The Lost Leonardo Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

The Lost Leonardo Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson April 21, 2022

Back in the early 2010s, I was lecturing on the cultural and monetary value of works of art to my class of communication media students and brought up some works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of my favorite painters. This was a period where the value of the late neo-Expressionist's paintings was soaring. I thought that the sale of $10.5 million for his Olympics (1984) painting co-created with Andy Warhol at Phillips's Contemporary Art auction in June 2012 was a ton of money for an artwork. I later learned that Basquiat's Untitled (1982) sold for $110.5 million in May 2017 and his In This Case (1983) sold for $93.1 million last May at Christie's in New York. I wasn't aware till seeing director Andraes Koefoed's The Lost Leonardo (2021) that Salvator Mundi (ca. early 16th century), a work often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold for around four times the amount of those two Basquiat paintings at Christie's in November 2017.

The Lost Leonardo is organized into three sections—“Art Game,” “Money Game,” and “World Game.” The film begins in New York where viewers meet Alexander Parish and Robert Simon, his art dealer friend. (Parrish is known as a “sleeper hunter” because he can locate paintings that have supposedly higher commercial value than their list price indicates.) The two devotees of old works of the masters became intrigued in 2005 when they saw a New Orleans auction house list an unidentified work of the Italian Renaissance. They snatched it up for $1,175. Seeking to both restore and authenticate it, they brought it to art conservator and restorer Dianne Modestini. She significantly cleaned up and retouched the painting. She noticed a similarity with how the upper lip was drawn compared to Leonardo's Mona Lisa (ca. 1503–1506). She also uncovered additional similarities distinct to Leonardo's techniques, leading her to conclude that the Salvator Mundi (Latin for Savior of the World) was painted solely by Leonardo. It depicts Jesus making a blessing with his right hand and holding a glass globe with his left hand. After three years of painstaking restoration by Modestini, it was later included in a London exhibit of Leonardo's works at The National Gallery in London.

The documentary is sketchy about the complete history of the Salvator Mundi. One notable omission is that it was displayed at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington campus where an exhibit of Leonardo's paintings and draperies were shown to the public from November 6, 1982 through January 16, 1983. The late Art History professor Joanne Snow-Smith helped organize the exhibit. She concurrently published a slender book titled The Salvator Mundi of Leonardo da Vinci.

The recovered Salvator Mundi.

The middle section of The Lost Leonardo examines how the painting was commodified to the extent that its financial value skyrocketed. Interviewed here (and throughout) are Bank of America executive Evan Beard, FBI art crime investigator Robert K. Wittman, CIA officer Doug Patteson, and Swiss businessman Yves Bouvier. The latter purchased Salvator Mundi for $83 million in 2013. He infamously sold it the next day to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $127.5 million! Rybolovlev was furious when he later learned that there was a $44.5 million disparity in the turnaround sale compared to the original purchase price. The strength of this section is that it reveals how billionaires like Bouvier will store priceless works of art in "freeports," warehouses usually close to an international hub where goods (e.g., artworks) are kept so they're exempt from customs or any tax laws.

The last section traces the massive publicity campaign engineered by Christie's to elevate the Salvator Mundi to that of a huge blockbuster. It looks at the creation of a trailer Christie's put together which shows Leonardo DiCaprio (named after da Vinci) gazing at the painting in awe. The chapter demonstrates in clockwork fashion the final bidding war that ensued to garner Salvator Mundi.

The Lost Leonardo is a wonderfully informative documentary featuring various glimpses at the celebrated painting. It also contains scores of interviews with art critics, art dealers, scholars of Leonardo, investigative journalists, government officials, and legal professionals. It's unquestionably one of the better non-fiction films about a work of art in recent times.

The Lost Leonardo Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Lost Leonardo makes it worldwide premiere on Blu-ray courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. The doc appears in its original theatrical exhibition ratio of 1.85:1 on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-25 (disc size: 22.25 GB). Most of the footage was shot in the late 2010s. There's archival footage of the National Art Gallery's exhibition early in the last decade and apparently some archival footage circa 2005. About all interviewees are filmed individually in separate locations stretching different continents. A small white typeface introduces each participant (e.g., see Screenshot #s 2, 7-13). The footage from the heralded Christie's auction derives from Agence France-Presse's AFPTV (see frame grabs 18-19). Besides Leonardo's paintings, the aerial location shots are the most beautiful and colorful in the movie (see capture #s 5, 15-17). Sony has encoded the feature at a mean video bitrate of 21837 kbps.

Sony has provided eleven chapters for the 96-minute movie.

The Lost Leonardo Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sony has supplied a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround mix (3542 kbps, 24-bit). This is a "talky" documentary with twenty-seven speaking parts. A majority of the interviewees talk in English, with the remainder (e.g., Yves Bouvier) speaking in French. There are optional English SDH as well as subtitles in English (see Screenshot #20), French, and Spanish. The photographed subjects are framed in medium and medium long shots. Their delivery is easy enough to pick up at normal listening volumes. I really like the original score that Sveinung Nygaard wrote and hope it becomes available as an album.

The Lost Leonardo Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Previews - previews for other Sony Pictures Classics titles.

The Lost Leonardo Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

After watching The Lost Leonardo, I'd predict that the viewer will at least attribute partial authorship of the Salvator Mundi to Leonardo da Vinci. It continues to be debated whether Leonardo created the entire painting, or only part of it, whether it was done by a pupil in his workshop or by one of his followers. The documentary doesn't take sides to the authorship question. Art curators and scholars argue it's completely painted by Leonardo while art critics such as Jerry Saltz and Jerry Schacter claim it's not. The film also goes into how many are driven by greed and power to snatch up the latest hot and prized artwork. Others such as Dianne Modestini and Alexandra Bregman are gravely concerned that the money game substantially degrades the cultural significance of an objet d'art. This is such a fascinating subject that I wish the doc could have been four hours long! Sony delivers a competent HD transfer and a stellar DTS-HD MA 5.1 track. Unfortunately, there are no extras. Still, this disc earns a VERY SOLID RECOMMENDATION.