Original subtitles

A sleeper is a painting that's being offered

almost entirely at auction...

Which is clearly by a much better artist

than the auction house has recognized.

A sleeper hunter is someone who looks for these mistakes.

And that's what I do. That's what I do.

So I find this painting that's cataloged as after Leonardo.

It's a copy after the lost salvator mundi,

the savior of the world, that we know Leonardo did.

Jesus is not an easy sell.

But for whatever reason...

This picture attracts my attention.

And I call Robert Simon.

We have purchased paintings together.

We've done very well with them.

He enjoys the same hunt.

Alex called me and said...

"Have you seen this picture down in New Orleans auction?"

He said, "yeah, lsawit too. What shall we do?"

And we decided to buy it. We're gonna buy it.

We agreed on a price.

Alex arranges for the shipment.

I think it was sent ups on a truck to New York.

And we're rolling.

- Rolling. - Yeah.

- Rolling. - Good.

I'm gonna open with a very broad question.

Why do you think the salvator mundi has caused so much fuss?

First, let me say this.

This is the most improbable story

that has, I think, ever happened in the art market.

Everybody wanted it to be a Leonardo.

And so everybody took the most optimistic view they could

of it as a Leonardo.

And perhaps it is a Leonardo.

It's not even a good painting!

I believe that a picture has its own power

and that power is experienced only truly

when you're standing in front of it.

This is simply a matter of economics when you boil down to it.

And greed. Basic human, uh, foibles.

Money.

The picture came in a cardboard box,

which is kind of what you'd expect for the sort of money we spent.

And I took it out...

And two things are immediately apparent.

And I mean... within five seconds.

One, there's clearly a great deal of overpaint.

Restoration on the face of Christ.

There's clearly a large swath of the painting...

That is untouched, UN-restored...

And absolutely period.

By that, I mean circa 1500.

I'm thinking, "this is an extraordinary object."

But what it is, I don't know. But we have to find out.

It's a work from around the year 1500,

probably by one of these artists so close to the master

that it deserved, really, to have, um, the best possible care.

I'm Evan beard.

I, uh, run the art services group at bank of america.

We 're the largest lender against art.

We manage about 100 museum endowments around the country.

This picture, it tells both an art historical story,

but it also tells the history of financial markets,

tells the history of the rise of social and cultural capital.

So they bring the picture to probably the top art conservation professional

in the entire field,

dianne modest/hi.

He comes over carrying this painting in, um...

A black plastic garbage bag.

And I take the painting out of the bag and put it on an easel.

There are very lovely passages

and other passages are very damaged, overpainted.

I still didn't know what it was

and I brought it to Mario in the bedroom.

Mario modestini is a celebrated painting conservator of all time.

He also vetted the ginevra de' benci for the national gallery.

The only Leonardo in the western hemisphere.

This is a man who's seen a lot of Leonardo

and he might be interested in seeing the picture.

At the time, he was 98 years old and housebound.

I said, "Mario, look at this picture.

What do you think of it?"

And he suddenly kind of paid attention to it.

And he said, "this is by a very great artist."

And he said, "I don't know who it is, but it's the generation after Leonardo."

I took some solvents from the cabinet, acetone and mineral spirits,

and I rolled cotton wool on a stick.

Then I began slowly to remove the varnish and some retouching.

And one of the things that immediately appears

a first position of the thumb.

This is called "pentiment." It's an artist's first idea.

The thumb was subsequently moved to a different position.

And you don't usually find that in a copy,

but it's not proof that it's definitely the original.

Uh, at least it wasn't proof for me.

As I remove retouching,

the thumb appears immediately,

as does, um...

A, um, lot of damage in the head.

I notice that there's a very wide white fill,

quite recent, that is covering a crack.

This crack that runs through the panel

is actually from a knot

that's low down in the center.

Next day, dianne calls me.

"Bob, I've cleaned the picture.

And you have to come over and see it."

I'm faced with two things.

One is a picture that I see is severely damaged,

but all of the very amateurish,

brownish, reddish paint that was an attempt to create a beard is gone.

So I knew that it really needed conservation treatment

at the very highest level.

Mario dies in January.

And I began to work on the salvator mundi in my studio.

Alone.

I would...

Carry on a conversation with Mario the entire time.

I didn't talk to him out loud.

Except maybe once or twice.

But I would just have this dialogue with him in my head.

I could hear him say, "he looks like he has a toothache."

And I would do it over again.

Or he would say, "nose is crooked."

Mario's face and the salvator mundi's face, you know,

they kind of shift back and forth in my mind.

One evening, I am wrestling for the tenth time

with retouching a small loss,

which is just above the lip, right here.

And there is a transition in this area

from the lip to the upper lip,

um, that is imperceptible.

There is no line there, for the edge of the lip

is exactly what is present

in the same area of the Mona Lisa.

My hands are shaking.

No one except Leonardo could have painted this picture.

I leave the building and call Robert and say,

"the painting is by Leonardo."

I think at that point...

"What can we do? What is there to do with this picture?"

There are only, by most people's count,

about 15 leonardos known.

And to say, "I have found a picture like this,"

is, in our circles, akin to saying,

"I had a spaceship on my lawn last night and I saw some unicorns."

