SIMON: He spent much more time as a writer, a scientist, a draftsman than he did as a painter. Various vandals have tried to harm da Vinci's famed masterpiece, and 1956 was a particularly bad year. He used his superb intellect, unusual powers of observation, and mastery of the art of drawing to study nature itself, a line of inquiry that allowed his dual pursuits of art and science to flourish. Leonardo da Vinci: Last Supper. PETERSON-WITHORN: Given Simon's connections to the Salvator Mundi, and his experience running a gallery of Old Masters works, he seemed like an excellent source to speak with for this valuation. This painting depicted St. Anne, her daughter the Virgin Mary, and the infant Jesus. See a gallery of the world's most expensive paintings, Leonardo da Vincis Salvator Mundi sold for $400 million at Christies ($450.3m, including auction house premium), One of four versions of The Scream created by Munch and the only one that is privately owned. Biography Of Leonardo da Vinci: How Old Is Leonardo da Vinci | Net Worth | People ProfilesPeople Profiles is a channel that dives deep into the lives of some. WINSTON: So once we've deduced that it's a first edition because it meets all of this criteria. Finding a new one is rarer than finding a new planet, he said. Leonardo spent 17 years in Milan, until Ludovicos fall from power in 1499. And then amid. His shares were of limited value when he was given them, but by the time of Facebook's IPO they were valued at around $200 million. Georgia O'Keeffe holds the record for the highest price paid for a painting by a woman. Head of anApostle. (Maybe so, but in the films and other reproduced images it does have a more cloying look). PETERSON-WITHORN: Yeah, and Gates loves books. His curiosity and insatiable hunger for knowledge never left him. PETERSON-WITHORN: And in fact, that fall he had just appeared atop our Forbes 400 ranking of the richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of $9.35 billion. As he would throughout his life, Leonardo set boundless goals for himself; if one traces the outlines of his work for this period, or for his life as a whole, one is tempted to call it a grandiose unfinished symphony.. But we ended up contacting others who we thought might know the work well, too. According to the provenance in the auction catalogue, a few Italian artists own the Codex after da Vinci's death, including a painter named Giuseppe Ghezzi, who apparently sold it in 1717 to Thomas Coke, a man who eventually became England's Earl of Leicester. CLIP OF BILL GATES: Taking Leonardo's notebook and translating them so everybody can understand the way that da Vinci thought a little better than before is very important. That sold for $3.6 million at Sotheby's in New York in 1986. There is so much information in the public sphere that everyone can have the illusion of being an insider. 1 for US$44.4 million (equivalent to US$50.8million in 2021). The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. The disciples, devastated by Christ stating one of them would cause his death, convey their feelings dramatically through their body language. I'm going to show it all over the world.. So of course, da Vinci never called it the Codex Leicester or the Codex Hammer. The inflation adjustment may change as recent inflation rates are often revised. The final winning bid? Moreover, he was no doubt enticed by Duke Ludovico Sforzas brilliant court and the meaningful projects awaiting him there. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. He was the auctioneer at the 1994 Christie's sale. And seeing these works enjoyed by people all over the world. The Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci. He had just gotten married to Melinda Gates on New Year's Day of that year and was in the middle of building his multi-million-dollar mega mansion, Xanadu 2.0. He decided that the Codex's fair market value was $50 million. TINDERA: Okay, so to recap, when it sold in 1980, it was expected to sell for $10 million, but ended up going for half that. Since the museums rarely sell them, they are considered priceless. PETERSON-WITHORN: After the auction, he told the press, I'm very happy with the price. But when I saw it, it didn't sit comfortably with me as an autograph Leonardo." At the press conference, Artnews reported, Gouzer spoke of the exceptional rarity of a work by Leonardo. But Christie's declined to comment, and a spokesperson for Gates never responded to our questions. The image of Christ as The Saviour of the World was billed as The Last da Vinci at Christie's 2017 auction, where it sold for a record $450 million (342 million) to a proxy for bin Salman (yes, that bin Salman, whom the CIA found