Tourism chiefs in the UAE capital on Wednesday revealed that the Salvator Mundi, a painting of Christ by Leonardo Da Vinci that sold for a record $450 million, is heading to the Louvre Abu Dhabi in September.
The Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi tweeted that one of the most significant art findings in history will arrive at the Louvre Abu Dhabi on September 18.
The Louvre Abu Dhabi, the first museum to bear the Louvre name outside France, has been billed as “the first universal museum in the Arab world,” in a sign of the oil-rich emirate’s global ambitions.
Salvator Mundi – dated to around 1500 – is the last known Da Vinci in the hands of a private collector. It was long believed to be a copy but was finally authenticated about a dozen years ago.
It was a historic night in November when the Salvator Mundi went on auction at Christie’s in New York.
Sold for $450,312,500, the piece by Leonardo da Vinci obliterated all the previous records according to the famed auction house.
It also exceeded the record for the most expensive work of art at auction set in the same Christie’s saleroom, when Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) achieved $179,364,992.
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