It's just so far-fetched.

Don't even try to convince yourself that it's right,

because you're just gonna look like a fool.

"The most famous artist of the high renaissance."

Those paintings are heavily documented.

And, all of a sudden, we have this one.

It disappears for hundreds of years.

And then it turns up in america?

In New Orleans?

Oh! I see.

Here's the lost Leonardo that somebody once mentioned in a book.

When you go back to old masters,

the provenance is very important

because that line of ownership tells its story.

Where did this object come from, and in what context

did it land in the moment it's in right now?

So, you know, Robert spent a lot of time going through archives

and starting to piece together a provenance,

because any picture, if it doesn't have a provenance, there's doubt.

There's reasons for people not to believe what it is.

I was able to trace the painting's whereabouts to the year 1900,

when it was sold at a London auction as attributed to luini.

But then the trail went cold.

I looked through old British inventories from the 17th century

and I found two possible citations in the collection of Charles I.

And my colleague Margaret dalivalle found one in the collection of Charles ii.

Our painting does not have the royal brand on its reverse,

as the panel has been thinned and rebacked.

It seems possible, but not provable, that this is the same painting.

But still today, we don't know exactly which one it might be.

Particularly in the old masters' space,

opinions matter more than facts at any one time.

And you always start with the two or three

who are most willing to potentially listen to you

that this could be by the hand of the master.

When you're a museum curator,

you quite often get sent images by e-mail,

transparencies, whatever they might be,

of pictures that people hope might be lost or forgotten masterpieces.

And I have to say that for the most part,

they are, to put it politely, somewhat disappointing.

So when I was sent a transparency of the salvator mundi,

I was, [have to say, somewhat skeptical about what one would see.

And I looked at it and I thought,

"gosh, this feels powerful."

And I felt it needed to be seen in the flesh.

So he suggested that he would invite

the leading scholars on Leonardo to see the painting

in kind of the neutral territory

of the painting conservation lab at the national gallery.

What I was hoping to do in gathering the scholars at the national gallery

was to look carefully at the picture

and how it spoke to that group of people.

I'm Martin kemp,

emeritus professor of the history of art, University of Oxford.

The salvator mundi came out of the blue literally as a surprise,

because there's been no authentic Leonardo painting for over 100 years.

So you don't sit there waiting for one to come along.

We knew that Leonardo had been involved with the subject of the salvator mundi.

We also have two drawings at windsor,

very beautiful red chalk drawings for draperies,

one for the chest with the gathered drapery,

and the other for the arm and sleeve.

So we know he was involved in planning that.

There are quite a lot of copies. I think we're now up to plus 20.

But I thought that if Leonardo had painted an original,

the chance of it turning up was very small.

A Leonardo can be several different things.

There's works that are fully accepted from the hand of the master,

and you will see them labeled by Leonardo.

But there are also workshop of Leonardo.

He was guiding perhaps a student on the work,

but there's not firm agreement that the entire work

is from the hand of the author.

You have circle of Leonardo 's,

followers that did work in their style and in their manner.

And then finally, follower of Leonardo,

who is doing his picture in the artist's style.

If this picture was the follower of a follower of Da Vinci,

it would be worth what Mr. Simon paid for it, $1100.

If it was a student of,

say he was working under Da Vinci at the time, like boltraffio was,

it would be exponentially more valuable than that.

And if it was by the hand of the master,

then it would be, not exponentially,

but exponentially upon exponentially more valuable.

Uh, the curve is rather absurd.

We had already begun to plan the Leonardo exhibition,

which had some major loans already agreed.

The issue was how to take this picture to London.

It was unframed and a special box was built for it,

and it was small enough so that it could be hand-carried

and go through the X-ray machine.

The next day, I go to the national gallery,

where it awaits the arrival of the invited scholars.

You're dealing with the ego and dreams of academics.

Every academic wants to make a discovery.

I'm trying, when I'm going to London, not to set up expectations.

Expectations are dangerous

because you end up seeing what you want to see.

I decided to play it as cool as I could,

and looked at it, and clearly, it's got a presence.

Leonardos have a strange presence.

They are very assertive, but at the same time very ambiguous.

And Leonardo does that. Other people can't.

I'm Maria Teresa fiorio.

I worked in the museums of the city of Milano.

I always have a magnifying glass with me,

which may seem pretentious,

but it actually serves me well in these circumstances.

It means I can shut up and just get on with looking at something,

rather than having to ramble on about it.

So there's an amazing moment.

I didn't really get any answer, I didn't get any direct answer from them.

They were... I also knew not to insist.

So did you get to talk to all of the scholars

and did you ask them directly, "is it Leonardo?"

I sometimes think that it's better to hear opinions over...

The course of a conversation.

So there was certainly no moment where we voted,

or where I put this question to people directly.

It was much more a kind of sense of what their response was.

To me at least, the response in the room felt very positive.

It felt as if there'd been... That discovery was confirmed in a way,

and that this group of scholars, um, was as excited as I had been.

Nobody asked me a formal opinion about this painting.

It was just... I shouldn't say a chat, but something like that.

So the scholars were just brought in for an afternoon to look at it?

Brought in, yes.

