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Bizarro not comics feeding frenzy
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25 posts in this topic

I took a break from collecting that may well be permanent given the surge in values in recent times and wondered if fellow boardies know of examples of this phenomenon occurring in other fields of collecting?

 

I was prompted by the following:

Bottle of 1945 Burgundy sells for £424,000 to become world’s most expensive wine

A bottle of 1945 French wine has been sold for a record-breaking £424,000 at auction.

The Romanee-Conti – widely considered the planet’s finest Burgundy – was bought for 17 times its estimated worth at Sotheby’s in New York on Saturday.

It smashed the world’s previous high-mark for a standard bottle: a 1869 Chateau Lafite Rothschild which sold for a comparatively inexpensive £177,000 in Hong Kong in 2010.

A few minutes after Saturday's sale, another 1945 Romanee-Conti went for £377,000.

The wine’s vineyard may help explain its worth. It spans just four acres in the Cote de Nuits region, with no more than 6,000 bottles produced each year.

 

The 1945 bottle was one of only 600 produced, just before the vines were pulled up for replanting with no more wine made until 1952.

Saturday's lots came from the personal collection of Robert Drouhin, who directed the prominent wine producer Maison Joseph Drouhin from 1957 to 2003.

Elsewhere at the auction, a bottle of 60-year-old 1926 whisky fetched £641,000, failing to break the current £910,000 record for Scotch.

 

Edited by Flex Mentallo
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'Yellow wine' from 1774 to be sold at auction

 

Tipple dating back to Louis XVI's reign set to fetch £17,500 a bottle

 
Two bottles, of three vintage bottles of vin jaune "yellow wine" from 1774
 
Two bottles, of three vintage bottles of vin jaune "yellow wine" from 1774 ( REUTERS )

Wine connoisseurs will be able to buy a truly vintage tipple when three bottles of "yellow wine" dating back to 1774 go up for auction in France on Saturday.

The bottles of Arbois Vin Jaune are among the oldest in the world. They were made with grapes harvested when Louis XVI sat on the country’s throne.

Now they have been estimated to be worth up to €20,000 – £17,500 – each according to the auction house, Jura Encheres in Lons-le-Saunier, which will sell them.

 

rts1srhc.jpg
 
One of three bottles of vin jaune "yellow wine" from 1774, is presented (Reuters)

"Having three bottles from this particular year and of such quality is exceptional," said lead auctioneer Philippe Etievant, according to the Economic Times.

The bottles were produced in the Jura region by 18th century winemaker Anatoile Vercel and have been kept by his descendants ever since. It gets its distinct colour from the grape being harvested later in the year and then being matured under a film of yeast.

A panel of two dozen experts tasted a sample of the same 1774 batch in 1994 and scored it 9.4 out of 10. They praised it for its notes of “walnuts, spices, curry, cinnamon.”

Yet the potential price tag remains some way off the world’s most expensive ever wine. Bottles of 1907 Heidsieck champagne sold for $275,000 - £206,000 - in 1998 after they were salvaged from the bottom of the sea.

The Swedish freighter carrying a crate of the stock had been sunk off the coast of Finland during World War One giving the drink historic – as well as vintage – value.

 

Edited by Flex Mentallo
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At least you can read a comic if you take a glass of wine your investment goes down your throat.I see so much money out there buying things just because they can it makes you wonder.The good thing about what is happening you and many others were ahead of the curve in this crazy market.I would like to have a crystal ball to see what the future holds for us in fact the whole human race :smile:

Edited by comicjack
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1 hour ago, comicjack said:

At least you can read a comic if you take a glass of wine your investment goes down your throat.I see so much money out there buying things just because they can it makes you wonder.The good thing about what is happening you and many others were ahead of the curve in this crazy market.I would like to have a crystal ball to see what the future holds for us in fact the whole human race 

Keep an eye on the crazy rich. T Boone Pickens is aggressively buying all the world's water rn. (Ive got 2 cases of aquafina if anyone's looking to invest.) 

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This is occurring in many areas.   With liberal printing/creation of money and immense amounts of money being made at the top end of holders of wealth there is crazy amounts of funds being funneled in to certain collectables and investments.   Google contemporary post war art sale prices and you will see the same thing happening.   I read an article that about 50% of the total $$ Sales are for only a small list of about 25 artists, with the remainder being split among 10,000s of artists.  Although this causes an upsurge of prices for lesser items, the stratospheric prices are contained to a small grouping of items.   Same thing is happening with vintage sports cards, contemporary art , comics and many other items.

