Long thought to be a copy of a lost original veiled with overpainting, it was rediscovered, restored, and included in an exhibition of Leonardo's work at the National Gallery, London, in 2011–2012.

The painting depicts Jesus Christ in anachronistic blue Renaissance attire, making the sign of the cross with his right hand, while holding a transparent, non-refracting crystal orb in his left, signalling his role as Salvator Mundi and representing the 'celestial sphere' of the heavens.

[9] The painting has not been publicly exhibited since the 2017 Christie's auction, and since late 2020 has been in storage in Saudi Arabia reportedly awaiting a museum and cultural center to be completed in Al-'Ula.

[5][14][n 2] Carlo Pedretti notes that Isabella d'Este was a guest of Leonardo's patron Giuliano de' Medici in 1514 and so may have convinced the artist to complete the commission at that time.

[18] Martin Kemp does not draw conclusions, but likewise discusses the possibility of Isabella d'Este as patron – though he also considers the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, Charles VIII of France, and others.

[19] This view was echoed by the British Royal Collection in their 2018 exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing and is supported by the early French provenance of many of the copies of the Salvator Mundi.

[25] [26] It is possible that the painting was recorded in a 1525 inventory of Salaì's estate as "Christo in mondo de uno Dio padre", though it is unclear to which Salvator Mundi this might refer.

[n 6] Indeed, the iconography of the Salvator Mundi came to fruition in paintings such as Robert Campin's Blessing Christ and Praying Virgin and in the central panel of Rogier van der Weyden's Braque Triptych, before such images became common in Italy later in the fifteenth century.

[38] The most significant and widely discussed among these is the painting formerly in the de Ganay collection, as this one shares most closely the same composition and demonstrates the highest technical skill of Leonardo's pupils.

[n 12] Other artists use the same model but for other subjects, as is the case with Leonardo's Spanish follower Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina and the Eucharistic Christ now at the Museo del Prado.

[44] Leonardo's studio and his followers likewise produced at least four Salvator Mundi panels depicting a youthful Christ who is less frontal in his pose and who holds a terrestrial globe.

The duke's illegitimate son, Sir Charles Herbert Sheffield, auctioned the painting in 1763[55] along with other artworks from Buckingham House when the building was sold to George III.

[62] In 1978, Joanne Snow-Smith argued that the copy in the collection of the Marquis Jean-Louis de Ganay in Paris was the lost original, based on, among other things, its similarity to Leonardo's Saint John the Baptist.

[70][n 23] The consortium believed there was a possibility that this seemingly low-quality work might be Leonardo's long-missing original;[73] as a consequence, in April 2005 they commissioned Dianne Dwyer Modestini at New York University to oversee the restoration.

When Modestini began removing the overpainting with acetone at the beginning of the restoration process, she discovered that at some point a stepped area of unevenness near Christ's face had been shaved down with a sharp object, and also levelled with a mixture of gesso, paint, and glue.

[56] Using infrared photographs Simon had taken of the painting, Modestini discovered a pentimento (a trace of an earlier composition), which had the blessing hand's thumb in a straight, rather than curved, position.

[86] In 2018, Rybolovlev also sued Sotheby's for $380 million, alleging that the auction house knowingly participated in a defrauding scheme by Bouvier, in which the painting played a part.

[111] Additionally, the hands in the painting are very detailed, something for which Leonardo is known: he would dissect the limbs of the deceased in order to study them and render body parts in an extremely lifelike manner.

[117] Other versions or copies of the Salvator Mundi often depict a brass, solid spherical orb, terrestrial globe, or globus cruciger; occasionally, they appear to be made of translucent glass, or show landscapes within them.

[129] The art critic Ben Lewis, who disputes a full attribution to Leonardo, admits that his authorship of the work is possible, owing to the originality of the face, which has "something modern about it".

After intensive studies of the other Leonardo works in the Louvre's collection it seems to us that a number of the techniques observed in the Salvator Mundi are typical of Leonardo—the originality of the preparation, the use of ground glass and the remarkable use of vermillion in the hair and shadows.

"[136] Carmen Bambach, a specialist in Italian Renaissance art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, questioned full attribution to Leonardo: "having studied and followed the picture during its conservation treatment, and seeing it in the context in the National Gallery exhibition, much of the original painting surface may be by Boltraffio, but with passages done by Leonardo himself, namely Christ's proper right blessing hand, portions of the sleeve, his left hand and the crystal orb he holds.

Secondly, the Salvator Mundi in its present state exhibits a strongly developed sfumato technique that corresponds more closely to the manner of a talented Leonardo pupil active in the 1520s than to the style of the master himself.

[146] The New York Times reported in April 2021 that the non-appearance was because the French were unwilling to meet Saudi demands that the painting be hung alongside the Mona Lisa.

The curator of the Louvre's 2019–20 Leonardo exhibition, Vincent Delieuvin, wrote in the Prado catalogue that the painting had "details of surprisingly poor quality", and that "It is to be hoped that a future permanent display of the work will allow it to be reanalyzed with greater objectivity".

This claim is also supported by the fact that a stricto sensu Salvator Mundi painting is recorded in Salaì's posthumous inventory of the estate established in Milan on 25 April 1525.

The rediscovered painting by Leonardo generated considerable interest within the media and general public amid its pre-auction viewings in Hong Kong, London, San Francisco and New York, as well as after the sale.

As Brian Boucher described, "the internet went a little bonkers" in response to the sale, leading to sarcastic and humorous comments and memes on Twitter, Instagram and other social media sites.

"[156] In an article in the Art Market Monitor, Marion Maneker compared the sensationalism around Salvator Mundi to the media coverage surrounding the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911.

[131] Shortly afterward, in June 2021, Andreas Koefoed's documentary The Lost Leonardo premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, exploring how the painting became the most expensive ever sold and the trail of buyers involved, the debate around its attribution and provenance, and its failure to appear at the 2019–2020 Louvre exhibition.