History was made on Wednesday night at Christie's auction house in New York City as Leonardo Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi broke the record to become the costliest painting in history.
It is one of the 16 verified Da Vinci originals still in existence. It is also the last to be verified in the 21st Century. The last da Vinci painting verified as a master original was Benois Madonna in 1909.
Salvator Mundi was sold to anonymous buyer by Russian billionaire Salvator Mundi for a whooping price of $400 million and another $50.3 million in fees. The previous record for the most expensive painting was $179m for Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger” (“Women of Algiers”), according to Christie’s. The highest price ever paid at auction for a da Vinci was in 2001 for his “Horse and Rider,” a work on paper, which went for $11.5m
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