Review: The Lost Leonardo Is a Spread-Thin Look at the Mystery of the Male Mona Lisa

At first, The Lost Leonardo appears interested only in whether or not Salvator Mundi was painted by Leonardo da Vinci. Around eight paintings are universally attributed to the Renaissance master, and the documentary is filled with dramatic clashes over the authenticity question. Art restorer Dianne Modestini states with soul-deep conviction that Salvator Mundi—a portrait of Jesus bought by an art dealer in 2005 for $1,175 and sold in 2017 for a record-setting $450 million—was painted by da Vinci based simply on the appearance of Christ’s mouth in the piece. Not at all convinced that the painting is anything special, critic Jerry Salz throws his hands up in the air in mocking exasperation over an industry he sees as over-excited and gullible. Several other experts land somewhere in between.

The tension, scattered clues, and ultimate unknowability in this discourse easily make a film all on their own. But director Andreas Koefoed widens his lens beyond this old-fashioned art-world mystery to explore how feverish art speculation plays into systems of wealth and geopolitics. Broken into three sections—“Art Game,” “Money Game,” and “World Game”—The Lost Leonardo deals less with absolutes than fungible notions of perception and power.

The documentary dispenses with Salvator Mundi’s origins in brisk fashion, with eager-eyed self-described “sleeper hunter” Alexander Parrish (a “sleeper” is a painting offered at auction that turns out to be worth more than was originally thought) describing how he and his colleague, Robert Simon, an old masters paintings expert, brought their find to the excited Modestini for restoration and evaluation. After the National Gallery briefly consulted several da Vinci experts—who were far from uniform in their appraisal—the London art museum included the painting in a 2011 exhibit, attributing it solely to da Vinci.

Although that stamp of approval set Salvator Mundi on its trajectory to infamy, the naysayers in the film outnumber the believers. The founder of the F.B.I.’s National Art Crime Team (possibly the only cool place to work in law enforcement) delivers his suspicions of the painting’s “ghostlike” provenance. Other experts criticize the greed-fueled credulousness they blame for causing an entire industry to ignore the painting’s many red flags and focus on the pay day. The build toward the 2017 Christie’s auction is dissected as a somewhat jaw-dropping artifact of blockbuster-movie-like overkill, complete with a gimmicky ad campaign including a montage of people, including Leonardo di Caprio, gawking in transfixed wonder at the work.

While the intersection of hype, art, and money is fertile territory and Koefoed makes the most of it, he misses the opportunity to look more deeply at the somewhat mediocre painting itself and whether it deserved the fairly laughable billing as the “male Mona Lisa.” Aside from a couple very justifiable questions about whether Modestini went too far in her five-year restoration—possibly making it more a Modestini than da Vinci—aesthetic matters are mostly put to the side, with Koefoed more engaged with the business surrounding the art.

In its last section, the film adopts the feel of a globe-trotting espionage thriller. Instead of dealers and experts haggling over artistic authenticity, Koefoed focuses on characters like Yves Bouvier. A dodgy shipping magnate who refers to himself in the third person, Bouvier talks about buying paintings for Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, who was upset when he discovered that Bouvier had marked up the prices by millions and pocketed the difference. And the film’s stranger-than-fiction vibe becomes more pronounced when the film dips into the shadow world of freeports, the fortress-like tax havens like the one in Chistopher Nolan’s Tenet, where tycoons and criminals can hide high-ticket items like $450 million paintings.

Inter-governmental gamesmanship even comes into play, with The Lost Leonardo threading the crown prince of Saudi Arabia’s winning bid for Salvator Mundi into a conspiratorial narrative involving the Louvre and a high-stakes Saudi-French tourism development. In all of this, the documentary suggests, that it matters far less whether Salvator Mundi is by da Vinci than whether the right people can be convinced of that. Even though its ostensible subject is art, The Lost Leonardo resembles a feature-length elaboration of what Oscar Wilde said about how all sex is about power, only in Koefoed’s formulation everything in the art world seems to boil down to money, which ends up being ultimately about power.