Salvator Mundi: the record sale, and is it Leonardo's?

How much did the Salvator Mundi sell for?

450.3 million US dollars, fees included, at Christie's in New York on 15 November 2017. That makes it the most expensive painting ever sold at auction, and the most expensive work of art of any kind, on the public record lists of November 2025.

The bidding took about 19 minutes, and at the end two bidders were left. The hammer came down at 400 million dollars for a bidder on the telephone, and with the fees the total came to 450,312,500 dollars. Christie's had estimated it at over 100 million, the highest estimate an Old Master painting had ever had, and offered it in its evening sale of post-war and contemporary art, not with the Old Masters. The record before it was Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger, about 179.4 million dollars in 2015, and next on the lists of November 2025 is Klimt's portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, sold at Sotheby's that month for 236.4 million. It was sold on behalf of trusts of the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev.

The bidder on the telephone was not named that night. Who it was is the next question.

Who bought the Salvator Mundi, and who owns it now?

Its owner has never been publicly confirmed. The buyer of record, reported in December 2017, was the Saudi prince Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud, and according to press reports the real buyer was Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

The reports and statements point to Saudi Arabia or to Abu Dhabi. In date order:

Whether it belongs today to a person or to a state body, and which one, is not public. The owner has said nothing about it in public that we could find.

What does Salvator Mundi mean, and what does the painting show?

Salvator Mundi is Latin for Saviour of the World. The painting shows Christ from the front, raising his right hand to bless and holding a clear orb in his left.

The orb has been described in two ways. In 2011 the National Gallery called it rock crystal, and the withdrawn Louvre book, as The Art Newspaper reported, found it is glass with air bubbles. According to the same report, the book also found that the blessing hand was painted over the black background, which suggests it was not part of the first plan. In 2025 the art historian Philipp Zitzlsperger argued that the all-blue robe with its low neckline borrows from pictures of women and of the Virgin Mary. Frank Zöllner called the idea important but a little too sensational. Martin Kemp said that if no other Christ wears such a blue robe, that would count for Leonardo.

Who it was painted for is not known. The National Gallery suggested in 2011 that Leonardo probably made it for the French king, Louis XII, and the Louvre's book, as reported, calls that idea weak.

How big it is, drawn to one scale with the other works in the wing: the sizes page.

Where is the Salvator Mundi now?

Its whereabouts are not public. It has not been shown since the days before the sale in November 2017, and every place named for it since then comes from a report, often from one person.

Abu Dhabi planned to unveil it in 2018 and called that off. Since then there have only been reports. In date order:

Where it is, what state it is in, and whether and when it will be shown again: none of this is public.

Is the Salvator Mundi really by Leonardo?

Experts disagree. Nearly all accept that the design goes back to Leonardo and that the panel is badly damaged and heavily restored, but not whether he painted it himself or his workshop did, with or without his hand.

No document from Leonardo's lifetime mentions a Salvator Mundi painted by him. The design is tied to him by two red chalk studies for the robe, kept in the Royal Collection at Windsor, and by more than twenty copies and versions. After his death, a 1525 inventory of his pupil Salaì's estate lists a Christ shown like God the Father, and royal inventories in 17th-century England list a Christ by Leonardo, but no document ties any of them to this panel. An etching made by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1650 names Leonardo as the painter of the picture it copies, but Hollar's Christ has a full beard, and the panel as restored has none. The panel itself can be followed only from 1900, as the table of sales shows. Our wing labels it about 1499 to 1510, and the dates proposed run from about 1499 to around 1523, as the list below shows.

Who holds which view, and since when:

Whether Leonardo's hand is in this panel, and how much of it. Two records that would help are not public: the Louvre laboratory's findings, known only through the withdrawn book, and a full account of the restoration, which Zöllner says was never published in full.

The wing's other paintings, work by work, and how sure scholars are about each: Leonardo da Vinci's paintings.

What did the Salvator Mundi look like before restoration?

Badly damaged: when its restorer received it in 2005, the walnut panel was split, the face worn and damaged in places, and much of the background scraped off and painted over. An older photograph from the Cook collection shows a different face.

Its restorer was Dianne Dwyer Modestini of New York University, who worked on it in stages from 2005 until July 2017, shortly before the sale. She holds that Leonardo painted it, so her detailed account on her own website comes from a party to the debate. She records a single walnut board with a split running through it, worm tunnels that had cost bits of the forehead, the tip of the nose and the left eye, and a chin, neck and chest worn down by harsh cleaning. She filled the losses with thin glazes, touched the eyes as little as she could, added a few waves of hair where it was missing and repainted the lost parts of the black background. An earlier position of the blessing hand's thumb showed through, and she painted it out after the National Gallery's curator, Luke Syson, decided so. She says an ultraviolet photograph shows exactly where she retouched, and that none of her retouching lies on original paint.

What share of the paint is original: no one has published a figure. Frank Zöllner says photographs from 2005 to 2017 show that the painting's soft, smoky modelling partly comes from this latest restoration, and that its findings were never fully published.