Moments from Christie’s Auction (2017) / intended for Louvre Abu Dhabi

This entry marks one specific, extraordinary night: November 15, 2017, when Christie's New York sold Salvator Mundi, a painting of Christ attributed, with real scholarly disagreement, to Leonardo da Vinci, for $450.3 million including fees, still the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. The bidding lasted nearly twenty minutes, an eternity by auction standards, and the eventual buyer turned out to be a Saudi prince acting on behalf of Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism, with the painting announced as a future centerpiece of the newly opened Louvre Abu Dhabi.

It never arrived. A planned unveiling in September 2018 was abruptly postponed and never rescheduled, and the painting has not been publicly displayed since the sale, reportedly held in storage, with reports pointing to Geneva as recently as 2024. Its authenticity, condition, and even its current whereabouts remain genuinely disputed among scholars and journalists who have spent years trying to track it down. The record price itself is worth sitting with: whatever you think of the attribution debate, a single painting became, for one night in a Christie's saleroom, the most expensive object most people alive had ever heard bid on, and then it simply vanished from public view.