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Here’s How You Get Someone to Bid $450 Million for a Painting

  • Christie’s Gouzer known for unconventional auctions approach
  • ‘Brilliant, creative plans that at first sound kind of nuts’
Bloomberg business news
Bloomberg’s Katya Kazakina reports on the Da Vinci painting that sold for $450.3 million.(Source: Bloomberg)

The vision came to Loic Gouzer when he was free diving in the Caribbean: Da Vinci and Warhol, together, on sale.

The Renaissance painter was on Gouzer’s mind because his colleague Alex Rotter was trying to secure Andy Warhol’s Da Vinci-inspired “Sixty Last Suppers” for Christie’s to put under the hammer. Wouldn’t it be something, Gouzer recalled thinking, if he landed Leonardo’s “Salvator Mundi” and the two, the very old and the fairly new, were presented at the same auction?