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2 hours ago, jhutton2 said:

This is occurring in many areas.   With liberal printing/creation of money and immense amounts of money being made at the top end of holders of wealth there is crazy amounts of funds being funneled in to certain collectables and investments.   Google contemporary post war art sale prices and you will see the same thing happening.   I read an article that about 50% of the total $$ Sales are for only a small list of about 25 artists, with the remainder being split among 10,000s of artists.  Although this causes an upsurge of prices for lesser items, the stratospheric prices are contained to a small grouping of items.   Same thing is happening with vintage sports cards, contemporary art , comics and many other items.

Yes Books like Action 1 and Bat 1 will probably be tomorrows Picasso items of the global pop culture ...

Edited by Mr bla bla
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Auction house Sotheby’s is currently accepting bids for one of three remaining original posters of 1932’s The Mummy. It is expected to sell for somewhere between $1-1.5m, making it the world’s most expensive movie poster. The poster in question is a lithograph, a fine art printing method with richer inks and a higher-quality paper than what is used today. Movie studios phased the method out by the 1940s. It was designed by Karoly Grosz, the advertising art director at Universal responsible for a number of prints from the era. This specific print, which will be the first movie poster to be valued in seven figures, was bought at auction in 1997 for $453,500.

1000.jpg

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34 minutes ago, Flex Mentallo said:

Auction house Sotheby’s is currently accepting bids for one of three remaining original posters of 1932’s The Mummy. It is expected to sell for somewhere between $1-1.5m, making it the world’s most expensive movie poster. The poster in question is a lithograph, a fine art printing method with richer inks and a higher-quality paper than what is used today. Movie studios phased the method out by the 1940s. It was designed by Karoly Grosz, the advertising art director at Universal responsible for a number of prints from the era. This specific print, which will be the first movie poster to be valued in seven figures, was bought at auction in 1997 for $453,500.

1000.jpg

This to me makes sense. A beautiful one of a kind litho from the classic period of Hollywood, featuring a great Karloff horror film. It sold for almost half a mill 20 years ago. The winner had vision. 

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13 hours ago, comicnoir said:

This to me makes sense. A beautiful one of a kind litho from the classic period of Hollywood, featuring a great Karloff horror film. It sold for almost half a mill 20 years ago. The winner had vision. 

Id happily swap it for a New Mutants #98 cgc 9.9

 

?

Edited by Mr bla bla
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16 hours ago, comicnoir said:

This to me makes sense. A beautiful one of a kind litho from the classic period of Hollywood, featuring a great Karloff horror film. It sold for almost half a mill 20 years ago. The winner had vision. 

I agree that the value makes more sense, but as far as the vision goes...  How much would they have made buying AF #15s up at 1997 prices? 3x isn’t that great a return on that money after 20 years of inflation. 

Edited by mysterio
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3 hours ago, mysterio said:

I agree that the value makes more sense, but as far as the vision goes...  How much would they have made buying AF #15s up at 1997 prices? 3x isn’t that great a return on that money after 20 years of inflation. 

I agree. It may make more, especially these days. It deserves to.

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Coming from a family that some collect, build and race cars this would be my non comic grail...

 

1. 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO (Sold for $48.4 million by RM Sotheby's in 2018)

559577B1-3F0C-4D01-A9B2-40D1C11DF689.thumb.jpeg.ea2b65bc55a8b4056ba38b32484bb23a.jpeg

 

There was a time in the 1990’s when this could be had for a cool million assuming you could find one for sale. The thrill lasts so much longer than wine too....

Edited by N e r V
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The Da Vinci mystery: why is his $450m masterpiece really being kept under wraps?

When the unveiling of the long-lost Salvator Mundi was cancelled last month, there were cries of fake. But is there more to the controversy surrounding the world’s most expensive painting?

 
‘Why not leave the painting in its raw yet beautiful state?’ … a detail of Salvator Mundi after touch-ups had been removed. See the full image below.
‘Why not leave the painting in its raw yet beautiful state?’ … a detail of Salvator Mundi after touch-ups had been removed. See the full image below. Photograph: Courtesy Dianne Modestini / © 2011 Salvator Mundi LLC

In May 2008, some of the world’s greatest Leonardo da Vinci experts stood around an easel in a skylit studio high above Trafalgar Square. The object they had been invited to scrutinise, in the conservation department of the National Gallery, was a painting on a panel of walnut wood. It showed a long-haired, bearded man gazing straight ahead with one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a transparent sphere.

“There’s a mixture of being excited but not getting caught up in it,” says Martin Kemp, the eminent art historian who was there that Monday. “I try to keep a gravitational pull going, saying, ‘This can’t be right.’” Yet the thrill in the room was tangible. The painting had “presence”, felt Kemp, and there was no dissent.

