Christie’s presents “The Last da Vinci”

How do you promote the sale of an artwork, when you can count your potential customers on one hand? Can slick branding and a tightly focused campaign contribute to the record sale price of a Leonardo da Vinci? If so, by how much?

As we cover in this entry, true artistic mastery will always command high prices, but appealing to emotion and ego can create a bidding war for the record books: the sale of “the last da Vinci,” the Salvator Mundi, for $450 million. The highest price ever paid for a piece of art.

So, you’re thinking, what about attribution?

There can be no doubt this work sold for the astronomical price it did for one reason: Leonardo da Vinci. (Like, the guy who painted the Mona Lisa.)

But auctions as heavily publicized as this, beamed live around the world, are also fueled in equal measure by ego and adrenaline. As the bidding war intensified, jumping up in obscene increments of tens of millions of dollars, as Christie’s themselves put it:

“We know for a fact that [the campaign] brought one underbidder into the fray. We also got contacted by clients wishing to sell their masterpiece with us ‘because only Christie’s could create so much excitement.’”

We can’t pretend to offer any spuriously specific dollar figure, but this is certain: “The Last da Vinci,” as an idea and a campaign, contributed to the highest price paid for an artwork in history—a sale so significant it pushed Christie’s, and the category as a whole, into a return to growth.