responsible for ordering the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi). The documentary covers much of the same ground as The Lost Leonardo, but less stylishly, with too many stock establishing shots of cities. MASSEY: At 16 million, 17 million. MASSEY: Nineteen-million five hundred thousand I'll be happy to take. At the same time, Bouvier was negotiating and eventually succeeded to buy the painting for $112 million from Ursula Ucicky, widow of, Some fear existed, that Portrait of Dr. Gachet had been cremated with the owner in 1996, but Gachet's portrait was privately resold to. Highly esteemed, he was constantly kept busy as a painter and sculptor and as a designer of court festivals. So Gates buying Leonardo da Vinci's notebook is the equivalent of a typical 66-year-old splurging ona new iPad. What by Leonardo can we compare it with? On permanent display at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa was assessed at US$100 million on 14 December 1962. The piece is sold.. [15] Not listed here in this list is Chinese painter Wang Shaofei's The High Sun, which was appraised for $74 million in 2017.[16]. "I'm absolutely sure that six months down the road or a year, there's going to be some kind of new information, whether true or not, that's going to blow up everywhere in the news media," Dalsgaard says. CBS CLIP, BILL GATES: Well, that's simply based on taking the stock I own in Microsoft and doing some type of multiplication. By 1508, Leonardo returned to Milan, working for the French rulers of the city. Last Supper (c. 1495-98) Leonardo da Vinci: Last Supper Images Group/REX/Shutterstock.com. They bought it from an auction in Louisiana for just over $1,000. PETERSON-WITHORN: So I thought this was super fascinating that you could actually consider a work of art as something that could not only hold value and appreciate in value, but could also be a business, generating income for its owner over time. Nonetheless, Leonardos notebooks reveal a sharp intellect, and his contributions to art, including methods of representing space, three-dimensional objects, and the human figure, cannot be overstated. In this episode of Priceless, staff writer Michela Tindera and deputy wealth editor Chase Peterson-Withorn explain how Forbes determines the value of a one-of-a-kind Leonardo da Vinci manuscript that Bill Gates purchased in 1994. Guinness World Records lists Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa as having the highest ever insurance value for a painting. MASSEY: Twenty-five million, twenty-six million. He told us via email that his guess would be, "over $100 million." That estimate sort of got you thinking in another direction, though, right Chase? TINDERA: Simon talked about how there have been a certain subset of book dealers called "breakers," who made it their job to buy books and then tear them apart, selling their illustrated pages piece by piece. With its sleek narrative and a wide range of voices from dealers to art historians to investigative journalists, The Lost Leonardo is the better of the two films, and benefits greatly from using Modestini as its main character. The Lost Leonardo is now playing in the US and opens in the UK on 10 September. TINDERA: Robert pointed out one other unique distinction. She even has her own mailbox. 1503-1519). The earliest sale on the list below (Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh) is from March 1987; with a price of 24.75 million (74.1 million in 2021 currency). Hi, Chase. The 16th-century writer Giorgio Vasari indicated that Leonardo cared little for money but was very generous toward his friends and assistants. And so I think it's, you know, not so much, Let's look at it and see what would happen if we took scissors to it and divided it up. But just to say, Here we have something of such significance, partly because it has survived 500 years without, you know, being destroyed.. I've worked as well as an art appraiser. Our 1994 story said Hammer was a master at litigation, and the aggrieved shareholders had to settle to keep building costs at $60 million. Many factors seem to have converged to create this flourishing moment for true art crime. He also did not apply himself to higher mathematicsadvanced geometry and arithmeticuntil he was 30 years old, when he began to study it with diligent tenacity. Months earlier, he had appeared on the cover of Forbes, and he was a member of our very first Forbes 400 ranking. However, other critics have disagreed with the truth of that claim. "As long as this painting is hidden from the world and the future and fate of this painting is unknown, it's going to be clouded in a realm of mystery and the world will be ready to read anything