They are calling it the most expensive dud in art history.
The unnamed bidder who bought Leonardo da Vinci’s long-lost “Salvator Mundi” for a record $450.3 million Wednesday wasted a half-billion dollars, art watchers say.
“I don’t have a clue who bought it, but I was completely mad,” gallerist Richard Feigen fumed to The Post. “The name Leonardo da Vinci is magic, but what they got was a skeleton of da Vinci, I think. It was mind-boggling.”
Of the anonymous buyer, he said: “Somebody was just oblivious. I don’t know why anyone would buy it for that price.”
The work has been retouched so much in its 500-year history that da Vinci’s handiwork has been diluted into oblivion, art-watchers said.
“We all agree that it’s in — at best — very poor condition,” art adviser and curator Todd Levin said. “I would have never advised a client pay that amount of money for that specific piece.”
The buyer’s identity has not been revealed, and critics were at a loss over who would pay so much for so specious a work.
Gallerists and curators can often guess at who buys a painting, because they’re familiar with collectors’ tastes, but not this time, Feigen said.
“Sometimes one can guess at [who buys what], but this doesn’t make any sense at all,” he said.
Levin, who believes the painting is actually the work of da Vinci protege Giovanni Boltraffio, said the painting lacks the divine spark that marks the master’s work.
“But putting aside the name of Leonardo, when you stand in front of the work, it’s simply not a gripping masterpiece. It’s not a transfixing work of art.”
Critic Jerry Saltz has leveled the same charge.
“The painting is absolutely dead. Its surface is inert, varnished, lurid, scrubbed over, and repainted so many times that it looks simultaneously new and old,” he wrote in an article for Vulture earlier this week.
Christie’s, which stands to make as much as $50.3 million on the record sale, disagrees and even produced a video of people gaping at the painting roughly a week before its sale.
“The experience of setting eyes on a work described as the ‘Divine Mona Lisa’ — one of fewer than 20 paintings acknowledged as being from the Renaissance master’s hand — is one that has moved people in many different ways,” the auction house wrote in an article accompanying the video.
But it’s smoke and mirrors, according to Levin, who said the footage only proves Christie’s is good at marketing — not that the painting is legit.
“It was this triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality,” he quipped.
Christie’s has said critics are green with envy and that competing auction houses are stoking dissent in the art community.
“I think haters are gonna hate — it’s honestly almost entirely ignorant gossip,” Christie’s vice president Alan Wintermute previously told The Post.