Who Owns Beauty?
How art became a public good — and why this may not last
In 2017, a painting most people had never seen or heard of sold for almost half a billion dollars. Salvator Mundi, an image of Jesus likely painted by Leonardo da Vinci, was purchased by the Saudi royal family for $450 million, making it comfortably the most expensive artwork ever.
The painting’s path to prominence was a confusing one. Art historians had long known that Leonardo had painted a salvator mundi — a common bit of Christian iconography featuring Jesus blessing the world with his right hand and holding a globe in his left. Others had written about Leonardo’s original and several artists had made their own copies of it. The painting had featured in the collection of some English kings and nobles in the 1600s, but, somewhere along the way, people lost track of it. Multiple attempts at restoration had altered the painting, and the painting’s owners thought they owned a copy, not the original. It sold in 1958 for £45.
By the 21st century, the painting was a mess; it had been painted over and looked terrible. But the painting’s owners — a group that had bought it for just over $1000 — thought they might have something. They hired Dianne Dwyer Modestini, a prominent NYU art scholar, to restore it. She discovered that under the centuries of clumsy attempts to improve or restore the image, there was something that seemed like a) an original painting rather than a copy and b) the work of Leonardo da Vinci himself.
The restoration process was extensive and controversial. The painting at one point broke into pieces. Some think that Modestini’s restoration went too far, changing the essential nature of the original. Others still dispute that the painting is a real da Vinci.
But none of that dampened the hype around this painting, and the valuation kept climbing. After restoration, Salvator Mundi sold for $75 million, then for $125 million, and finally ended up in the hands of the Saudis for a cool $450 million.
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Congratulations, Mohammad bin Salman, you own the most expensive piece of art in history. What do you do with it?
After suddenly becoming famous after centuries in obscurity, the painting once again disappeared from public view. Mohammad bin Salman displayed Salvator Mundi on his mega-yacht in the Red Sea for a while, and now it seems to be in super-secret storage somewhere. Only the painting’s owners, their friends, and the people they employ to look after their art collection can enjoy it. The public has not seen the painting since its purchase in 2017.
This has provoked bafflement and anger — shouldn’t people be able to see one of the most famous paintings in the world? Why isn’t the painting in a museum? The painting’s restorer, Dianne Dwyer Modestini, has complained that “To deprive the art lovers and many others who were moved by this picture — a masterpiece of such rarity — is deeply unfair.”
Salvator Mundi is not unusual. Of the seven most expensive paintings in history, only one — Cezanne’s The Card Players — is on display in a museum. The rest hang the walls of some rich guys or, worse, sit in darkened storage facilities accruing value and avoiding taxation. It does seem “tragic,” as Modestini puts it, that so many notable works of art are hidden from public view.
A few hundred years ago, this state of affairs would not have seemed problematic or even notable. Art belonged to its owners, and it was for their private consumption.
We should be aware of another difference, too — there was nothing like today’s level of attention to individual works of art before the 20th century. The household-name paintings that we all know today would have just been something to take up blank space on a wall in some royal home. The Mona Lisa, for example, which today gets up to 30,000 visitors a day, hung near the bathrooms of one French royal palace in the 1500s and then got thrown in storage because Louis XV didn’t like it very much. Napoleon pulled it out of the warehouse and put it up in his bedroom. It wasn’t the greatest work known to man, admired by millions, it was just a way to spruce up the royal bedchamber.
So where did the idea that great art should be public come from?
In Europe, at least, it seems to stem from the discovery in 1506 of an ancient Roman sculpture of the very fit Trojan priest Laocoön and His Sons fighting some snakes. After a farmer discovered the statue, Pope Julius (who was very interested in ancient Rome) purchased it and, rather than squirreling it away for his own private enjoyment, placed it in a publicly accessible location on the Vatican grounds. This was the beginning of the Vatican Museum.
It makes sense that the Popes would be among the first to allow the public to view art in a museum setting. After all, the great cathedrals of the church served as a type of museum, as well, where worshipers could gaze at remarkable works of art.
