A Leonardo da Vinci Painting Just Sold for $450 Million. Here ’s How Experts Figured Out It Was Real

For a painting worth nearly half a billion dollars, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi is far from perfect. The 500-year-old portrait of Jesus Christ has a shady past that includes ownership by King Charles I, a 160-year disappearing act and a sale for only thousands of dollars just 12 years ago. It is damaged and was heavily repainted, then restored. And at least one prominent da Vinci expert is on record saying he doesn’t believe da Vinci was the primary artist behind it. But the 15-by-17 portrait overcame all of that Wednesday night when it sold at auction to an anonymous buyer for a gob-smacking $450.3 million — the highest known sum paid for a work of art, by far. Andy Rain — EPA-EFE Before the sale at Christie’s in New York, came experts like Nica Rieppi, who spent four years and used the latest technology and a lot of highly detailed art books to authenticate the painting. “There’s no doubt that this wasn’t the work of a copyist, but really the hand of a master at work,” Rieppi, the principal investigator at Art Analysis & Research, told TIME on Thursday. Reippi and her team of six scientists painstakingly analyzed the painting at a microscopic level, taking minuscule samples to determine the pigments, materials and techniques used to create it. They also used technical imaging with x-rays, infrared and ultraviolet technology to evaluate how it evolved with each stroke. The CSI-like research contributed to th...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Art onetime Source Type: news