new. TINDERA: So keeping all of those things in mind and knowing what he does about the Codex today. Most art world observers thought the Salvator Mundi would be the centrepiece of a new museum or art centre in the region, but the painting has not been glimpsed in public since. TINDERA: Hypothetically though, Simon explained that our logic of taking one drawing and reviewing the sale price of that to extrapolate what a whole manuscript filled with drawings might be worth was something he considered in his own appraisal. As late as the press preview of the show, there was an empty space on the wall waiting for the Salvator Mundi, but it never arrived. But we need a lot more information than that before we make our estimate. One sold for nearly $6 million, and the other for $5.2 million. Leonardo da Vinci was a Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, military engineer and draftsman the epitome of a true Renaissance man. His drawing of the Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) has also become a cultural icon. JoinBBC Culture Film and TV Clubon Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. They brought it to Dianne Modestini, a highly respected restorer, who removed decades of grime and overpainting, and was the first to suspect it might be a true Leonardo. Son of Daniel (conductor & cellist) and Eleanore Saidenberg who were Picasso's New York dealers from 1955 to 1973. A list in another currency may be in a slightly different order due to exchange-rate fluctuations. Portrait of Ginevra de' Benci by Leonardo da Vinci. His was the last name on the 1988 provenance list; painting came from "a private collection in Arizona". As everyone who does not live in utter isolation knows, a painting of Christ known as the "Salvator Mundi" ("Savior of the World") by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci was. It was first unveiled to the public at the National Gallery in London in 2011. We also spoke with Stephen Massey, who we heard at the beginning of this episode. CLIP OF BILL GATES: So here, you're just seeing the page exactly as it looked to da Vinci. In cases like these, that's why we have to turn to the experts who know more about this than us. A tempera and oil mural on plaster, "The Last Supper" was created for the refectory . One of the sources says the Louvre concluded that Leonardo merely "contributed to the painting," but that bin Salman would only approve the loan if the Salvator Mundi were labelled an authentic Leonardo. So it doesn't really look like a notebook anymore. The series is full of conspiracy theories about the never-solved robbery. The source says he advised the government that "exhibiting under the Saudi conditions would be like laundering a piece that cost $450 million". ROBERT SIMON: My name is Robert Simon. Early Life: Verrocchio's Pupil. A New York Times story on the sale remarked that it was the highest price ever paid at auction for a manuscript. Whereas Picasso and Warhol became wealthy men, van Gogh is known to have sold only one painting in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard, for 400 French francs (approximately $2,000 in 2018 dollars) in 1890, to the Belgian impressionist painter and heiress Anna Boch. And if you liked this story,sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. It stayed with the Earl of Leicesters estate until 1980, when it finally went up for auction. Soon, the painting was on its way to Christie's. ", 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). TINDERA: Gates is up against a group from a bank in Milan thats sitting in the front of the Christie's salesroom. 9. The first question we're asking, but we're going to ask it again is, What are we actually looking at? If it's a first edition of Moby Dick, that's a great thing to have. Kenneth Griffin acquired it in 2004 from Wynn. The rest are owned by museums around the world. He created something he called the Codescope, which was software built to help museum-goers actually read da Vinci's backwards scrawl. This is a list of the highest known prices paid for paintings. He also worked in the next-door workshop of artist Antonio del Pollaiuolo, a sculptor, painter, engraver, and goldsmith, who frequently worked with his brother, Piero. [11][12] Prices realised for just his nine paintings listed below, when adjusted for inflation to 2017, add up to over US$900million. Love film and TV? Somewhere in Saudi Arabia, hidden away by order of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is the world's most expensive painting, Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. TINDERA: So how much is the Codex worth today? On the telephone in this room at $28 million. But one tries to lay