That day, a long-forgotten old picture was authenticated as Leonardo’s lost masterpiece, Salvator Mundi (Latin for Saviour of the World). Three years later, in November 2011, this portrait of Christ was unveiled for the first time in the National Gallery’s blockbuster Leonardo exhibition. Six years after that, it became the most expensive painting ever auctioned, when it sold at Christie’s for the stupendous sum of $450.3m (£342.1m).

Then, last month, something perplexing happened. Salvator Mundi had been purchased from Christie’s for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Its unveiling was scheduled for 18 September – a big moment. But at the start of September, this was suddenly and mysteriously postponed. “Further details will be announced soon,” said the official statement.

There has been no further announcement and my enquiries were met by just a resending of the statement. Kemp admits he’s in the dark but insists: “It isn’t a matter of cold feet.” That’s how it looks, though.

 

Even as the auctioneer’s hammer went down, a chorus of scepticism was creating uncertainty around Salvator Mundi. Had those experts at the National Gallery been taken for a ride? One insider summed up the situation to me bluntly: “It’s not very good.” Stories have emerged that complicate its provenance or history. Matthew Landrus, an Oxford academic, has even gone public with the claim that, far from being a Leonardo, this work was largely done by his third-rate imitator, Bernardino Luini.

But if the Louvre Abu Dhabi really has got doubts about Salvator Mundi, they will most likely be about its condition. For there really is a problem with this painting and it is there for anyone to see. If the Louvre – both its new outpost and its home in Paris, which has the most sophisticated conservation technology on Earth – has not yet spotted the issue, all its curators need to do is check out an Instagram post that materialised just after the painting’s sale last year.

Thomas Campbell, former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, wrote: “450 million dollars?! Hope the buyer understands conservation issues.” The accompanying picture shows Salvator Mundi in the middle of its restoration. All the previous repaints have been cleaned off to reveal an image with streaky gaps, including a sizeable few running from top to bottom. The implication was that the painting as sold by Christie’s is over-restored. When challenged, Campbell added: “Was simply remarking, as so many others have, on extensive amount of conservation.”

In fact, the photograph was something of a bombshell, a glimpse of a painting that looks dramatically different from the restored version. Time had left Christ partly bald, with impaired eyes, yet the face was truly beautiful – smooth and harmonious but anatomically precise. It is completely different, in tone and feeling, from the smoky, ambiguous appearance of the painting today, after its full treatment by the respected restorer Dianne Dwyer Modestini.

The image in Campbell’s post was cropped and blurry but the Guardian is today publishing a high-definition version. If the scars of age are even more visible, so is the youthful beauty of Christ. He looks like just the kind of androgynous, long-haired model Leonardo loved to portray and, said his 16th-century biographer Vasari, surround himself with, in a workshop that was the Renaissance precursor to Warhol’s Factory.

It was Martin Clayton, curator of Leonardo’s drawings at the Royal Library in Windsor Castle, who suggested I check out Campbell’s post and drew my attention to the startling differences between the painting after it was cleaned and its appearance now. “Photographs seem to show that, before it was touched up, it was all Leonardo,” he says. “They show the painting mid-restoration – and it looks as if the subsequent retouching has obscured the quality of the face.” Clayton is not questioning the painting’s authenticity. He’s suggesting that a very pure Leonardo has been partly “obscured”.

I took this troubling theory to Robert Simon, the man who discovered Salvator Mundi along with two business partners. They bought this apparently insignificant picture at a Louisiana auction in 2005. Simon is passionate about Leonardo and, when he started to think this was something more than a bad copy, set about carefully researching its provenance, while bringing in Modestini to restore it. “The most important decision was not to treat this as a simple commercial decision,” he says. Instead, the work was carried out in accordance with “a very slow, prepared and not rushed plan”.

It paid off when they showed the partly retouched painting to Nicholas Penny, who was then about to take over as director of the National Gallery in London. “He got it. He said, ‘I think you have an interesting problem: how do you approach something that seems almost impossible?’”

Penny was right. The discovery of a previously unknown painting by Leonardo does seem “almost impossible”. Only about 20 paintings by him survive. Others are known to have been lost or destroyed, but he was never prolific. Those few existing paintings have been treasured, making the reappearance of a forgotten one even less likely.

Penny’s solution was to bring the painting to the National Gallery and set up that expert viewing. Then it was shown for the first time in the uniquely authoritative setting of the gallery’s Leonardo exhibition. In 2013, just a year after the exhibition finished, Simon and his partners sold Salvator Mundi through Sotheby’s to a middleman for a Russian art collector, who later sold it for that record-breaking price.

