“The Lost Leonardo” in the cinema: a thriller about an old painting – culture

After the drug business and prostitution, the art market is the third largest unregulated market. The criteria for pricing fluctuate, supply and demand are decisive, i.e. the pack behavior, and not necessarily always the works themselves: their position in an artist’s oeuvre, their origin, their condition, their design. You can lose a lot of money and win even more with art in the higher price segments, even if you don’t know your way around particularly well.

The extreme case is the “Salvator Mundi”, the painting of Christ, which was auctioned off in 2017 at Christie’s auction house for the record price of around 450 million dollars as the alleged work of Leonardo da Vinci. In this story, greed and craving for recognition, audacity and ignorance, spinelessness and loss of reality come together to such an extent that the story would not be accepted from any novelist or feature film director. That is why the documentary is an appropriate form, and the Danish director Andreas Koefoed has mastered it with virtuosity.

The camera in his film “The Lost Leonardo” reads the faces of the interviewees, and it often recognizes more than they express in words: the deep satisfaction, for example, of having ripped off tens of millions of dollars as an art mediator from an oligarch. Or the poorly played innocence in the face of an expert who does not want to have thought about the financial consequences of his ascription. And the mischievous joy of dealers who have persuaded art historians to do something that diametrically contradicts their training.

The Margravine Isabella d’Este regularly sent spies to Leonardo’s studio

The painting was already on auction twice before the sensational sale in 2017. It fetched 45 pounds in London in 1958 and $ 1,175 in New Orleans in 2005. The heavily damaged piece was then considered to be the work of a student or a successor to da Vinci. Leonardo himself was denied it for centuries because no contemporary source shows that he ever completed such a painting. At the small auction in New Orleans, the picture was seen by a researcher who was specifically looking for possibly underrated old masters. Together with the dealer Robert Simon, he had the piece bought and examined; they entrusted it to the restorer Dianne Modestini. On the blessing hand she discovered a pentimento, i.e. a change of mind on the part of the painter, who had bent a finger a little differently in the first version. And the mouth area of ​​the figure reminded her of Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” from the Louvre. That was enough for an awakening experience that she knows how to portray very emotionally in the film: At that moment she felt that she was dealing with a work by the master himself. Which did not prevent her, but even encouraged her to take up the brush courageously.

Koefoed uses hard cuts when he confronts Modestini, for example, with the statement of the art historian Franz Zöllner that she is the true artist, because she first painted the Leonardesque into the largely destroyed painting. The eloquent woman’s face becomes a mask. When asked about her payment (“it was appropriate”), she also reacts rather briefly. Such changes of mood give the film dynamism, as do the re-enacted key scenes of the story – even if sometimes one would have liked to have known more precisely what is freely interpreted reconstruction and what is documented in detail.

The “explorers” brought the freshly restored picture to London, where it was viewed by a panel of experts in the National Gallery. In the meantime, the statements about how binding an authorship by Leonardo was considered at this date differ widely. In any case, after the meeting, the curator Luke Syson felt empowered to present the “Salvator Mundi” without question marks in the great Leonardo exhibition in London in 2011.

That was the breach of the dam, this decision by one of the most important old master museums gave the painting the price boost. Already at that time, however, almost everything spoke against Leonardo’s authorship, and it is a pity that the film hardly goes into this in terms of content. So the provenance of the table was always incomplete (and in the meantime the few indications of a high-ranking history of origin have also been refuted). It is also not credible that none of da Vinci’s contemporary admirers should have noticed his work on the Christ image – the Margravine Isabella d’Este regularly sent spies to Leonardo’s studio. After all, the two studies in robes, which are supposed to be preliminary work for “Salvator Mundi”, are so fragmentary and arbitrary that they fit many paintings. Above all, however, the composition of the painting is in large parts much more simply structured than the complex Leonardo’s pictures, and after Modestini’s interventions hardly anything can be said about the painting style (because of the ruinous condition, a certain stylistic judgment would not have been possible beforehand).

