How does a 500-year-old Renaissance painting spend 17 years hanging next to a stairwell in Baton Rouge, sell for $1,175 at a regional clearance auction, and end up twelve years later as the most expensive object ever sold at auction?
The story of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi sounds like an airport thriller. It features a trash bag, a botched glue job, a hidden thumb, international oligarchs, and a 19-minute bidding war at Christie's that shattered the global art market. Yet before it fetched $450.3 million in 2017, the battered walnut panel was widely regarded as little more than ruined junk.
Here is the real, forensic journey of how a forgotten canvas escaped five centuries of neglect and rewritten identity.
The £45 Misattribution in London
In 1958, Sotheby's London auctioned off pieces from the storied collection of British merchant Sir Francis Cook. Among the lots was a heavily damaged portrait of Christ holding a crystal orb, cataloged merely as a copy after Leonardo's pupil Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio.
The hammer dropped at just £45 (roughly $125 at the time). The buyers were Warren and Minnie Kuntz, a couple from New Orleans touring Europe who wanted a decorative religious picture for their home.
For nearly three decades, the painting remained quietly in Louisiana. Following Minnie Kuntz's death in 1987, it passed to her nephew, Baton Rouge business executive Basil Clovis Hendry Sr. Hendry hung the dark, cracked portrait in the stairwell of his home, where it stayed until his death in 2004.
The $1,175 Trash-Bag Gamble
In April 2005, Hendry's estate went up for bidding at the St. Charles Gallery, an auction room in New Orleans. The listing was casual: "After Leonardo da Vinci: Christ Salvator Mundi," estimated at a few hundred dollars.
Art sleeper hunter Alexander Parish spotted the online thumbnail and immediately alerted New York art dealer and Old Master specialist Robert Simon. Parish noticed that despite the awful surface condition, the underlying composition had peculiar dignity.
Simon and Parish put together a consortium and won the lot for $1,175 ($1,000 hammer price plus buyer's premium). Simon picked up the panel, wrapped the fragile wood in a standard black plastic trash bag, and drove it to Manhattan in the trunk of his car.
Mistake #1: The Strangled Walnut Panel
When Simon placed the piece on a workbench, its physical state was alarming. Leonardo had painted the composition around 1500 on a single, thin slab of walnut wood measuring 65.6 by 45.4 centimeters (a proportion often echoed in classical vertical wall art).
Walnut expands and contracts with changes in seasonal humidity. Sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, an amateur restorer decided to "stabilize" the wood by gluing a rigid lattice of oak slats (known as a cradle) across the back. The cradle prevented the walnut from breathing naturally.
The trapped tension had split the panel clean in half vertically, right through Christ's left cheek and breast. To keep the pieces together, previous owners had forced hide glue into the gap and slathered coarse white stucco across the fissure.
Mistake #2: The Clownish Face Overpaint
The physical wood fracture was only the beginning of the disguise. Past restorers, horrified by paint loss along the split, had taken brushes to Christ's face.
They had repainted the hair into stiff, muddy corkscrews. They gave Christ a harsh, artificial mustache and a heavy goatee. The subtle, ethereal gaze of the Renaissance had been covered by thick, opaque modern pigments that looked clumsy under normal gallery lighting.
Anyone glancing at the panel in a Louisiana parlor would have seen a cartoonish nineteenth-century retouching. The real painting was buried underneath.
The Solvent Swabs of Dianne Modestini
In late 2005, Simon brought the battered panel to Dianne Dwyer Modestini, a senior conservator at New York University's Conservation Center and widow of legendary Old Master restorer Mario Modestini.
Modestini began the painstaking work of cleaning the panel millimeter by millimeter. Working under high-magnification surgical microscopes, she dampened cotton swabs with mild chemical solvents to lift away oxidized resin varnish that had turned dark greenish-brown.
