These 10 Paintings Just Sold for Almost $1 Billion

Given the runaway success of one painting in particular, it’s kind of unfair to compare the top 10 lots of New York’s auction mega-week: Approximately $2.3 billion of Impressionist, modern, postwar, and contemporary art was sold in five days, yes, but the numbers are skewed pretty dramatically by Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. Having sold for $450.3 million at Christie’s on Wednesday, the painting, which was rediscovered in 2005, represents around 19 percent of the value of the week’s overall sales.

Remove that Leonardo from the equation and you still have solid numbers—up more than 100 percent from last year’s auctions, which tallied around $1 billion—representative of a confident, perhaps even booming, market.