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2 new documentaries delve into the ongoing saga of Leonardo da Vinci'due south Salvator Mundi in a moment when truthful art offense stories are at their peak, writes Caryn James.

Somewhere in Saudi Arabia, hidden abroad by gild of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is the world'southward most expensive painting, Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. Or is it? No one in the fine art globe knows for certain where the painting is. Virtually observers concord that it is likely stashed in the Eye Eastward, just some take speculated that information technology is stored in a tax-costless zone in Geneva or even on the Prince's half-a-billion-dollar yacht. Is information technology even a Leonardo at all? The image of Christ as The Saviour of the World was billed every bit The Last da Vinci at Christie's 2017 auction, where it sold for a record $450 million (£342 one thousand thousand) to a proxy for bin Salman (aye, that bin Salman, whom the CIA found responsible for ordering the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi). But even and so, many Leonardo experts were dubious that the painting had more a few brush strokes past him, and those doubts have ramped upwards e'er since.

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Veiled in layers of mystery and international intrigue, the story of the Salvator Mundi is an ongoing, incessantly fascinating saga, told in ii new documentaries, The Lost Leonardo and Saviour for Auction: Da Vinci's Lost Masterpiece?, which play out with all the drama and suspense of a detective story. They arrive in the wake of Ben Lewis's loftier-profile 2019 volume, The Terminal Leonardo, and dozens of articles. The painting, which dates to effectually 1500, was lost to history for more than 200 years, was damaged and badly restored, and was sold and resold as a pocket-size work, probably by a Leonardo acolyte. But now the Salvator Mundi has become the poster boy for the volatile mix of coin, power and geopolitics that defines the art world today.

"When we chose the title," Andreas Dalsgaard, a producer and a writer of The Lost Leonardo, tells BBC Culture, "the inspiration was partly that the painting is lost right now and the truth is lost, but it was also inspired by movies like the Indiana Jones movies that are total of treasures and treasure hunts."

This possibly-Leonardo treasure'south route to fame began when it surfaced at an obscure New Orleans sale business firm in 2005 and was bought past two New York dealers for a measly $1,175. They brought it to Dianne Modestini, a highly respected restorer, who removed decades of crud and overpainting, and was the first to doubtable information technology might be a true Leonardo.

Art restorer Dianne Modestini in a scene from The Lost Leonardo, one of two new documentaries about the Salvator Mundi (Credit: Sony Pictures Classics/Entertainment Pictures)

Art restorer Dianne Modestini in a scene from The Lost Leonardo, one of two new documentaries well-nigh the Salvator Mundi (Credit: Sony Pictures Classics/Entertainment Pictures)

With its sleek narrative and a wide range of voices from dealers to fine art historians to investigative journalists, The Lost Leonardo is the better of the ii films, and benefits profoundly from using Modestini as its main character. She is a captivating, elegant presence on screen, with a whispery phonation and broad eyes backside signature black or red-framed glasses. She spent years restoring the painting, and passionately defends its actuality in precise detail, pointing out the pentimento nether Christ's pollex or a curve of his mouth that could only exist Leonardo'southward. But many experts think she did a drastic over-restoration. In the film, the art historian Frank Zöllner, who has compiled a catalogue raisonné of Leonardo's paintings, wryly calls the Salvator Mundi "a masterpiece by Dianne Modestini," who fabricated information technology "more Leonardesque than Leonardo had done." For her part, Modestini has documented her work and the scientific studies of the painting, and published them online.

Nigh experts today concur the painting was probably produced by assistants in Leonardo's workshop, where he added some finishing touches – a common practice. Merely doubtfulness is key to the appeal of every version of the story, as Lewis tells BBC Civilisation: "Nobody knows if information technology is a Leonardo, so you besides can play the game, you tin do your own Da Vinci Code on the Salvator Mundi."

Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi was sold by Christie's in 2017 for a record-breaking $450 million (Credit: Photo by Ilya S Savenok/Getty Images for Christie's Auction House)

Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi was sold past Christie'southward in 2017 for a record-breaking $450 million (Credit: Photo by Ilya S Savenok/Getty Images for Christie's Auction House)

The quality of the painting itself divides people. The US art critic Jerry Saltz rails in The Lost Leonardo that "information technology'south not even a skilful painting", much less a bang-up Leonardo, while true believers gush that seeing it in person is a transcendent experience. (Perhaps so, but in the films and other reproduced images it does have a more than cloying look).

Some of the about eye-opening commentary in both films isn't even about fine art. In The Lost Leonardo, Evan Beard, a Bank of America executive who deals with art as investment, talks virtually the mutual buyers' motive of using artworks equally collateral for other financial manoeuvres. The film doesn't take a stand on the painting'south attribution, but makes information technology clear that museums, dealers and potential buyers had millions to gain – along with incalculable prestige – past choosing to believe it is a true Leonardo.

'Colourful characters'

A major turning bespeak came when the painting was controversially displayed as an authentic Leonardo at a 2011 exhibition at the National Gallery in London. In both films, Luke Syson, the curator of the show, stands by his decision. But many experts on camera and elsewhere in the press think he leapt to an early conclusion. Alison Cole, editor of The Fine art Newspaper, has written extensively most the painting and saw it at the National Gallery. She tells BBC Culture, "Since then, Dianne Modestini continued to work on it. Merely when I saw it, it didn't sit comfortably with me equally an autograph Leonardo." Nonetheless, the exhibition went a long way toward legitimising a shaky attribution.

Two years afterwards, some colourful characters entered the game. Yves Bouvier, a Swiss art dealer, bought the painting from the New York dealers for $83 million, reportedly on behalf of his customer, a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev, though this is disputed by Mr Bouvier. Inside 2 days he sold information technology to Rybolovlev for $127.5 million. In The Lost Leonardo, a grinning Bouvier says his exploits are just business as usual: "you buy depression and you sell high." (Swiss regime investigated him for defrauding Rybolovlev over several artworks, simply this twelvemonth closed the instance without charging him.) Shortly, the painting was on its way to Christie's.

The Christie's sale itself was a highly staged drama, beginning with a marketing video that showed non the painting but the faces of observers – most are ordinary people just i of them is Leonardo DiCaprio – looking reverently at the paradigm as if they were seeing Christ himself. The buyer was bearding, simply the New York Times soon revealed him to exist acting for bin Salman, a discovery that catapulted the painting into the geopolitical realm. At the time bin Salman was trying to brighten Kingdom of saudi arabia'south image by loosening a few restrictions. Almost art world observers thought the Salvator Mundi would be the centrepiece of a new museum or fine art centre in the region, merely the painting has non been glimpsed in public since.

It came close. The Louvre very much wanted to include it in its thousand exhibition to celebrate Leonardo's 500th anniversary in 2019. Bin Salman himself visited President Emmanuel Macron in Paris while the loan was dangling in the remainder. As tardily as the press preview of the show, there was an empty space on the wall waiting for the Salvator Mundi, but it never arrived. The New York Times confirmed rumours that the Louvre wouldn't accede to bin Salman'due south demand that his painting exist displayed in the same room every bit the Mona Lisa, giving it near-equal status.

French President Emmanuel Macron pictured in 2018 with the owner of the Leonardo, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Credit: Photo by Bandar Algaloud/Getty Images)

French President Emmanuel Macron pictured in 2018 with the possessor of the Leonardo, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (Credit: Photograph by Bandar Algaloud/Getty Images)

"The Louvre is supported by the government, the ministry of civilization and ultimately Macron," Cole tells BBC Culture. "And information technology is involved therefore in the politics around civilization. So if Kingdom of saudi arabia decides that culture is going to be the style it opens up and the Salvator Mundi is going to exist a key actor in that strategy and the Louvre is offering to exhibit it, and so all those things are tied upwards together."

