He’s not all that well known.

In fact, he hails from a remote branch of a royal family, and has no history as a major art collector and no publicly known source of great wealth.

Yet Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, a little-known Saudi prince, bought Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” for a whopping $450,3 million (R6,5 billion) at an auction last month.

Yeah boi.

While not without its own controversy, after “experts” came out claiming it isn’t a da Vinci painting, the information obtained after documents of the sale were reviewed by The New York Times shows that, well, there’s some more controversy in the mix.

No only did Prince Bader “splurge on this controversial and decidedly un-Islamic portrait of Christ”, but he did so at a time when the “Saudi elite, including some in the royal family, are cowering under a sweeping crackdown against corruption and self-enrichment”:

As it happens, Prince Bader is a friend and associate of the leader of the purge: the country’s 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

I am not going to get into that, but you should read all about where Prince Badar fits into the Saudi regime here.

Oh, and here he is:

So where’s it going? To the Louvre!

But no, not to the beloved Louvre in Paris, but rather its “sister” in Abu Dhabi that paid France hundreds of millions of dollars for the use of the Louvre name and for loans of artworks and managerial advice:

And going full circle, the painting was sold by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev:

Okay, we’re done here.

[source:nytimes]