They looked at it and said, "looks good to me"?

Well, they were open to the fact that it was a Da Vinci.

They named the scholars and said, "these people authenticated the painting"?

- Yes. - Oh, god.

There is a suspicious aspect to it,

in that the provenance of the painting is very murky.

It's ghostlike, from where it came from.

So there's a question there.

Maybe it was a week or week and a half later,

the national gallery called me to tell me that basically

everyone had agreed that the picture was indeed by Leonardo.

This was the moment we had to say,

not only to each other, but to ourselves,

"this is real. This really is real.

This is a Da Vinci and we're currently the owners of it."

How long would you queue to see an exhibition?

These Da Vinci fans stood in the cold for hours.

It's like watching your child go out into the world

and just hoping that they don't fall down, scrape their knee,

that nobody hurts their feelings.

This is Leonardo's rediscovered salvator mundi

that has astonishingly turned up in the United States of America.

It sort of seduces your soul. It's calming just to be near it.

Finding a Leonardo is not something that you can do every day.

So they presented it as a Leonardo.

As Leonardo. Yes.

Okay, so that was their own decision.

- Yes. - Okay, so...

We found it as a Leonardo in the exhibition.

Before the exhibition, the national gallery makes a press release

where it's described as a sort of test, but when the exhibition opens,

the painting is labeled as a full-autographed Leonardo.

Why this difference?

So putting "attributed to,"

or "ascribed to," or "possibly by, " or one of these phrases,

would, I think, have been to distort my own view,

and, um, to really,

in a way, confuse the issue still further

that this was the lost picture by Leonardo of the salvator mundi.

I felt the national gallery was in a good place

to put this picture on view,

and I have to say, had I felt anything differently at that point,

we would have made a very different decision.

My name is frank zdllner. I'm working on renaissance art,

Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo.

I saw the salvator in the exhibition in London,

and my first impression basically said,

"okay, this is an interesting painting,

uh, but there's something very strange."

For example, the curls are sort of very schematic

and the blessing hand, the flesh tones, looks like a pupil to me.

And then you have this overall aura, the overall light.

It's something which is very, very good.

But this is exactly the part which has been restored.

So this is a quite paradoxical situation.

You have the old parts of the painting which are original.

These are by pupils.

And you have the new part of the painting, which look like Leonardo,

but they are by the restorer.

In some part, it's a masterpiece by dianne modestini.

But that's ridiculous, because I can't paint like Leonardo.

I mean, it's very flattering, but it's absurd.

I think she has done a great job on it as a painter.

But one can ask if she maybe has overdone it a bit.

I think it's more leonardesque than Leonardo had done it.

Well, to me, the work is not by Leonardo

because I don't recognize his technique.

What struck me first was the hand.

Because the lifted fingers were absolutely wrong

because, notably this one,

because it seems to rotate over itself, which, of course, is impossible.

He studied human anatomy extensively.

Imagining that...

Such a work led him to paint wrong hands...

Can't be thought about. It's unthinkable.

We need a little distance to judge this painting.

Attribution issues are not decided in one or in ten years.

They are decided in ten, in 20, in 30 years.

And it may turn out that in 50 years' time, people say,

"okay, how could these idiots

at the early 21st century see this as a Leonardo painting?"

There's been a lot of noise and so on.

How has it been for you to be through that?

Fine.

What do you feel is at stake for you, personally, in this case?

- Nothing. - No?

You're not gonna get anywhere. Sorry.

Okay.

You could say I'm a maximalist.

There's not much wall space left, but there's always somewhere else.

I haven't used the ceiling yet.

Everyone in this country now, and I guess the world,

talks about fake news, and all lies and politics,

and all of the hypocrisy that you see.

But the thing is, what scares people the most, in my business, is the truth.

What's the reason that the national museum would show this painting?

Simple. Unfortunately, it's to boost the visitors.

They have no right to exhibit a painting

that hasn't been 150% scrutinized

and, uh, vefled that it is what it purports to be.

And in this case, that painting was nowhere

near that stage of authentication

where it would be warranted to be exhibited

in such a tremendously reputable

and influential museum. It's just not right.

I mean, whenever there's a lot of money involved,

the world becomes a bunch of worms

intertwined when you pick up a rock.

There was no doubt in anyone's mind where this painting

was ultimately going to end up, which was for sale.

I'm Warren adelson, and I've been an art dealer

for most of my adult life.

My first encounter was at a lunch with Bob Simon,

and he was grinning and he was grinning.

And I said, "what's with you? What's going on with you?"

He said, "I've got to tell you, nobody knows this,

but we just had this picture by Leonardo

in London at the national gallery, and it's been authenticated."

And I said, "wow, can I see an image of it?"

And he showed me a photograph of it.

And I thought it was incredible.

I said, "you know, maybe there's some role for me here.

[Have a history, as you know, of selling expensive pictures."

80 Warren became our third partner.

When you had to figure out the price,

how did you come about that?

I came up... Certainly, we came up with an idea

that it was worth in excess of $200 million.

You know, the desire was not to put it on the market, essentially.

The desire was for it to be, um, acquired by a museum.

I made an attempt to sell the painting to museums.

