On November 15, 2017, a famous New York City auction house published the following announcement: “On a historic night at Christie’s in New York, ‘Salvator Mundi’, a depiction of Christ as ‘Saviour of the World’ by one of history’s greatest and most renowned artists, sold for $450,312,500 / £342,182,751 (including buyer’s premium), becoming the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.”
The irony is that Leonardo da Vinci may have had a hand in producing that painting, but the composition which is before our eyes and minds today is so uncharacteristic of the great master’s mind that the curators who manipulated it made a mockery of it and turned the composition into the most expensive mystification ever.
