Salvator Mundi

In November 2017 this small panel of Christ raising a hand in blessing sold at auction in New York for about 450 million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a painting. What made that figure strange was that only a dozen years earlier the same picture had been bought for well under two thousand, as a battered copy by a follower of Leonardo. Between those two sales it was cleaned and restored, and a group of scholars concluded it was the lost original. Others have never agreed. Some see a genuine Leonardo, some see a studio work he only touched, and some argue the restoration was so extensive that no one can now say for certain whose hand is underneath. Look at the orb of rock crystal the figure holds. Leonardo studied optics closely, yet the sphere bends no light and casts no distortion of the robe behind it, and that oddity is one of the things the doubters point to. Since the record sale the panel has not been shown in public, and its exact whereabouts have not been confirmed.