Yet, even before it reached the National Gallery, the painting had been worked on. Simon confirms that it was partly “in-painted” before being shown to experts, including Penny. Why didn’t he leave the painting in its raw yet beautiful state after it was stripped down? Wasn’t that an incredible object in itself?

We felt that to leave the painting 'raw' would cause viewers to focus on the losses

“The painting was powerful as it was without further treatment,” he says. “We considered leaving it, considered more limited restoration, as well as a more extensive one.” These were not casual decisions, he insists. “Part of our final decision was made with the understanding that to leave the painting ‘raw’ would inevitably cause viewers to focus on the losses and not on what survived.

“In the end, we decided to do what we felt was best for the picture. That might sound false or corny, but it was out of a profound respect for the painting itself that we felt that bringing it back to life as much as possible was the right way to go.”

Simon absolutely rejects the possibility of any “falsehood” being introduced. “I found [Campbell’s] comments both ill-informed and offensive,” he says. As for the repainting, he regards that as a loaded term. “‘Inpainting’ is the right way to describe what has occurred here – retouching restricted to areas of loss. In the restoration, no original paint was covered.”

 

That last claim doesn’t seem right, however, when it comes to the hand of Christ raised in blessing. When the painting was cleaned, it turned out Christ had two right thumbs. This is what art historians call a “pentimento” – literally, a repentance, used to mean a second thought. If the artist had such a second thought, it’s regarded as evidence that this is an original, not a copy – as why would a copier have second thoughts?

This explains why the thumb was left with its pentimento when it was shown to those experts, even though some in-painting had been done. However, by the time of its public unveiling in 2011, Christ’s hand had just a single thumb. “Both thumbs,” says Kemp of the painting’s raw state, “are rather better than the one painted by Dianne.”

So a crucial piece of evidence that Leonardo painted Salvator Mundi also suggests that its restoration has been excessive and has muffled its power. Ironically, this seems to make the work both an original and, in my view, a kind of kitsch concoction.

Kemp has a further point to make. One of the rules of all public museums, he says, “is that you don’t exhibit something that’s on the market. The National Gallery received an assurance that it was not – but if it’s owned by three dealers, that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.”

Perhaps it was institutional embarrassment about the decision to work with a group of art dealers to authenticate a Leonardo that explains why no expert at the National Gallery – nor those involved with it who have since left – would be interviewed. Perhaps not.

 

An official statement said: “The National Gallery makes careful consideration before including any picture that is in private hands in an exhibition. It weighs up the advantage in including it – the benefit to the public in seeing the work, the advantage to the argument and scholarship of the exhibition as a whole. On that occasion, we felt that it would be of great interest to include Salvator Mundi in Leonardo da Vinci: Painter of the Court of Milan as a new discovery, as it was an important opportunity to test a new attribution by direct comparison with works universally accepted as Leonardo’s.”

It was indeed a haunting thing to see. Was I looking at something that was a work of genius, or a smoky imitation of Leonardo’s style that turns his brilliance to mush? Surely it would have been more true to the greatest artist who ever lived to let his timeworn masterpiece speak to us directly.

 

3755.jpg

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On 10/15/2018 at 2:57 PM, Flex Mentallo said:

Auction house Sotheby’s is currently accepting bids for one of three remaining original posters of 1932’s The Mummy. It is expected to sell for somewhere between $1-1.5m, making it the world’s most expensive movie poster. The poster in question is a lithograph, a fine art printing method with richer inks and a higher-quality paper than what is used today. Movie studios phased the method out by the 1940s. It was designed by Karoly Grosz, the advertising art director at Universal responsible for a number of prints from the era. This specific print, which will be the first movie poster to be valued in seven figures, was bought at auction in 1997 for $453,500.

1000.jpg

A few years ago, Fishler bought (for, I think, an undisclosed amount from the guy who found it locked in a suitcase) the only known six-sheet from the original 1931 Frankenstein. Supposedly it would set the record for most valuable movie poster were he to auction it. 

f4c587c4-f56d-4d51-8f1c-96fdf8402ea8_1.a315fb837dabd2c5c5c71ca1cefbb3a0.jpg

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3 hours ago, Flex Mentallo said:

The Da Vinci mystery: why is his $450m masterpiece really being kept under wraps?

When the unveiling of the long-lost Salvator Mundi was cancelled last month, there were cries of fake. But is there more to the controversy surrounding the world’s most expensive painting?

