On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like the obvious way to prove your modern and progressive credentials: with the purchase of a disputed, 500-year-old Renaissance oil painting depicting Jesus Christ holding a non-refracting crystal orb. Yet just as in art, everything involving the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is very much relative.
Besides, as visitors to a freshly touted but as-yet unbuilt museum in Riyadh will one day see for themselves, it’s not as if it was any old painting. And as the art world is increasingly finding out, the royal families of the Persian Gulf – like the Medicis of Renaissance Italy before them – aren’t any old collectors.
The recent history of the Salvator Mundi says as much. Saudi Arabia’s association…