I'm from Boston. I went to the Boston museum.

I was close to the Houston museum

through my great friend Meredith long.

I tried the Dallas museum

and the painting was there for nine months

and they tried to raise the money.

So why didn't they buy it?

Um, it was completely an issue of, uh...

Inability to raise the sufficient funds to acquire it.

My name is bernd lindemann.

I was the director of the geméildegalerie here in Berlin.

One day I got a telephone call. It was a dealer,

and he said he has something which could be interesting

for the gemaldegalerie. Well, and that was the painting.

Most of the painting is a remake,

and this was, for me, the argument to say,

"no, this is not a painting for the gemaldegalerie."

I was surprised to see the painting

in the exhibition at the national gallery in London.

It is a problematic painting,

and I think it's not the role of serious museums

to present a painting which is so heavily discussed.

It was very frustrating. It was a very frustrating thing.

I felt I had the rarest painting in the world

by the greatest artist in the world,

and I couldn't sell it.

There were so many issues that are like red flags popping up.

Da Vinci paints on wood.

When he's making these paintings, he's such a perfectionist.

He's not gonna paint it on a piece of shit wood

with a big knot right in the middle,

which inherently makes the painting unstable.

It's just not the way he operates.

I mean, the joke circulating around the contemporary art world

was that the painting was a contemporary painting because 90% of it

was painted within the last ten years, during the restoration process.

Mario and I had a house southeast of Florence that we restored together.

It's bittersweet

because there are so many memories there

and so many ties.

Mario used to like to use these little, you know, small boards to paint on.

Oh, that's one of his. That's a little picture that he painted.

I think that's Mario. Maybe it's me. I'm not sure.

Well, yeah.

I had never really painted when I met him.

So he was, um...

Yeah, so he began teaching me to draw,

and to paint, and to draw from these...

I know there are rumors that I was part owner of the picture,

but that's completely untrue.

People may think that because my husband was...

He absolutely did own shares in pictures all the time,

because Mario was also a dealer.

He worked with the best dealers.

That's why I have money, pictures, things.

No, Mario bought pictures and shares with dealers,

but he was such a great connoisseur,

apart from being a restorer, that he was so valuable to them,

but it was with the top of the top.

But I'm not a dealer.

Art dealers, the whole art world is very tricky and, you know...

You know? And it's, um...

And I'm not...

I'm not that kind of tricky person. So I don't...

I would never get into that. Never.

And I certainly didn't have anything to do with this. Uh...

And why do you say it was more than just a restoration?

I was also involved with the whole process

of attributing the painting

and being a spokesman for the picture,

which I did because I absolutely believe in it.

I said to Robert one day,

"I don't know how to charge you for this. It's more than just a restoration."

He said, "when we sell it,"

he said, you know...

"I'll give you what, you know, I believe you deserve."

Hm. So it was not like a fixed percentage?

It was never fixed.

He paid me generously, but yeah.

Geneva, historically, is a place you go to disappear.

This is a place where nations negotiate peace treaties.

This is a place where diplomats and intelligence agents go

to have a neutral territory.

And this is also a place

where businessmen are able to run sensitive operations

in a very low-voltage, safe environment.

So the painting is sold to yves bouvier.

There are many versions of yves bouvier.

And the more I have gotten to know him,

the less I think I know him.

The bouvier affair was a bit the elephant in the room

for investigative journalists in Switzerland.

And we were able to get access to a lot of court documents,

and that enabled us to build a narrative,

a storyline that was as close to the truth as we could have.

Yves bouvier is a quiet guy

who, I think, at the time,

you probably would not have said is a major player

in the art world, um, but he played a major role.

He meets a Russian transplant

who really exiles himself in Geneva,

Mr. Dmitry rybolovlev.

We were contacted, uh, by sotheby's...

About a client they had.

Part of the agreement in the sale

was that I'm not supposed to talk about the trip to Paris.

I can say that I was glad that it was finally over.

Uh, it was a very trying and difficult situation.

And I'm really glad I got back,

and the best thing I could say about it was that it was over.

We were paid the next day. And from that point of view,

it was cleaned up.

Cleaned up.

Yves bouvier is trying to convince Mike sazonov.

What he omits to say is that he already bought it.

That was the whole negotiation, and all of it is fake.

Bouvier has made this really quite extraordinary markup

of $47.5 million on a transaction

that took him less than two days.

It's extraordinary and quite frankly, pretty unheard of in the art world.

New part of the free port.

Yves bouvier inherited a shipping business from his father.

But yves bouvier realized that there was increasing demand

for places to store high-value goods.

So he expanded his business by creating armored warehouses

generally within the perimeter of an airport,

and these are free ports.

The Geneva freeport is supposed to hold

literally billions of dollars' worth of art.

My name is Doug patteson.

A former clandestine service officer with the CIA.

The history of the salvator mundi and how it's grown in value

is opening eyes to how money can be moving in different ways

through the free port system.

A free port is a tax-free haven...

Where very wealthy people will often keep items secret from tax authorities.

So objects can be bought and sold within a free port,

but no taxes apply because the objects are considered still in transit.

One of the things that we've really observed recently

is that paintings are increasingly used as collateral for loans, bank loans.