out in a rational way, why one has a higher value than the other, why one has a lesser market appeal, and then try from that to come up with a single value. PETERSON-WITHORN: In the end, we decided to take the average of all the recommendations we got from our expert sources. In Verrocchios renowned workshop Leonardo received a multifaceted training that included painting and sculpture as well as the technical-mechanical arts. What Gouzer may have meant is that buyers prepared to spend in excess of $100m on artwork exist in the modern and contemporary fields. That's why these valuations can be so tricky. The Wikipedia template uses a yearly average inflation. At 18 million in this room. Re-sold for 12m to Stavros Niarchos in 1993. It came close. At one point, a telephone bidder jumped in, pushing the price from $332m to $350m. Leonardo devoted 12 yearswith interruptionsto this task. Life of Leonardo da Vinci, a Short Biography 1. St John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci. Renaissance artist, inventor, polymath, musician, and architect who painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and drew the iconic Vitruvian Man. On June 11, 2017, Ms. Gund revealed that she intended to use the proceeds from the sale of the painting for a specific purpose: to create a fund that supports criminal justice reform and seeks to reduce mass incarceration in the United States. TINDERA: Ultimately, in his appraisal, which Simon submitted in December 1993. PETERSON-WITHORN: And the fifth was a drawing by Michelangelo called The Holy Family with the Infant St. John the Baptist, which also sold to the Getty Museum in 1993, for $6.3 million. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Is it even a Leonardo at all? I'll give everyone time. And so, you've got the painting itself is you know, much more of a rare object. Twenty-eight million. The first is da Vinci's "The Last Supper," painted during his time in Milan, from about 1495 to 1498. When Leonardo was about 15, his father, who enjoyed a high reputation in the Florentine community, apprenticed him to artist Andrea del Verrocchio. But uncertainty is key to the appeal of every version of the story, as Lewis tells BBC Culture: "Nobody knows if it is a Leonardo, so you too can play the game, you can do your own Da Vinci Code on the Salvator Mundi. This stands as the most expensive painting by a living artist. Christies CEO, Guillaume Cerutti, said he did not know whether the buyer would reveal themselves. The world's most expensive painting to sell at auction is Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450.3 million on November 15, 2017 at Christie's.Shattering previous records and exceeding auction expectations, the sale underscored market demand for the artist's rare auction appearances, and the competition among collectors to own a work of such caliber and distinction. That is still a question. The paintings transferred to the dealers include a late, Alan Bond could not pay off the painting, and. Leonardo da Vincis total output in painting is really rather small; there are less than 20 surviving paintings that can be definitely attributed to him, and several of them are unfinished. The triptych had probably been reassembled by the Italian collector Francesco De Simone Niquesa, but were resold to a person in the US before 2013, This is the small version of the painting; the large version is at the. Amidst all these delightfully tangled histories, nothing rivals the Salvator Mundi. But he went even beyond that. Leonardo da vinci was an Artist, Scientist and Inventor.He was Born in April 15, 1452 in Vinci, Italy. Here's how much the artwork is worth! It suffers from not having Modestini or some other compelling central figure. - The world's greatest art detective, - The men who Leonardo da Vinci loved, - The detail that unlocks the Mona Lisa. TINDERA: Hammer is also the great-grandfather of Hollywood actor Armie Hammer. There is hardly a person on this planet that doesn't know about this artwork. SIMON: This is the clipping that I had taken out of the New York Times in 1980, when it was to be auctioned when Armand Hammer bought it. $50 million through Sothebys in 1997. The Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci. However, we should probably note that it seems unlikely that as the owner of the Codex, Gates would actually do this. The sale places Salvator Mundi as the highest-priced work sold privately or at auction, including Pablo Picassos 1955 Women of Algiers (Version O), sold for $179.4m, and Amedeo Modiglianis 1917-18 Reclining Nude, sold for $170.4m. Twenty-eight million dollars, then. This is the mirror where we flip it around, and now here it is in English. This wall