Cole was the beginning to report, in March 2020, the existence of a 46-page booklet the Louvre prepared for publication but never released, which asserts that the piece is an authentic Leonardo. Considering the Louvre cannot comment on privately-owned works it has not displayed, the book tin can't be published, and at kickoff, Cole says, the museum denied its existence.

Scandals and conspiracies

Antoine Vitkine'south picture show Saviour for Sale is nearly notable for some explosive additions about what might have happened behind the scenes at the Louvre. The documentary covers much of the same ground as The Lost Leonardo, merely less stylishly, with too many stock establishing shots of cities. It suffers from not having Modestini or some other compelling primal figure. But it does have two anonymous sources, their faces subconscious on camera, identified as high-ranking French government officials who had admission to the Louvre's studies of the painting and to the French-Saudi negotiations. One of the sources says the Louvre concluded that Leonardo simply "contributed to the painting," but that bin Salman would only approve the loan if the Salvator Mundi were labelled an authentic Leonardo. The source says he advised the government that "exhibiting under the Saudi conditions would be like laundering a piece that cost $450 million". The Louvre and the National Gallery refused to comment for either motion picture.

The ii documentaries arrive at a time when films, podcasts and pop culture itself seem fascinated by art crimes, mysteries and forgeries. In the past yr ii documentaries, the engaging Made You lot Await and the pedestrian Driven to Abstraction, tackled the example of the Knoedler Gallery in New York, which for virtually 2 decades sold forgeries supposedly past 20th-Century masters including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Knowingly or non? That is still a question. The Netflix series This Is a Robbery delves into the 1990 theft of masterworks including a Rembrandt from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The serial is full of conspiracy theories about the never-solved robbery.

And Lewis has a new eight-episode podcast, Art Bust: Scandalous Stories of the Art Earth, which promises stories of "the ugliest crimes, the biggest scandals and the murky in-between." The subjects range from Inigo Philbrick, criminally charged with defrauding clients by selling more than 100% of shares in artworks, to a golden Egyptian coffin whose smuggled past came to calorie-free later Kim Kardashian was photographed side by side to it at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute gala. The Met has since returned the coffin to Arab republic of egypt. That these tales can work in a podcast, where no one can even see the piece of work being described, suggests how much the allure of today's fine art-criminal offense stories is in the skulduggery and mystery, not aesthetics.

A scene from Saviour for Sale, a second documentary about the Salvator Mundi, by French journalist Antoine Vitkine (Credit: Zadig Productions)

A scene from Saviour for Sale, a second documentary about the Salvator Mundi, by French announcer Antoine Vitkine (Credit: Zadig Productions)

Many factors seem to take converged to create this flourishing moment for true art crime. There is so much information in the public sphere that everyone can have the illusion of existence an insider. There are more than and more platforms for telling stories. And Lewis points out that as the art market place has enlarged, our globe view itself has changed. The full general mental attitude toward fine art criminal offence, he says, used to be shrugged off every bit "it'southward billionaires spending money, crooking each other", but today at that place is a realisation that "no, y'all tin't loot that country's entire cultural heritage".

Amidst all these delightfully tangled histories, cypher rivals the Salvator Mundi. Unless new documentation surfaces (unlikely after all these centuries), or a new scientific method of authentication arrives (also tricky because the work has been so damaged), the mystery may evidence eternal. "I'm admittedly sure that half dozen months down the road or a year, there's going to exist some kind of new data, whether true or not, that's going to blow upwardly everywhere in the news media," Dalsgaard says. "As long as this painting is hidden from the world and the time to come and fate of this painting is unknown, information technology's going to be clouded in a realm of mystery and the earth will be fix to read annihilation new. Because at the stop of the mean solar day, it's an entertaining story."

The Lost Leonardo is now playing in the US and opens in the Great britain on x September.

Saviour for Sale opens in the The states on 17 September.

All episodes of the Art Bust podcast are available now.

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