A whole infrastructure has sprung up around this

that allows you, the collector,

who've put millions of dollars in your art,

you can keep your art within the free port facility,

get the capital you have invested in the art out of there and redeploy.

It's not about art and love. It's about money.

It's about transferring funds.

There's one thing that you cannot remove from the human beings,

is the greed.

If you sit on valuable goods and you don't trust your own country,

because, you know, the fiscal guys are on your back...

Why not store it in the free port and store it in a so-called whatever safe?

That gorilla is a big smoker.

Interesting guy.

If taxes were reasonable, people would not have to play that game.

You know, there is this saying that after drugs and prostitution,

that the art market is the most unregulated market in the world.

A very opaque world in which you very often don't know who owns something,

how much it's worth, who's buying it or who's selling it.

Most of the transactions are very, very dark.

It's another Avenue to store money.

It's the last vestiges of the wild wild west.

Russia in the 19903 is the wild west.

And this is also a time where businessmen had an opportunity

to become exorbitantly wealthy by taking ownership

in the transitioning of bureaus that became businesses.

So out of this comes Mr. Dmitry rybolovlev,

a man who becomes a billionaire literally overnight

when he floats this potash company on the London stock exchange.

What you had was someone who needed to get money out of Russia,

and he found someone who was quiet, discreet,

and who he felt he could trust with his life.

The Russian on the run and the quiet Swiss man,

they forge this alliance around the acquisition of art.

Yves bouvier had built a network

allowing him to get all kinds of information

on who owned the paintings, what was its real value.

And that was priceless in order to conduct his business.

He was the king because he was in possession of information

that no one else had.

He made a billion dollars' profit.

That's a good dealer.

Yeah, it's good business.

It's safer to buy a painting than a piece of real estate

because a piece of real estate you can always seize it to jump on it.

A painting is buried somewhere in a free port around the world.

Nobody knows where it is. Look at the salvator mundi.

Right now, I don't know where it is.

I am so anxious for it

to finally find a home

where people can experience the extraordinary power of this painting.

Art, to me, is the only truth, really.

And it's really a way of living life, to communicate with people.

Art doesn't exist in a vacuum.

If it's existing in these great warehouses that are free ports

as a kind of financial asset...

It would be a shame because it's something that could be seen by people.

It could have an effect on people.

The whole world is trying to...

Is discussing, "where the hell is that painting?"

Nobody knows where it is.

The buyer doesn't have to tell where he puts his painting.

They do whatever they want with their money.

Who cares?

Only the press, the bad press,

and the people who are curious

are caring about something that doesn't even concern them.

2014 was really the beginning of the end for bouvier and rybolovlev.

An article was published that indicated the price of the final sale,

which, of course, was different than what rybolovlev had paid.

So once Mr. R. Found out, he was pretty pissed off.

And that really sparked the actions

that were taken against bouvier that moved quite quickly after that.

Mr. R. Couldn't look at any of his art collection the same.

Every time he looked at a painting,

if it was the greatest masterpiece ever painted,

all he saw was the fact that he was abused and taken advantage of

by Mr. Bouvier, who was now the world's richest free port owner.

His markup was 100%. That's not a crime, it's greedy.

What he was trying to do to screw bouvier

was to destroy his reputation,

to sue him in every courthouse that would entertain the suit.

He is really very angry, like a Russian bear

that somebody had stuck something into.

He was furious!

What he wanted to do was dump all of his art

that were great, fantastic pieces, but he radically overpaid for them.

So, what he was fully expecting to do was to lose money.

People think of auction houses as sort of a passive repository of objects

to sell on behalf of collectors who decide it's time to sell.

Most of the actual high-end objects they sell

don't actually come to market in that way.

Sold.

They are actually out there.

Their specialists are in the living room of collectors

and telling them it's the right time to sell this work...

Seventy-one, 72...

It's a hot market for this work,

and they're trying to actually pull in those objects.

Thank you, all of you, for one million six. To you, sir.

If they've got the best art for sale, they'll find the buyers.

So the competition is at the level of getting the consignments.

You have it. What's your number?

The guy at the auctioneer is always European with a vague accent.

"Do I have 2 million?

Oh, John, I saw you bid 3 million before.

Oh, wait. I say!

We have 5 million."

Sold. Thank you very much indeed.

So once rybolovlev,

when he does start selling, he sells them through christie's.

And, of course, that is where salvator mundi ends up.

Nothing was wrong with his art, except for the Da Vinci.

All of the other pieces in his collection were fantastic pieces.

This was the one black swan in his collection that had questions around it.

But there is a massive billion-dollar collection behind it

that could be potential future business for the auction house.

So christie's had to keep their client happy.

They went all-in on this picture.

The term "male Mona Lisa" is used for this object.

The Mona Lisa is insured for over $800 million.

So I think calling it the male Mona Lisa makes sense as a marketer.

On a financial front, it helps to explain the value.

The Mona Lisa, in the early 20th century, was of secondary importance...

Until 1961, when John F. Kennedy

makes his way to the Vienna summit and makes a stop off in Paris.

And their culture minister, Andre' malraux, is completely entranced by Jacqueline.

