Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
It was an eye-watering amount that not even the experts had predicted. As the hammer fell at Christie’s New York on Wednesday night, it marked the first time that $400m (£304m) was paid for a single painting at auction.
How did Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, a masterpiece rediscovered less than a decade ago, sell for more than triple the amount most dealers and experts had predicted?
Thomas Campbell, former director of the Metropolitan Musuem of Art, told the Guardian that while the price was “eye-popping, it should come as no surprise in a market where speculation, marketing and branding have displaced connoisseurship as the metrics of value”.
Perusing MEdia Dragon never exhausts the mind...
A MEdia Dragon takes a photo of Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci at Christie’s New York auction house before the sale. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
After 19 minutes of dueling, with four bidders on the telephone and one in the room, Leonardo da Vinci's “Salvator Mundi” sold on Wednesday night for $450.3 million ...
Perusing MEdia Dragon never exhausts the mind...
A MEdia Dragon takes a photo of Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci at Christie’s New York auction house before the sale. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
As the World Turns
Separated by 500 years and $450 million.
After 19 minutes of dueling, with four bidders on the telephone and one in the room, Leonardo da Vinci's “Salvator Mundi” sold on Wednesday night for $450.3 million ...