Over time, some monarchs began to occasionally allow the public into certain areas of their palaces to view their art collections. Rulers seem to have done this to curry favor with their subjects, call attention to their generous patronage of the arts, and glorify their national artistic traditions. In France, for example, the kings occasionally allowed the public into some areas of Versailles and turned part of the Luxembourg Palace into an art museum that was opened to the public in 1750.
The spirit of the Enlightenment drove these changes. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant believed that everyone should try to understand the world using their own rational mind:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!” — that is the motto of enlightenment.
This attitude extended to art, as well. Enlightenment thinkers held that people should view great art with their own eyes, and that kings should not hoard beautiful things.
The world’s greatest art museum, the Louvre, emerged during the defining moment of the Enlightenment: the French Revolution.
When revolutionaries took political power away from King Louis XVI, they found themselves in possession of all of his art, as well. Though the royal family had previously planned to open some kind of art display in the Louvre as a kind of noblesse oblige, the new government explained its decision to open a public museum in revolutionary terms: the treasures of France belonged to its people, not its monarchs.
After the National Assembly threw Louis XVI in prison in 1792, it moved quickly to establish a museum in the Louvre, partially out of revolutionary fervor and partially out of fear that mob actions against symbols of the monarchy would destroy the art that the French kings had acquired.
One year after Louis’ downfall, the museum — officially called Muséum central des Arts de la République — opened, displaying to the public hundreds of artworks that had previously sat in church and royal storehouses. The king’s art collections (including the Mona Lisa) were now considered biens nationaux — national goods. The galleries would be open to artists for study on some days, and the general public on others.
The revolutionary Abbe Gregoire exulted that the artworks
which were previously visible to only a few . . . will henceforth give pleasure to all: statues, paintings, and books are charged with the sweat of the people: the property of the people will be returned to them.
Historian Andrew McClellan explains that the significance of the Louvre to the revolutionary project went well beyond the public’s ability to enjoy an afternoon of fine art:
In a space such as the Louvre, free circulation and joint ownership of nationalized art would forge communal bonds of belonging and loyalty to the state sufficient to dissolve preexisting differences of origin, class, race, and language. Recognition of mutual ties to others who were different in those respects made it possible to imagine the nation. The then minister of the interior, Dominique Garat, was particularly keen that the Louvre welcome the provincial representatives assembling in Paris for the 10 August festival, in order to show them that recent “political turmoil has in no way diminished the cult of the arts among us.” As a national institution, the Louvre could represent and convey the state of the nation.
As French armies conquered much of the European continent, the same logic justified the French looting the artistic treasures of other countries and hauling them back to Paris. The painter Luc Barbier said that
The fruits of genius are the patrimony of liberty. . . . For too long these masterpieces have been tarnished by the gaze of servitude: it is in the bosom of a free people that the legacy of great men must come to rest… The immortal works of Rubens, Van Dyck, and the other founders of the Flemish school are no longer on alien soil . . . they are today safe in the home of the arts and genius, in the land of liberty and righteous equality, in the French republic.
By the nineteenth century, every major city in Europe featured a public art museum, many of which occupied the former homes of the nobility. The great paintings and sculptures were now accessible by anyone with a few hours to spare rather than being hoarded by the wealthy (it should be noted that part of this process was the theft of art from around the globe as victorious armies and ambitious archaeologists piled the world’s treasures into the capitals of Europe).
Now, things seem to be headed backward. In today’s overheated art market, paintings serve as status symbols and stores of wealth — not that different, I suppose, from their purpose back in the 1500s. That’s why so many of them aren’t in museums; their owners don’t think these paintings are “the property of the people.”
As for Salvator Mundi, it appears the Saudi royal family plans to install its $450 million painting in a fancy new museum in Riyadh designed to announce “Saudi Arabia’s cultural renaissance” to the world. The painting, like the soccer teams and golf leagues the Saudis have acquired, will provide entertainment for the public while bolstering the public’s view of Saudi Arabia and its regime.
This way, the owners of Salvator Mundi will get to have their cake and eat it too. The art will be available to the people, but it sure won’t belong to them.
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This essay was also published here.