As the darkened varnish and clumsy overpaint dissolved, Modestini uncovered an astonishing detail on Christ's upper lip. There were no visible brushstrokes. Leonardo was famous for applying micro-thin glazes (often less than two microns thick) and softly blending them with the fleshy pad of his hand or fingertips. This delicate sfumato technique matched the surface handling of the Mona Lisa and St. John the Baptist.
The Turning Point: A Hidden Thumb Revealed
Skeptics understandably asked: could this still be a copy produced by Leonardo's Milanese workshop? The definitive clue surfaced under infrared reflectography.
Infrared cameras penetrate surface paint layers to reveal underdrawings and earlier paint stages. Scanning Christ's raised right hand, Modestini detected a clear pentimento (an artist's change of mind). Leonardo had originally painted the blessing thumb in an upright position. He then changed his mind, scraped back the thumb, and repainted it in a more relaxed, curved profile.
Copyists do not make pentimenti. A copyist works from a finished painting and faithfully copies the visible contour. Just as multi-spectral scans of Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine revealed multiple evolutionary phases, only the original creator rethinks anatomy mid-stride and repaints over their first draft.
The Science of the Rock Crystal Orb
In Christ's left hand sits a glowing sphere representing the world (the mundus). For years, commentators wondered why the sphere did not refract or invert the drapery behind it, as solid glass naturally does.
Leonardo's personal manuscripts show he was fascinated by mineralogy and optical physics. The orb is not hollow glass. It is solid rock crystal (calcite quartz). Leonardo carefully rendered two tiny internal inclusions (microscopic fissures and mineral gas bubbles known as phenomena) inside the crystal matrix.
Oxford art historian Martin Kemp argued that Leonardo intentionally omitted optical distortion of Christ's tunic to preserve the spiritual clarity of the figure: to Leonardo, a sacred orb representing the cosmos was miraculous, not an earthly optical lens.
The Secret London Gathering & Auction Record
In May 2008, National Gallery curator Luke Syson invited five leading international Leonardo scholars to London. In a private conservation room, Martin Kemp, Carmen Bambach, Pietro Marani, Maria Teresa Fiorio, and David Alan Brown examined the cleaned panel side by side with Leonardo's undisputed Virgin of the Rocks.
Three years later, in November 2011, the National Gallery included Salvator Mundi in its landmark exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan," cataloging it as an autograph work by the Renaissance master.
From that moment, financial mania took over:
- 2013 Private Sale: Sotheby's brokered a sale to Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier for $83 million.
- The 48-Hour Flip: Within days, Bouvier sold the canvas to Russian fertilizer billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev for $127.5 million, pocketing a $44.5 million markup that sparked a decade of international litigation known as the Bouvier Affair.
- November 15, 2017: Rybolovlev consigned the painting to Christie's New York (Lot 9B). Specialist Loic Gouzer took the unconventional step of slotting a 500-year-old religious work into a Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale (surrounded by high-profile contemporary art masterpieces).
After a dizzying 19-minute telephone bidding war between two anonymous callers, auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen brought down the gavel at $400 million. With auction house premiums, the final price reached $450,312,500.
The buyer was later revealed as Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah, acting as an intermediary for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Where Is Salvator Mundi Today?
Following the auction, the painting vanished from public view. A scheduled display at the Louvre Abu Dhabi in September 2018 was postponed without explanation. Reports placed the fragile walnut panel aboard the royal superyacht Serene, while others indicated it was transferred to high-security storage in a Swiss freeport or Riyadh, awaiting completion of a cultural center in AlUla.
Scholarly debate also persists. Some specialists, including Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Carmen Bambach, believe that while Leonardo conceived the work and painted key passages (such as the hands and lip glazes), workshop assistants like Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio may have executed sections of the garment drapery.
Whether viewed as a pure Leonardo miracle or a collaborative workshop survivor, Salvator Mundi remains the wildest journey in art history. Much like the precarious centuries that threatened The Last Supper, it survived war, cracked wood, thick house paint, and a Louisiana hallway before becoming the half-billion-dollar ghost of the Renaissance.
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