The Last Leonardo: The Secret Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting Audiobook (Free)

In 2017 the Salvator Mundi was offered at auction for $450m. But is it a genuine da Vinci? In a thrilling narrative built on formidable analysis, Ben Lewis paths the extraordinary trip of a masterpiece dropped and found, lied and fought over across the centuries.

In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s little oil painting, the Salvator Mundi was sold at auction for $450m. In the words of its discoverer, the picture of Christ as saviour from the globe is ‘the rarest point on earth from the about The Last Leonardo: THE TRICK Lives of the World’s Most Expensive Painting greatest individual who ever lived’. Its dazzling price also makes it the world’s most expensive painting.

For two centuries art dealers had searched in vain for the Holy Grail of art history: a portrait of Christ as the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. Many very similar paintings of significantly varying quality had been carried out by Leonardo’s assistants in the first half of the sixteenth century. But where was the initial by the grasp himself?

In November 2017, Christie’s auction house announced that they had it. But do they? The Last Leonardo tells an exciting story of the spellbinding icon spent with the power to create or break the reputations of scholars, billionaires, kings and sheikhs. Lewis will take us to Leonardo’s studio room in Renaissance Italy; to the court of Charles I as well as the British Civil War; to Holland, Moscow and Louisiana; towards the galleries, salerooms and restorer’s workshop as the painting gradually, painstakingly, emerged from obscurity. The vicissitudes from the highly secretive art marketplace are charted across five generations. It really is a twisting story of geniuses and oligarchs, double-crossings and disappearances, where we’re by no means quite certain what to believe. Above all, it is an experience story about the seek out lost treasure, and a search for the truth.