In 2005, Sotheby’s sold Leonardo DaVinci’s painting Salvator Mundi for $10,000. Twelve years later, in 2017, Saudi Prince Bader bin Abdullah bought paid $450,000,000 for it. How did this happen?
It’s a fascinating story that Naha Tandon Sharma recently told in an article for Luxurylaunches, but the tldr is:
The UAE and Saudi Arabia are fierce rival with the Qatari ruling family, who have been buying a lot of highly valuable artwork for years. They didn’t want this painting to fall into Qatari hands. The Saudi Prince and Mohammed Bin Zayed, ruler of the UAE, both thought that they were bidding against the Qatari’s and pushed up the price, however, the Qatari’s weren’t bidding for this painting. They were offered to purchase DaVinci’s painting for $80 million a few years ago but decided not to purchase it, since they considered it too Christian.
Whether acquiring that painting for almost half a billion dollars can be considered a win for the Saudi Prince, I leave that up to your own judgment. One person who’s very happy about this deal surely ist be Dmitry Rybolovlev, the previous owner of the painting.
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