Jackie whispers in his ear at one of the evening events

that, "I'd love for you to take the Mona Lisa to the United States

so we could show our population this cultural masterpiece."

Mr. Minister, we in the United States

are grateful for this loan...

From the leading artistic power in the world, France.

And lines go down the block.

Most of the people that were coming to see it

were not coming to see the painting.

They were coming to have seen the picture, to say they saw the celebrity.

Christie's understood they had to accomplish the same thing,

where this is the male Mona Lisa,

we need to convince the potential buyer that you're now buying a global celebrity

that will play into the power and prestige of your acquisition.

Their primary marketing video was brilliant in a way

because it never actually showed the object.

What they show instead is a series of people

going up to the object and having an emotional reaction to it.

They even had Leonardo DiCaprio.

They realized that they needed to show whatever collector bought this thing,

there was a mass following

and that people were buying into this celebrity.

Christie's released a ton of marketing

that generated traffic, generated hype.

It brought the salvator mundi into the mind's eye

of so many people very quickly.

This is some kind of an homage to an artist, the first viral artist,

who was the first real image maker, who's...

You know, who would have images that would go all around the world

and be recognized by anyone.

Christie's is in the business of selling.

It's not in the business of authenticating.

And they did a great job

on the back of that amazing marketing campaign,

which everybody, without hesitation, gives plaudits to

as a sort of cynical marketing exercise.

Any serious questions about its authenticity?

None, really. Uh...

It was, as I said, almost completely overpainted.

But once that was removed, after its rediscovery,

the quality of it became very evident,

and, really, there hasn't been any real question.

Why is it called the male Mona Lisa?

Well, it's painted around the same time as Mona Lisa.

It's painted around 1500.

And this and the painting of Mona Lisa probably overlap.

The salvator mundi global tour took on a life of its own,

to London, to Hong Kong, where there may be clusters of potential buyers.

I was very opposed to them doing that.

It was reckless...

Uh, to send it around the world that way. But they...

I couldn't stop them from doing it.

Christie's is mercenaries.

That's a business. You expect that behavior from them,

and if you're a client of christie's, you want them to do anything

as ruthlessly as possible to get you the greatest price for your asset.

In the time I've been at this, I never remember a picture

becoming sort of a pop culture icon

where lines were literally around the corner.

This was a cultural event in its own right.

By the time it came here to New York, everyone wanted a piece of it.

So christie's, their tag line is "the last Leonardo."

Normally, what you'd do with an old master

is you'd talk about the provenance, its composition.

None of that was required here.

They knew they were gonna be appealing to a subset of the collector base

that was thinking about power and legacy.

"Hey, Mr. Billionaire, this is your last chance to acquire

the greatest artist of western civilization."

You have to know your audience,

because it was a trophy to end all trophies.

It is a work... That's very subject is power.

The morning of the sale, I woke up at 6 am.

And had a car fetch me and took me to cnbc's headquarters in midtown.

The last privately owned Leonardo Da Vinci painting is going to auction...

You know, there was so much interest from the financial world.

What would this thing actually make?

- Who are those bidders? - It's a good question.

I think the bidders are gonna be a contemporary collector,

a trophy hunter, a private equity executive, a hedge fund individual,

or a syndicate from the middle east, Chinese wealthy.

This is a global trophy, and we'll see where it goes.

I think it has a fighting chance to make 180 million or more.

The most expensive painting ever sold in the history of the art world.

Welcome to rockefeller center here in New York.

You had a completely packed room.

They had to bring in extra chairs, people were pushed to every corner,

corralled there to try and take in the action.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we move to the Leonardo da Vinci, the salvator mundi.

Previously in the collections of three kings of england.

Going over here to take 125.

Last chance, 125 then.

130? 130 with...

Phones started to go up.

At 180 million, ladies and gentlemen.

Because that was the most valuable price ever achieved at auction,

and you could hear an audible gasp

as everyone was sort of waiting for that final hammer to come down.

Give me 200, 190 is bid. Who...?

200 million is bid. At 200 million.

There it is at 205.

It was hard to tell how much of the loss of composure was genuine

and how much of it was for the crowd.

At one point, he even has the hammer held in the air.

There is a certain courtesy about how long you wait

for someone to decide if they're gonna make the bid.

In the weeks leading up to the auction,

the team at christie's are receiving calls

from some of the world's richest people.

At the very end of this list

is this one bidder that they've never heard of before.

They needed to make sure he was a real bidder.

So they told him and his team,

"listen, if you want to be a bidder in this auction,

you're gonna have to transfer 10%

of what is the maximum amount you would be willing to pay."

The next morning, the accounting department came over

and said, "you won't believe this,

but that guy just transferred $100 million into our account overnight."

Oftentimes, there is a predetermined price of sorts.

Very few people, or sometimes only one person,

knows what that final amount will be.

220 is bid, a casual hand goes up at 220 million.

Are you all done here, sir? Are you out?

240 million?

So we're all done?

Maybe not.

Don't take the photograph quite yet.

Still two of you in the game here.

It became clear that, okay, we're in a duel.

On one telephone, you had someone who wanted to be completely incremental,

that was playing with his own money.

And then you had someone who was using house money.

