Let me ask you something: how many paintings by Leonardo da Vinci exist in the world? A dozen? Fifty? Maybe a hundred?Whenever I pose this query to people, the guess I receive in reply is usually one of two extreme, and opposing, options: something impossibly low like, “There’s what, three?” or something insanely high like, “I don’t know…500?” The answer is actually closer to the impossibly low end of the spectrum. There are eight works that we know unequivocally that the master painted and then another nine or so that experts are pretty sure he created but the provenance—records that trace the painting’s whereabouts from easel to present day—is disputed, lost, or incomplete. A single painting by Leonardo is one of the rarest, not to mention most valuable, items on earth. In 2006, a group of art speculators spent $1,175 on a painting in New Orleans thought to be a copy of a lost work by Leonardo called the Salvatore Mundi. The painting, depicting Christ giving the sign of the cross and holding a glass sphere, was in bad shape from centuries of overpainting, dirt, and grime. It was during the restoration process that experts began to notice things that were a little unusual. An infrared photo of the painting showed the thumb of Ch… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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‘The Lost Leonardo’ Documentary Reveals the True Story Behind A Supposed Renaissance Masterpiece
