The Salvator Mundi. I remember the news stories. A painting by the artistic genius himself, Leonardo Da Vinci. Or was it really? The Lost Leonardo goes into the full story behind the painting’s discovery, and more importantly, what has happened to it since those news stories made the Mundi the most popular painting in recent memory, for better, and mostly, for worse.
After an effective opening credits bullet points, Andreas Koefoed’s doc fills in the crazy journey the Mundi has taken. After being discovered by the artist equivalent of a baseball Sabremetrician, the Mundi gained in notoriety as various people in the art world gave it either a smidgeon or a ginormous amount of credibility, featuring prominently in the Tate Modern in London for example. That alone is an exciting tale, but what happens when the owners want to sell the painting? Well…
All sorts of people are excited to chat about their contributions to the discovery of the Salvator Mundi. I don’t think any of them would anticipate this documentary would paint a scathing indictment of their profession. The Lost Leonardo paints the high end art culture as a society built on a house of cards, or should I say an art deco house of established relationships. Ergo, if one of the “experts” says a slight curl of the lip PROBABLY indicates a painting is a Da Vinci because they want to discover something in their lifetime, every other peer runs with that information, using one “expert’s” opinion to help boost ticket sales to, say, a museum they’re curating. And that’s how the Mundi’s relationship grew: everyone so wanted the Mundi to be a Da Vinci because it served their careers best, not interested in listening to the litany of problems/assumptions the painting’s credibility was built upon.
If The Lost Leonardo was only about a bunch of New York City art history majors, the doc would have been a silly small Fyre Festival like story. However, the Mundi’s journey and Andreas Koefoed’s scope goes much farther and wider than just NYC’s cultural elites. When all these NYC owners of the painting decide to sell it, we learn the true power of cultural currency. Literally in this case, as we see how financial and cultural interests work behind the scenes to boost the price of something worth maybe a million dollars up to a 100x higher valuation. That type of monetary draw attracts powerful forces as well, where the doc then goes into the world of freeports, bank loans, and how some 16×16 square drawing by someone a few years ago can be used as a loan for a Russian Oligarch or a Middle Eastern prince to exert their political influence across the planet. We’re not talking about a painting anymore. It’s almost like we’re talking about a hostage a country is using as leverage to get what they want, meaning that small curl on the lip of Salvator Mundi almost caused an international incident between two countries, leaving that painting (and probably countless others) locked in some building next to an airport, denying the world a chance to experience some shared history.
I know a lot of museums had a hard go of it in 2020 because of the pandemic. But movies like The Lost Leonardo almost make me want them all to go down. If we devalue the Salvator Mundi and our personal/cultural history, this rich people’s art deco cards come crumbling down. Then Christopher Nolan can come in and crash a plane into it and burn it to the ground, then reverse pincer maneuver the situation to get all the bad guys.