----- 3 stars ----- The Invention of the ‘Salvator Mundi’: Or, How to Turn a $1,000 Art-Auction Pickup Into a $450 Million Masterpiece. / Vulture Few observers issued as forceful a critique as Carlo Pedretti, a longtime scholar of da Vinci and a former chair in Leonardo studies at UCLA. In an opinion piece for the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, Pedretti pointed out that years earlier, another Salvator Mundi, “a better version,” in his estimation, had been floated as the original. Whether it was — the scholarly consensus today is that it wasn’t — the public, Pedretti went on, should be cautious of “the sophisticated marketing operation” surrounding Simon and Parish’s version. “There is … much in circulation in the art market,” he wrote, “and it would be wise not to chase chimeras like the case of the ‘rediscovered’ Salvator Mundi, which in the end explains itself. Just look at it.” A condition of Simon and Parish’s loan of the Salvator Mundi to the National Gallery was that the painting not be actively on sale, or “in the trade,” in art-world parlance. Still, it escaped the attention of no one in the art world that the Salvator Mundi would be the only painting in Syson’s upcoming exhibition to be privately owned, and by a consortium of dealers at that.
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----- 3 stars ----- The Invention of the ‘Salvator Mundi’: Or, How to Turn a $1,000 Art-Auction Pickup Into a $450 Million Masterpiece. / Vulture Few observers issued as forceful a critique as Carlo Pedretti, a longtime scholar of da Vinci and a former chair in Leonardo studies at UCLA. In an opinion piece for the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, Pedretti pointed out that years earlier, another Salvator Mundi, “a better version,” in his estimation, had been floated as the original. Whether it was — the scholarly consensus today is that it wasn’t — the public, Pedretti went on, should be cautious of “the sophisticated marketing operation” surrounding Simon and Parish’s version. “There is … much in circulation in the art market,” he wrote, “and it would be wise not to chase chimeras like the case of the ‘rediscovered’ Salvator Mundi, which in the end explains itself. Just look at it.” A condition of Simon and Parish’s loan of the Salvator Mundi to the National Gallery was that the painting not be actively on sale, or “in the trade,” in art-world parlance. Still, it escaped the attention of no one in the art world that the Salvator Mundi would be the only painting in Syson’s upcoming exhibition to be privately owned, and by a consortium of dealers at that.