And that house money was probably not an individual,

but maybe, maybe even a country.

I thought so.

300 million.

Salvator mundi by Leonardo da Vinci.

320 million, we're still not done.

At 330 million now.

Back to francois.

Three-fifty.

350? Okay.

At 350 million for Leonardo's salvator mundi.

- 400. - 400 million!

Salvator mundi selling here at christie's.

$400 million is the bid, and the piece is... sold.

The art world is stunned, they are shocked,

they can't believe it this morning

after the astonishing record-breaking sale of a rare masterpiece.

Who paid 450 million?

Probably a billionaire that bought it.

Your response to me was, "well, duh!"

It's a very anonymous world,

and people aren't always quick to say, "it's me.

I spent all this money, I have all this money.

Come to my house, take whatever you want."

You know, there's privacy because there's fear

around showing your wealth to that degree.

We'll not comment on the identity and the geography of the buyer.

Even if it's decided months, years, decades later

that it's not really by Leonardo da Vinci,

those $450 million will live out in eternity

as a value put upon this work of art.

This director of metropolitan museum of art

wrote on his Instagram page after the sale:

"Watch out, 85% of the painting is by dianne modestini."

And that then was picked up by...

A whole lot of people who didn't know anything.

There were people of all walks, museum curators,

art historians and regular people, just chiming in.

People who had never had any weight, or interest even,

were suddenly decrying this image as false and a fraud.

Then all these, you know, Internet trolls started saying,

"oh, that's because it's not really by Leonardo,

and nobody accepts the attribution."

This is just for self-publicity and to create a scandal,

and nobody really cares what the truth is.

One of the people that spoke most vocally

about the salvator mundi being fake was Jerry saltz.

I've been looking at art for 40 years,

and this is a made-up piece ofjunk.

In drag.

The salvator mundi, it is no more real...

Than any of the other dreamed-up scams and schemes

by people that may not mean to be flimflamming...

But in the end, they all went along for the ride.

Which is the lesson of our time.

I go along with the lie,

I don't say anything because I don't want to be kicked off

the island of love, of power,

of money, of influence.

So you have museum people,

you have collectors, curators, art historians.

Of course, the auction houses who make a big deal about everything.

"Oh, it's our dream painting." Always pushing.

Everybody was complicit

in dreaming up this beautiful dream

of a lost Leonardo da Vinci.

People can get lots of media attention

by saying something outrageous about this painting.

Anyway, so I'm just kind of trying to make a case for myself.

I have continued to study the salvator mundi.

I went to Naples to look at a copy of the salvator mundi.

I've tried to explain some of the questions about the painting.

There is all this documentation, so I put everything up on a website.

And I want to give anyone who is interested

all the information that I have

so that they can make up their own mind.

After this, I will have my life back.

Because everything I know,

or probably ever will know, about this painting

is on this website.

Let's hear it for salvator mundi.

Do you feel that you have to defend yourself in your work?

No, I don't.

A $450 million purchase price,

and nobody knows who's buying it?

The intelligence community is absolutely gonna want to understand

where did the funds come from, where are they going.

It's very difficult to check auctions.

The reason for that is because of the opaqueness.

Is there money laundering taking place?

Is there a shifting of assets to support terrorists?

Is it state money?

That anyone would pay that kind of money

for a piece that had questions about it

is very strange.

The intelligence community knew very quickly

who had bought it and how they'd bought it,

and chooses to release that information.

Around the end of 2017, I'm based in London.

An old contact of mine from the middle east

gets in touch and wants to meet.

He refuses to tell me why we're meeting,

but when we sit down together,

he shows me some rather extraordinary documents.

And these documents are the details of the arrangements for the sale

between the christie's auction house and the buyer.

Reports suggest

that the Saudi Arabia's crown prince is the mysterious buyer

of a rare Leonardo da Vinci painting.

Prince Mohammed bin salman, who has recently become

the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia.

What was so extraordinary about this purchase

is that prince Mohammed bin salman had made this splurge

at the same time that he was cracking down on the Saudi elite,

including many of his own royal cousins.

He had imprisoned many of them in the ritz-Carlton,

forcing them to try to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars

that he said had been stolen from the Saudi government that he wanted back.

His family, by the way, is the Saudi government.

Right around the same time, he had spent half a billion dollars on a yacht,

and a short time later, $300 million on a French chateau.

And then there's one more wrinkle, which is the content of this work.

Most islamic scholars, including the ones that are dominant

in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia,

believe that islam forbids the depiction in art of any of the prophets.

So it's a sacrilegious painting.

And Saudi Arabia has never yet publicly acknowledged

that he or the government of Saudi Arabia is the owner of that work of art.

Have you been able to obtain any information about

when and where this piece of art will be revealed?

No. No one knows. It remains a complete mystery.

I had unequivocal confirmation that the painting was on the boat.

I got this story and, like, all of a sudden it was in one newspaper,

then it was in another newspaper,

then it was translated into one, two, three, four languages.

CNN is on the phone. Time magazine is on the phone.

I didn't think it would strike an international nerve

and become the most-read article I've written in my entire life, 30 years.

The art newspaper,

after I wrote the article disclosing where the painting was,

they literally tracked the boat to the Netherlands

and it was just a few-hour drive from the louvre.

