Abu Dhabi department indefinitely postponed Salvator Mundi unveiling

The postponed unveiling

Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism announced on 27 June 2018 that Salvator Mundi would go on display from 18 September that year. The department said the Renaissance oil painting of Christ, blue-robed and holding a crystal orb, had sold at Christie's in New York the previous November. The department announced on Twitter that the unveiling had been indefinitely postponed. No new date has been given.

The painting has not been displayed in public since the sale, and its location is not publicly known, according to Aeon.

In December 2017, Louvre Abu Dhabi said on Twitter that the work had been acquired by Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism for the museum.

Contested attribution

Fewer than 20 paintings are generally accepted as coming from Leonardo's own hand, according to Christie's, and this is the last known one in private hands. It was long believed to be a copy and was authenticated about a dozen years before the 2017 sale, according to a December 2017 report. It went on public display at the National Gallery in London in 2011 as the first newly discovered Leonardo in a century.

Aeon reported that scholars of equal renown are convinced the painting is a derivative work, not by Leonardo, in which case it might be worth only $450,000. The essay said attribution is the keystone of an economic and cultural structure: without it, prices collapse and catalogues unravel. Governments, insurers, lenders, heirs and institutions depend on attribution being right, the essay said, even though they know at some level that it might not be.

Aeon said attribution rests on connoisseurship, the trained eye comparing brushwork, composition and handling across an artist's work. It is subjective, and two equally qualified scholars may disagree profoundly, as they have for generations. The essay said the 20th century added scientific and forensic analysis: testing materials, identifying anachronistic pigments, examining underdrawings, dating the panel or canvas on which a painting is made. Those methods exposed many celebrated fakes, it said, but did not solve attribution.

Sale and ownership

Christie's sold the painting on 15 November 2017 for $450.3 million including fees, a world auction record, more than double the previous record of $179.4 million paid for Picasso's Women of Algiers (Version O) in New York in 2015. The auction house declined to identify the buyer. The New York Times, citing documents it reviewed, named Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud as the purchaser. He had no history as a major art collector and was a friend and associate of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Prince Bader is listed as a director of Houston-based Energy Holdings International.

The Wall Street Journal reported a different account. Prince Bader was the nominal buyer, it said, and US intelligence reports identified Mohammed bin Salman as the true owner. A figure in the Gulf art world told the paper: "He is a proxy for MBS."

Saudi officials rejected that account. A Saudi official told Reuters that "contrary to media reports, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did not purchase this art piece." Al Arabiya reported that a UAE government official said of the work: "We own it." The Financial Times reported that Prince Bader bought it on behalf of the Saudi government, with the understanding that Saudi Arabia would give it to the UAE. Abu Dhabi's culture authorities said the painting had been acquired for the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

The accounts do not agree. The price is documented; beneficial ownership is not.