardo da Vinci Auction
History was made on West 49th Street on Wednesday night.
It started with a letter and a number, 9B, an otherwise meaningless alphanumeric code that now represents the largest sum ever paid for a work of art in history. Lot 9B at Wednesday’s Christie’s auction was Leonardo da Vinci’s undiscovered masterpiece, Salvator Mundi, auctioned to an undisclosed buyer in an undisclosed location for $450 million. The piece more than doubled the previous record held by Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger auctioned for nearly $180 million in 2015. And it left an unanswerable question: what is an appropriate price for a picture of the savior of the world painted by the world’s greatest mind?
As an endless parade of sleek black cars deposited their guests at the entrance to Christie’s in Manhattan, the casual mingling and chatting with old friends in the lobby that typically precedes an evening sale was nowhere to be seen. Instead grandes dames in fur and their husbands in bespoke suits made their way briskly upstairs to secure their seats, only pausing for a quick double kiss here and there; that night, their friends became the competition.
Extra chairs were jammed in wherever possible to push capacity, with 1,000 seats in total, as Patti Smith, Michael Ovitz, and Vito Schnabel filed in with the stragglers. A taut silence fell over the crowd as Jussi Pylkkänen, global Chairman of Christie’s, took the auctioneer’s podium and started bidding on the first lot, Black Dada by Adam Pendleton. Three world records were broken before lot 9B was even up, setting a tone for the evening: this crowd, including those tethered to their dealers at the phone banks, were itching to make history wherever possible
Bidding began at a now-paltry $90 million. Hopefuls from the seated crowd, happy to shoot their paddles skyward when bidding stalled briefly around $150 million, became dejected spectators as the da Vinci inched steadily higher. At 15 minutes, three tenacious bidders remained, represented at the phone banks by Alex Rotter, Christie’s co-chairman; François de Poortere, head of Old Masters; and Loic Gouzer, co-chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art. The bids dwindled to increments of $5 million, then down to $2 million. The audience, wide-eyed in disbelief, responded to Pylkkänen’s raise of the gavel like violinists to a conductor, iPhones raised to capture the historic moment. “$350!” Rotter called out, as the crowd gasped—the bid had jumped by $18 million. Pylkkänen repeated the bid, as if in disbelief himself, and searched for the next price to name, though now it was impossible to predict. “At 350 million and looking for . . . another bid please, François,” he said as the crowd laughed.
Minutes later, the muted whispers of minutes before yielded to audible guffaws of disbelief as Pylkkänen brought down the gavel for the final $450.3 million bid from Rotter’s mystery client.
“I’ve sold four pictures over $100 million at Christie’s, broken many records, but for me this is the ultimate privilege—the absolute zenith of my career as an auctioneer,” Pylkkänen said afterwards. “I should hang up my gavel,” which, he says has sold over $10 billion dollars of art in its time.
Pylkkänen speculated that though the work is now privately owned, it will very likely be open to the public, at least at first: “A work of art of this cultural significance will always be requested for museum shows,” he says. “I gather that the Louvre is planning a magnificent show of da Vinci and I would expect this painting to be loaned to that show . . . Certainly anybody that owns an object of this type will be intending to lend it to any major show.”
The normally unflappable Christie’s staff was visibly shaken as they blotted their brows and grappled with the gravity of the moment. Loic Gouzer struggled to identify the effect a sale of this magnitude will have on the art market: “I think it’s difficult to fathom at this point. It’s fresh, it just happened,” he said. “The effect of . . . I don’t want to say a nuclear bomb . . . but it’s the biggest sale ever, and I think it shows the importance of the artist . . . a guy who made less than 20 paintings basically. People knew this was a once in a lifetime chance. There will be no other chance, and that’s what created that moment.”
For Gouzer, one thing was certain: “It definitely shows the art market is healthy. In a world where everything is digitalized and in the cloud, people like to hang on to solid historical objects.”