 
 

‘Why not leave the painting in its raw yet beautiful state?’ … a detail of Salvator Mundi after touch-ups had been removed. See the full image below. ‘Why not leave the painting in its raw yet beautiful state?’ … a detail of Salvator Mundi after touch-ups had been removed. See the full image below. Photograph: Courtesy Dianne Modestini / © 2011 Salvator Mundi LLC

In May 2008, some of the world’s greatest Leonardo da Vinci experts stood around an easel in a skylit studio high above Trafalgar Square. The object they had been invited to scrutinise, in the conservation department of the National Gallery, was a painting on a panel of walnut wood. It showed a long-haired, bearded man gazing straight ahead with one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a transparent sphere.

“There’s a mixture of being excited but not getting caught up in it,” says Martin Kemp, the eminent art historian who was there that Monday. “I try to keep a gravitational pull going, saying, ‘This can’t be right.’” Yet the thrill in the room was tangible. The painting had “presence”, felt Kemp, and there was no dissent.

That day, a long-forgotten old picture was authenticated as Leonardo’s lost masterpiece, Salvator Mundi (Latin for Saviour of the World). Three years later, in November 2011, this portrait of Christ was unveiled for the first time in the National Gallery’s blockbuster Leonardo exhibition. Six years after that, it became the most expensive painting ever auctioned, when it sold at Christie’s for the stupendous sum of $450.3m (£342.1m).

Then, last month, something perplexing happened. Salvator Mundi had been purchased from Christie’s for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Its unveiling was scheduled for 18 September – a big moment. But at the start of September, this was suddenly and mysteriously postponed. “Further details will be announced soon,” said the official statement.

 

There has been no further announcement and my enquiries were met by just a resending of the statement. Kemp admits he’s in the dark but insists: “It isn’t a matter of cold feet.” That’s how it looks, though.

 

 

 

Even as the auctioneer’s hammer went down, a chorus of scepticism was creating uncertainty around Salvator Mundi. Had those experts at the National Gallery been taken for a ride? One insider summed up the situation to me bluntly: “It’s not very good.” Stories have emerged that complicate its provenance or history. Matthew Landrus, an Oxford academic, has even gone public with the claim that, far from being a Leonardo, this work was largely done by his third-rate imitator, Bernardino Luini.

 

But if the Louvre Abu Dhabi really has got doubts about Salvator Mundi, they will most likely be about its condition. For there really is a problem with this painting and it is there for anyone to see. If the Louvre – both its new outpost and its home in Paris, which has the most sophisticated conservation technology on Earth – has not yet spotted the issue, all its curators need to do is check out an Instagram post that materialised just after the painting’s sale last year.

 

Thomas Campbell, former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, wrote: “450 million dollars?! Hope the buyer understands conservation issues.” The accompanying picture shows Salvator Mundi in the middle of its restoration. All the previous repaints have been cleaned off to reveal an image with streaky gaps, including a sizeable few running from top to bottom. The implication was that the painting as sold by Christie’s is over-restored. When challenged, Campbell added: “Was simply remarking, as so many others have, on extensive amount of conservation.”

 

In fact, the photograph was something of a bombshell, a glimpse of a painting that looks dramatically different from the restored version. Time had left Christ partly bald, with impaired eyes, yet the face was truly beautiful – smooth and harmonious but anatomically precise. It is completely different, in tone and feeling, from the smoky, ambiguous appearance of the painting today, after its full treatment by the respected restorer Dianne Dwyer Modestini.

 

The image in Campbell’s post was cropped and blurry but the Guardian is today publishing a high-definition version. If the scars of age are even more visible, so is the youthful beauty of Christ. He looks like just the kind of androgynous, long-haired model Leonardo loved to portray and, said his 16th-century biographer Vasari, surround himself with, in a workshop that was the Renaissance precursor to Warhol’s Factory.

 

It was Martin Clayton, curator of Leonardo’s drawings at the Royal Library in Windsor Castle, who suggested I check out Campbell’s post and drew my attention to the startling differences between the painting after it was cleaned and its appearance now. “Photographs seem to show that, before it was touched up, it was all Leonardo,” he says. “They show the painting mid-restoration – and it looks as if the subsequent retouching has obscured the quality of the face.” Clayton is not questioning the painting’s authenticity. He’s suggesting that a very pure Leonardo has been partly “obscured”.

 

I took this troubling theory to Robert Simon, the man who discovered Salvator Mundi along with two business partners. They bought this apparently insignificant picture at a Louisiana auction in 2005. Simon is passionate about Leonardo and, when he started to think this was something more than a bad copy, set about carefully researching its provenance, while bringing in Modestini to restore it. “The most important decision was not to treat this as a simple commercial decision,” he says. Instead, the work was carried out in accordance with “a very slow, prepared and not rushed plan”.