The art dealer Yves Bouvier took a poker player to negotiate to keep the price down

Koefoed is more interested in crime novels than in art history, and that’s exciting enough. Of course the owners, there were three of them now, tried to sell the painting after the London show. They had 200 million dollars in mind, but museum heads in Europe and the USA waved their hand tiredly. $ 200 million is an absurdly high price to pay for an alleged student work. For an original Leonardo, on the other hand, the price would be absurdly low, after all there are only around 15 paintings by the grand master. The request was doomed to failure.

But then the Russian oligarch Dmitri Rybolowlew came under pressure in his homeland – the film suspects that he had developed an interest in art, because with this investment you can leave the country quickly in an airplane if necessary. His dealer was the well-connected Yves Bouvier, who conveniently also owns free trade warehouses. One of the highlights of the film is the walk with Bouvier into the armored, extremely sterile-looking Geneva high-security warehouse for duty-free goods. His customer, he says, insisted on buying the “Salvator”. Bouvier took a poker player to negotiate the picture and pushed the price down to $ 83 million. After the failures at the museums, the owners could be happy that someone wanted to pay a double-digit million sum without asking too much.

But Bouvier took away $ 127.5 million from the oligarch. When Rybolowlew found this out, he accused Bouvier of fraud, and the latter soon afterwards of character assassination. In any case, the oligarch had lost the fun of the play and turned it over to Christie’s. There they felt compelled to accept the dubious work in order not to spoil the prospect of really high-ranking pieces in the Russian’s collection.

The auction house started what is probably the most successful PR campaign in the art trade and popularized the image as the “male Mona Lisa” without bothering with historical facts. The whisper caught on, perhaps not with connoisseurs, but with potential buyers. They had fallen for an auratic commercial and even more for their own longing for something unique.

$ 450 million? The Crown Prince has already spent that much on a yacht

Many were amazed how two trophy hunters rose to the record sum of around 450 million dollars on the day of the auction and then presumably the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman received the painting. But the price is not particularly high, bin Salman has already spent that much on a yacht. And what is expensive has a valuable effect – the price had to be heavy to authenticate Leonardo’s authorship.

The preliminary finale told by the film is instructive. Of course he wanted The Paris Louvre will show the painting in its Leonardo anniversary show in 2019, only: What should be on the sign: “Leonardo da Vinci”, “Ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci” or “Circle of Leonardo da Vinci”? If one believes Koefoed’s reconstruction, then the loan did not ultimately fail because of the question of attribution. The film thus contradicts its predecessor, the French documentary “Savior for Sale” by Antoine Vitkine. He recently argued that the Louvre had steadfastly refused to award the painting to Leonardo da Vinci for the sake of diplomacy. That sounded good, and it sounded like saving the honor of the great museums, which should ultimately only be committed to art and historical truth instead of jeopardizing their credibility, as the National Gallery did in 2011.

But in the meantime a catalog has emerged in which the Louvre aggressively defends the Leonardo attribution. Koefoed shows it briefly, but unfortunately does not quote the argument. The catalog was never delivered, the Louvre is silent about it. If all of this is so, it is a tragedy. Then even the Louvre would have been ready to take part in the imaginative reinterpretation of the oeuvre of the most important artist of the Renaissance. Only the hubris of the Crown Prince could have prevented this – according to Koefoed, he not only wanted to own a recognized Leonardo original, but also wanted to see it on par with the most famous of all paintings, right next to the “Mona Lisa”.

One would like to know how Leonardo would have painted them, all these players for fame, recognition and money. But no, he found power people rather boring. He kept trophy-addicted rulers waiting and preferred little-known women for portraits. And his Christ? Well, in the Milanese “Last Supper”, a certain work, he is debating his teaching instead of proclaiming it from above. Leonardo didn’t swear like a Christie’s promotional video. He discussed.

The Lost Leonardo, Denmark / France 2021 – Director: Andreas Koefoed. Piece of Magic Entertainment, 100 minutes. Theatrical release: December 23, 2021.