And now to the blockbuster exhibition of the year,

perhaps of many years, a celebration of Leonardo da Vinci,

500 years after his death.

This is the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death.

This is the big show.

There is huge expectation that if it does turn up,

the curator, Vincent delieuvin, will have a chance to nail the attribution.

Everybody's really talking about the salvator mundi.

Wrrr it show up?

And we 're dealing with an owner that is very secretive.

The missing u. S.-Based journalist is no longer alive.

The coalition's airstrikes may amount to war crimes.

The arabian states, they want to sort of be seen as cultural nations,

and for this cultural nation building,

they need to place the salvator mundi in the Paris louvre show

because it's a political thing.

That's what art is being used for today,

this kind of soft political capital,

where we may have sliced up a journalist or all of these terrible things,

and then you cover it with a nice painting and it's a diversion.

If the louvre says it's an autographed Leonardo, that is a big deal.

It's not just art history, it's world politics.

The curator of the louvre at this moment has a problem

because, politically, he cannot refuse the salvator mundi.

He cannot refuse the attribution to Leonardo,

but nobody at the moment knows what's going on there.

We know that the painting was brought to Paris in June, 2018,

where it was taken to the louvre laboratory for a top-secret examination.

So it's just about six days before the opening

and I receive the plan for the installation of the exhibition.

And on that plan is the salvator mundi given pride of place in the final room.

If it were to be presented as a true Leonardo,

he would make the institution ridiculous.

So I wrote to the president of the French republic:

So we're all waiting to see if the salvator mundi shows up.

It would be good if the salvator mundi belonged to the public.

The louvre has all the latest imaging equipment

to examine the painting, and that would be wonderful.

And I arrive at the advance press preview

and immediately run through the entire exhibition to see,

is the salvator mundi in the last room?

And there on the wall is a bare spot with three picture hooks.

We think, "are they about to hang it?

Is this a moment of theater that they have planned for the press?"

And we then, to our huge disappointment...

We get a shrug of the shoulders from the louvre.

One painting not here, the still controversial salvator mundi.

Here instead, a copy from the same period.

People were transfixed, and I kept... I said to a couple that...

I said, "it's a copy. Don't you know that this is a copy?"

Some of them looked a little confused, but they kept taking pictures of it.

I was hoping up until the last minute that it would turn up.

The most notorious no-show is the salvator mundi.

It's actually shrouded in mystery,

because no one has seen it since the sale in 2017.

People can say whatever they want.

It's like putting out wildfires.

You know, one goes away and another one immediately crops up somewhere else.

It never, never stops.

A few days ago, I had a really strange experience.

I visited an art historian at his house and he had some books on the table.

Among them was a small catalog of the salvator mundi.

Published by the louvre.

And I was really taken aback and I said...

I said, "what is this? I've never seen it."

He said, "oh, I bought it at the exhibition."

And I said, "oh, that's strange."

I started to look for it. Not for sale anywhere.

I asked our librarian if he could track it down,

and, uh, he said, "it doesn't seem to exist."

I have heard nothing about this book,

and I find out that it is produced by the louvre

on the occasion of the exhibition.

And it is full of some new technical examination

they have done of the picture.

The book recapitulates the history of the painting,

then goes on to attribute it securely to Leonardo.

This is the first time that we have an independent body, really,

doing a thorough analysis of the picture.

But it's difficult to know what to believe

when you've got a lost painting, a lost book,

and no access to the scientific examinations themselves.

Let me say something about institutional knowledge and authority.

It's not as real and as foolproof,

and as clean, immaculate...

As you think.

It is never neutral.

Power is never neutral.

You know people at the louvre. What do they say about the rumors?

So why did mbs pull the work at the last minute?

What he wanted to do was elevate the salvator mundi

to the level of the Mona Lisa

by placing it not amongst the lesser da vincis,

where the work would be subjected to every academic

who wanted to make a name for themselves by opining on the work.

He wanted it opposite the Mona Lisa as a civilizational masterpiece.

It was just a raw power, you know,

"we own this thing, we're gonna show it to the world when we're ready."

For shit sure the painting's gonna turn up again.

You can stick it in some place in the desert

and start to lure tourists from all over the world to see it

and stand in front of it like Disneyland.

That's gonna happen.

At this moment, it is a Da Vinci,

and even the debate adds some attractive force to it.

Even that there are folks that may disagree

makes you want to go look in its eye and see for yourself

what all the fuss is about.

My greatest regret is that it did not go to a museum.

And of course, everyone's idea of the picture is now formed

by mystery and legend and speculation.

I still have lots of art supplies here.

It would be very surprising if all the experts suddenly said,

"oh, yes, this is absolutely by Leonardo."

And there are no documents.

It cannot be proven, you know, factually, beyond a doubt.

You okay?

Of course I wish that I could move on.

But the salvator mundi is always with me because I'm never allowed to forget.

The mystery is sort of solved, but not really.

And this, again, is a whole new sort of rabbit hole, hall of mirrors.

The painting hasn't been seen since it was sold.

Once described as the greatest discovery of the 21st century,

the mystery surrounding salvator mundi continues today...