Artnet screams yet again in a headline that should be filed under sour grapes in regards to the National Gallery in London having the foresight to exhibit a painting in 2011 that captivated the entire world in 2017.

Meanwhile, artnet did nothing when a true british forgery peddler got caught treating dim witted Prince Charles as a patsy and potential accessory to wire fraud as said pill popping cockney grifter attempted to borrow tens of millions against spurious works hanging on the walls of jug ears club house up there in dark and dreary scotland.

Forgery peddler James Stunt Patsy Prince Charles

A Leading Old Masters Scholar Is Accusing London’s National Gallery of Unwittingly Inflating the Price of the ‘Salvator Mundi’

Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci

If you thought you’d heard the last of Leonardo’s contested final masterpiece Salvator Mundi, you have another thing coming.

A leading art historian has accused London’s National Gallery of helping to inflate the price of the painting, which sold for $450.3 million at Christie’s in 2017, by exhibiting it as an autograph Leonardo without properly informing the public about the doubts surrounding its attribution. The historian, Charles Hope, argues in a recent London Review of Books article that the work’s presentation was particularly egregious given that it was available for sale both immediately before and after its inclusion in the show, “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter in the Court of Milan.”

In a flurry of spirited letters published in response to the article, two sides duke it out: Hope and fellow art historian Ben Lewis argue that the picture was effectively for sale during the exhibition—a somewhat unusual and frowned upon practice—while a former owner of the painting, dealer Robert Simon, and the former director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, say it was not.

Read more on Artnet:

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/salvator-mundi-national-gallery-price-1765539