 

It paid off when they showed the partly retouched painting to Nicholas Penny, who was then about to take over as director of the National Gallery in London. “He got it. He said, ‘I think you have an interesting problem: how do you approach something that seems almost impossible?’”

 

Penny was right. The discovery of a previously unknown painting by Leonardo does seem “almost impossible”. Only about 20 paintings by him survive. Others are known to have been lost or destroyed, but he was never prolific. Those few existing paintings have been treasured, making the reappearance of a forgotten one even less likely.

 

Penny’s solution was to bring the painting to the National Gallery and set up that expert viewing. Then it was shown for the first time in the uniquely authoritative setting of the gallery’s Leonardo exhibition. In 2013, just a year after the exhibition finished, Simon and his partners sold Salvator Mundi through Sotheby’s to a middleman for a Russian art collector, who later sold it for that record-breaking price.

 

Yet, even before it reached the National Gallery, the painting had been worked on. Simon confirms that it was partly “in-painted” before being shown to experts, including Penny. Why didn’t he leave the painting in its raw yet beautiful state after it was stripped down? Wasn’t that an incredible object in itself?

 

We felt that to leave the painting 'raw' would cause viewers to focus on the losses

 

“The painting was powerful as it was without further treatment,” he says. “We considered leaving it, considered more limited restoration, as well as a more extensive one.” These were not casual decisions, he insists. “Part of our final decision was made with the understanding that to leave the painting ‘raw’ would inevitably cause viewers to focus on the losses and not on what survived.

 

“In the end, we decided to do what we felt was best for the picture. That might sound false or corny, but it was out of a profound respect for the painting itself that we felt that bringing it back to life as much as possible was the right way to go.”

 

Simon absolutely rejects the possibility of any “falsehood” being introduced. “I found [Campbell’s] comments both ill-informed and offensive,” he says. As for the repainting, he regards that as a loaded term. “‘Inpainting’ is the right way to describe what has occurred here – retouching restricted to areas of loss. In the restoration, no original paint was covered.”

 

 

 

That last claim doesn’t seem right, however, when it comes to the hand of Christ raised in blessing. When the painting was cleaned, it turned out Christ had two right thumbs. This is what art historians call a “pentimento” – literally, a repentance, used to mean a second thought. If the artist had such a second thought, it’s regarded as evidence that this is an original, not a copy – as why would a copier have second thoughts?

 

This explains why the thumb was left with its pentimento when it was shown to those experts, even though some in-painting had been done. However, by the time of its public unveiling in 2011, Christ’s hand had just a single thumb. “Both thumbs,” says Kemp of the painting’s raw state, “are rather better than the one painted by Dianne.”

 

So a crucial piece of evidence that Leonardo painted Salvator Mundi also suggests that its restoration has been excessive and has muffled its power. Ironically, this seems to make the work both an original and, in my view, a kind of kitsch concoction.

 

Kemp has a further point to make. One of the rules of all public museums, he says, “is that you don’t exhibit something that’s on the market. The National Gallery received an assurance that it was not – but if it’s owned by three dealers, that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.”

 

Perhaps it was institutional embarrassment about the decision to work with a group of art dealers to authenticate a Leonardo that explains why no expert at the National Gallery – nor those involved with it who have since left – would be interviewed. Perhaps not.

 

 

 

An official statement said: “The National Gallery makes careful consideration before including any picture that is in private hands in an exhibition. It weighs up the advantage in including it – the benefit to the public in seeing the work, the advantage to the argument and scholarship of the exhibition as a whole. On that occasion, we felt that it would be of great interest to include Salvator Mundi in Leonardo da Vinci: Painter of the Court of Milan as a new discovery, as it was an important opportunity to test a new attribution by direct comparison with works universally accepted as Leonardo’s.”

 

It was indeed a haunting thing to see. Was I looking at something that was a work of genius, or a smoky imitation of Leonardo’s style that turns his brilliance to mush? Surely it would have been more true to the greatest artist who ever lived to let his timeworn masterpiece speak to us directly.

 

 

 

3755.jpg

 

2507.jpg

 

‘Why not leave the painting in its raw yet beautiful state?’ … a detail of Salvator Mundi after touch-ups had been removed. See the full image below. ‘Why not leave the painting in its raw yet beautiful state?’ … a detail of Salvator Mundi after touch-ups had been removed. See the full image below. Photograph: Courtesy Dianne Modestini / © 2011 Salvator Mundi LLC

In May 2008, some of the world’s greatest Leonardo da Vinci experts stood around an easel in a skylit studio high above Trafalgar Square. The object they had been invited to scrutinise, in the conservation department of the National Gallery, was a painting on a panel of walnut wood. It showed a long-haired, bearded man gazing straight ahead with one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a transparent sphere.

