The Lost Leonardo (2021)
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The Lost Leonardo Movie Review
The Lost Leonardo is a 2021 international documentary film directed by Andreas Koefoed. It is one of the most underappreciated documentaries of the year.
The film follows the mystery behind the Salvator Mundi, an alleged long lost painting done by Leonardo da Vinci and the quest to prove if it is authentic or not. This is just a fascinating story that actually happened fairly recently and I remember reading about it in the news. This painting was the only one supposedly done by Leonardo that was discovered in over a century, so the first half of the documentary follows the discovery and appraisal process.
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The second half shifts gears and becomes this full-on thriller about the chase to find the bidder and then the attempts to find out where the painting went. Apparently, a Saudi Arabian prince bought it for unprecedented 450 million dollars, but it is not known where the painting is now due to a variety of reasons, all very well explained in the doc.
The Lost Leonardo is a highly entertaining documentary that is made to appeal to wider audiences who just might not care about art all that much, but would find the heist elements thrilling. The movie hinges too much on that concept and I would have liked more exploration of the appraisal process and the auction world, but still the film did make an important point that all of this auctioning might be fraud.
Not a single painting should cost hundreds of millions, but it is a well-known, superbly established scheme that brings millions to the auctioneers every year. The movie’s most honest and best point is against the art industry, but I would have liked to have seen more about the actual painting, thus the first half was a bit more interesting to me.
Whether or not the painting is really done by Leonardo is still up for debate and the question of whether or not the enormous purchase itself solidified the answer all for itself. The movie has so many of these questions that it tries to answer, and it does succeed in that more often than not. The pacing is excellent, the editing is very good and the movie is confidently directed and structured. The interviews and the whole production are wide and international in scope, making for a rather ambitious project, but the interviewees needed a bit more backstory.
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