Rediscovered Da Vinci Painting Sells For $450+ Million And This Makes Me Feel So, So Poor


A rediscovered Leonardo da Vinci painting broke records by becoming the most expensive piece of art ever sold. Just last month, insiders forecasted that the resurfaced ‘Salvator Mundi’ by Leonardo da Vinci would sell for $100 million at auction. It ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED those projections and sold for an astounding $450.3 million.

It’s okay to feel poor upon reading this news. I do. I can’t imagine spending $4,500 on a painting, and spending $4.5 million on a house is something in my wildest dreams right now. But someone threw down $450.3 million on a painting at Christie’s auction house.

The 500-year-old painting, Savior of the World, is the last painting from Leonardo da Vinci that wasn’t accounted for. Are you ready for the biggest kick in the dick of all? In 1958, this painting sold for just $60 at Christie’s Auction House because at the time nobody realized what it truly was. It wasn’t until 2011 when the Art world realized that this was the last surviving unaccounted for Leonardo da Vinci painting.

Here’s what four hundred and fifty million dollars buys you at auction these days:

“The ‘Salvator Mundi’ is the Holy Grail of Old Master paintings,” said Alan Wintermute, Christie’s Senior Specialist of Old Master Paintings. “Long known to have existed, and long sought after, it seemed just a tantalizingly, unobtainable dream until now.”
Da Vinci painted the image of Jesus Christ at about the same time as the “Mona Lisa” — around 1500. It adorned the walls of royal palaces before disappearing towards the end of the 18th century. By the time the painting resurfaced in 1900, its origins had been forgotten. (via CNN)

Pablo Picasso’s 1955 “Women of Algiers (Version O)” held the previous world record for the most expensive painting ever sold at $179.4 million in 2015. These are public records. According to the WSJ, paintings have sold privately for $250 and $300 million before.

Bidding on this painting was done in increments of $10 million. Just try and wrap your mind around that for a minute. In order to one-up someone’s bid you would’ve needed to bid $10 million more EVERY GODDAMN TIME.

You can head on over to the Wall Street Journal to read all about how the room full of billionaires bidding on this painting was said to be electric.

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Cass Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of BroBible. Based out of Florida, he covers an array of topics including NFL, Pop Culture, Fishing News, and the Outdoors.