“There’s a mixture of being excited but not getting caught up in it,” says Martin Kemp, the eminent art historian who was there that Monday. “I try to keep a gravitational pull going, saying, ‘This can’t be right.’” Yet the thrill in the room was tangible. The painting had “presence”, felt Kemp, and there was no dissent.

That day, a long-forgotten old picture was authenticated as Leonardo’s lost masterpiece, Salvator Mundi (Latin for Saviour of the World). Three years later, in November 2011, this portrait of Christ was unveiled for the first time in the National Gallery’s blockbuster Leonardo exhibition. Six years after that, it became the most expensive painting ever auctioned, when it sold at Christie’s for the stupendous sum of $450.3m (£342.1m).

Then, last month, something perplexing happened. Salvator Mundi had been purchased from Christie’s for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Its unveiling was scheduled for 18 September – a big moment. But at the start of September, this was suddenly and mysteriously postponed. “Further details will be announced soon,” said the official statement.

 

There has been no further announcement and my enquiries were met by just a resending of the statement. Kemp admits he’s in the dark but insists: “It isn’t a matter of cold feet.” That’s how it looks, though.

 

 

 

Even as the auctioneer’s hammer went down, a chorus of scepticism was creating uncertainty around Salvator Mundi. Had those experts at the National Gallery been taken for a ride? One insider summed up the situation to me bluntly: “It’s not very good.” Stories have emerged that complicate its provenance or history. Matthew Landrus, an Oxford academic, has even gone public with the claim that, far from being a Leonardo, this work was largely done by his third-rate imitator, Bernardino Luini.

 

But if the Louvre Abu Dhabi really has got doubts about Salvator Mundi, they will most likely be about its condition. For there really is a problem with this painting and it is there for anyone to see. If the Louvre – both its new outpost and its home in Paris, which has the most sophisticated conservation technology on Earth – has not yet spotted the issue, all its curators need to do is check out an Instagram post that materialised just after the painting’s sale last year.

 

Thomas Campbell, former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, wrote: “450 million dollars?! Hope the buyer understands conservation issues.” The accompanying picture shows Salvator Mundi in the middle of its restoration. All the previous repaints have been cleaned off to reveal an image with streaky gaps, including a sizeable few running from top to bottom. The implication was that the painting as sold by Christie’s is over-restored. When challenged, Campbell added: “Was simply remarking, as so many others have, on extensive amount of conservation.”

 

In fact, the photograph was something of a bombshell, a glimpse of a painting that looks dramatically different from the restored version. Time had left Christ partly bald, with impaired eyes, yet the face was truly beautiful – smooth and harmonious but anatomically precise. It is completely different, in tone and feeling, from the smoky, ambiguous appearance of the painting today, after its full treatment by the respected restorer Dianne Dwyer Modestini.

 

The image in Campbell’s post was cropped and blurry but the Guardian is today publishing a high-definition version. If the scars of age are even more visible, so is the youthful beauty of Christ. He looks like just the kind of androgynous, long-haired model Leonardo loved to portray and, said his 16th-century biographer Vasari, surround himself with, in a workshop that was the Renaissance precursor to Warhol’s Factory.

 

It was Martin Clayton, curator of Leonardo’s drawings at the Royal Library in Windsor Castle, who suggested I check out Campbell’s post and drew my attention to the startling differences between the painting after it was cleaned and its appearance now. “Photographs seem to show that, before it was touched up, it was all Leonardo,” he says. “They show the painting mid-restoration – and it looks as if the subsequent retouching has obscured the quality of the face.” Clayton is not questioning the painting’s authenticity. He’s suggesting that a very pure Leonardo has been partly “obscured”.

 

I took this troubling theory to Robert Simon, the man who discovered Salvator Mundi along with two business partners. They bought this apparently insignificant picture at a Louisiana auction in 2005. Simon is passionate about Leonardo and, when he started to think this was something more than a bad copy, set about carefully researching its provenance, while bringing in Modestini to restore it. “The most important decision was not to treat this as a simple commercial decision,” he says. Instead, the work was carried out in accordance with “a very slow, prepared and not rushed plan”.

