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Good Morning. How can a painting be worth $400m?

At the end of a record breaking week in the art world - when two anonymous bidders went head to head to own the Saviour of the World - the question of how you value a work of art remains baffling.

When one bidder finally lost their nerve, the hammer came down on Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi at $400m. Plus 50m in booking fees.
Was this monumental price – a hundred million - above the previous record, about scarcity value? There are less than 20 works by Leonardo still in existence.

Was it a brilliant marketing campaign by the auction house, touring the painting worldwide, building its brand?

Maybe it’s about art being seen by the super-rich as a safe investment for their billions.

Or does this particular painting, 500 years old, capture something about our times, right now?

This is a very secular image, one art dealer told The Guardian - there’s no cross and no halo. You could imagine it hanging next to a Pollock or a Warhol. Also, he said, ‘there’s something sexily ambiguous about his appearance, a gender fluid aspect that makes it very zeitgeisty.’

He called it ‘the face of today’.

Well, it may be the face of today… if the face of today is a light-skinned, long-haired, European but what we see in a work of art depends on where we stand.

Da Vinci’s Jesus raises his right hand in benediction while with his left he cradles a translucent orb – as if he’s got the whole world in his hands. In long-sleeved blue robe, this is how the most painted figure in Western art is often captured. Part Greek god, part hippy peacenick.

It’s the face of Jesus who turns up in the froth of someone’s cappuccino… on the way to going viral on Instagram.

But we can be pretty sure he doesn’t look like Jesus of Nazareth – of whose physical appearance the Bible offers few clues. Maybe he was small or heavily set. Some of the earliest depictions, from generations after he’d left the stage, show a clean-shaven, short-haired man.

We know more about the company Jesus kept, the life he lived and the stories he told… such as the one where he draws his own portrait of God for his friends.

That woman you visited in prison? God looks like her, he says.

The rough sleeper you chatted to in the shop doorway? He bears all the features of the divine.

Your donation to that agency supporting refugees? You were putting your cash in the hands of God.

If we have few clues on what Jesus looked like there are more on how he imagined everyone else might look.

Time will tell if $400m for da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi is a good investment but in the Christian tradition there’s an image of Jesus Christ which is worth even more. A picture that is priceless.

It’s the image of someone who is giving up their life for someone else.

First broadcast 18 November 2017

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