painting in the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, allowed Leonardo to explore how the body communicates inner states of being. In November 2017 Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman paid $450 million for a da Vinci painting. At the height of the auction, as many of six bidders were in play. For example, on June 25, 2019, the American hedge fund manager J. Tomilson Hill bought a recently rediscovered Judith and Holofernes (1607) attributed to Caravaggio, two days before it would have been auctioned in Toulouse. Rybolovlev resold Te Fare in February 2017 at Christie's in London for $25 million. The most famous paintings, especially old master works created before 1803, are generally owned or held at museums, for viewing by patrons. Ford House couldn't refuse", "Secret $100 Million Czanne Sale in Detroit artnet News", "Chteau Ptrus Makes a Record-Breaking Saleof Art", Roman Abramovich brings home the $86.3m Bacon and the $33.6m Freud, "Femme assise prs d'une fentre (Marie-Thrse), 1932", Auction; `Blue' Picasso Breaks Record at $51.7 Million, Works by Johns and de Kooning Sell for $143.5 Million, "Russian Billionaire Takes 74% Loss on $85 Million Gauguin", "Now hanging at the Art Institute: Chicago billionaire Ken Griffin's new, $100 million Basquiat canvas", "Ken Griffin Buys Basquiat Painting for More Than $100 Million", The Getty secures masterpiece portrait by Titian, Mark Rothko painting sets post-war auction record, Hopper Painting Sells for Record $91.9 Million at Christies, "ARTnews: Cohen Buys Two Works from Wynn in $120M Deal", David Hockney Painting Sells for $90 Million, Smashing Record for Living Artist, "Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale Fine Art Auction Search Results Christie's", "Revealed: $72.8m Rockefeller Rothko has gone to Qatar", https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-heirs-of-a-jewish-banker-are-taking-a-japanese-company-to-court-over-an-allegedly-nazi-looted-van-gogh/ar-AA15sviM?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=cc9460cf2a05415db49f7eb48ba01da2, "How Robert Rauschenberg 'rewrote the rules of the game', "Report: Alice Walton Was Buyer of Record-Breaking $88.8 M. Rauschenberg at Christie's", A Warhol Leads a Night of Soaring Prices at Christies, Andy Warhol's "Triple Elvis" auction results, "Basquiat's In This Case headlines Christie's inaugural 21st Century Evening Sale at $93,105,000". He said that he would guess that if the Codex were to go up for auction again, the auction estimate for the item might be $150 million. Explore the life of Italian painter, architect, engineer, and humanist Leonardo da Vinci. But some have said that's because he was left-handed, and he didnt want his ink to smear. She tells BBC Culture, "Since then, Dianne Modestini continued to work on it. In the days leading up the the sale, Christies produced a video of celebrities viewing the work, among them Leonardo DiCaprio and Patti Smith. He Died in May 2, 1519 in Amboise, Kingdom of France.His Famous works includes Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Vitruvian Man Style/Period: High Renaissance Biography. Knowingly or not? TINDERA: Simon shared with us his own process for how he estimated the fair market value in the appraisal he put together nearly 30 years ago. CBS CLIP, CONNIE CHUNG: You know, you may be the richest man in America, or at least the second-richest man in America. Author of. According to some sources, the painting had been sold by Argentinian art collector Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier for $300 million,[9] but the price was not confirmed by any of the parties involved.[10]. It next appeared at a Sotheby's in England in 1958 where it sold for 45 - about $125 at the time. Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol are the best-represented artists in the list. Self Portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. At the time bin Salman was trying to burnish Saudi Arabia's image by loosening a few restrictions. We should note here that we did reach out to Christie's, as well as Bill Gates to ask if they had any comments on the value of the Codex today. He currently resides in Vinci, Italy. Because at the end of the day, it's an entertaining story.". The Met has since returned the coffin to Egypt. He was known to be fastidious in personal care, keeping a beard neat and trim in later age, and to dress in colorful clothing in styles that dismissed current customs. Robert Simon told us that he thought it would not sell for less than $150 million. He applied his creativity to every realm in which graphic representation is used: he was a painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer.