 

It paid off when they showed the partly retouched painting to Nicholas Penny, who was then about to take over as director of the National Gallery in London. “He got it. He said, ‘I think you have an interesting problem: how do you approach something that seems almost impossible?’”

 

Penny was right. The discovery of a previously unknown painting by Leonardo does seem “almost impossible”. Only about 20 paintings by him survive. Others are known to have been lost or destroyed, but he was never prolific. Those few existing paintings have been treasured, making the reappearance of a forgotten one even less likely.

 

Penny’s solution was to bring the painting to the National Gallery and set up that expert viewing. Then it was shown for the first time in the uniquely authoritative setting of the gallery’s Leonardo exhibition. In 2013, just a year after the exhibition finished, Simon and his partners sold Salvator Mundi through Sotheby’s to a middleman for a Russian art collector, who later sold it for that record-breaking price.

 

Yet, even before it reached the National Gallery, the painting had been worked on. Simon confirms that it was partly “in-painted” before being shown to experts, including Penny. Why didn’t he leave the painting in its raw yet beautiful state after it was stripped down? Wasn’t that an incredible object in itself?

 

We felt that to leave the painting 'raw' would cause viewers to focus on the losses

 

“The painting was powerful as it was without further treatment,” he says. “We considered leaving it, considered more limited restoration, as well as a more extensive one.” These were not casual decisions, he insists. “Part of our final decision was made with the understanding that to leave the painting ‘raw’ would inevitably cause viewers to focus on the losses and not on what survived.

 

“In the end, we decided to do what we felt was best for the picture. That might sound false or corny, but it was out of a profound respect for the painting itself that we felt that bringing it back to life as much as possible was the right way to go.”

 

Simon absolutely rejects the possibility of any “falsehood” being introduced. “I found [Campbell’s] comments both ill-informed and offensive,” he says. As for the repainting, he regards that as a loaded term. “‘Inpainting’ is the right way to describe what has occurred here – retouching restricted to areas of loss. In the restoration, no original paint was covered.”

 

 

 

That last claim doesn’t seem right, however, when it comes to the hand of Christ raised in blessing. When the painting was cleaned, it turned out Christ had two right thumbs. This is what art historians call a “pentimento” – literally, a repentance, used to mean a second thought. If the artist had such a second thought, it’s regarded as evidence that this is an original, not a copy – as why would a copier have second thoughts?

 

This explains why the thumb was left with its pentimento when it was shown to those experts, even though some in-painting had been done. However, by the time of its public unveiling in 2011, Christ’s hand had just a single thumb. “Both thumbs,” says Kemp of the painting’s raw state, “are rather better than the one painted by Dianne.”

 

So a crucial piece of evidence that Leonardo painted Salvator Mundi also suggests that its restoration has been excessive and has muffled its power. Ironically, this seems to make the work both an original and, in my view, a kind of kitsch concoction.

 

Kemp has a further point to make. One of the rules of all public museums, he says, “is that you don’t exhibit something that’s on the market. The National Gallery received an assurance that it was not – but if it’s owned by three dealers, that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.”

 

Perhaps it was institutional embarrassment about the decision to work with a group of art dealers to authenticate a Leonardo that explains why no expert at the National Gallery – nor those involved with it who have since left – would be interviewed. Perhaps not.

 

 

 

An official statement said: “The National Gallery makes careful consideration before including any picture that is in private hands in an exhibition. It weighs up the advantage in including it – the benefit to the public in seeing the work, the advantage to the argument and scholarship of the exhibition as a whole. On that occasion, we felt that it would be of great interest to include Salvator Mundi in Leonardo da Vinci: Painter of the Court of Milan as a new discovery, as it was an important opportunity to test a new attribution by direct comparison with works universally accepted as Leonardo’s.”

 

It was indeed a haunting thing to see. Was I looking at something that was a work of genius, or a smoky imitation of Leonardo’s style that turns his brilliance to mush? Surely it would have been more true to the greatest artist who ever lived to let his timeworn masterpiece speak to us directly.

 

 

 

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The art scene definitely has a @completely@ different view on restoration compared to our hobby. The size of this gap is hard to comprehend.

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11 hours ago, Sqeggs said:

A few years ago, Fishler bought (for, I think, an undisclosed amount from the guy who found it locked in a suitcase) the only known six-sheet from the original 1931 Frankenstein. Supposedly it would set the record for most valuable movie poster were he to auction it. 

f4c587c4-f56d-4d51-8f1c-96fdf8402ea8_1.a315fb837dabd2c5c5c71ca1cefbb3a0.jpg

Thanks for sharing that Tony - absolutely stunning! Do you happen to know if there are facsimiles of such rare examples?

 

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