'Salvator Mundi' heads to Louvre Abu Dhabi

December 6 2017

Picture: via Twitter

On Twitter, the Louvre Abu Dhabi has announced that Leonardo's 'Salvator Mundi' will soon be on display there. In another tweet, Christie's has described the museum as the painting's 'new home'. While that doesn't rule out the fact that the painting is being loaned by a private collector - and thus not acquired by the museum itself - it at least sounds like a long-term loan. There's no announcement that I can see on the museum's website (which incidentally is pretty clunky). 

Update - David Kirkpatrick has the scoop in the New York Times; the buyer was a Saudi prince:

He is a little-known Saudi prince from a remote branch of the royal family, with no history as a major art collector, and no publicly known source of great wealth. But the prince, Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, is the mystery buyer of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “Salvator Mundi,” which fetched a record $450.3 million at auction last month, documents show.

Update II - the Wall Street Journal now says that Bader bin Abdullah was a front man for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia himself. 

•