EARTH-SHATTERING da Vinci Painting Resurfaces _ History's Greatest Picks (S1)

We all know how the story goes. A woman walks into a thrift store and buys a painting for $30 to cover a hole in her wall, and then it turns out to be the lost masterpiece that sells for over a million bucks at an auction. It's a true story just like the next one, except this time we're not talking about a painting worth a mere million bucks. We're talking hundreds of millions. It's 1958 and a couple are on a trip to London. Warren and Minnie Koontz from New Orleans are small-time art collectors. Just before they head back to the States, they do what any good collector does. They just poke their head into an auction house just to see what's happening. There's a collection of 136 paintings up for sale. One of the lots is called Salvator Mundi. It's a Renaissance-era painting attributed to Giovanni Poltrafio, who was a student of Leonardo da Vinci. It shows Christ holding an orb in one hand and giving a blessing with the other. The painting is showing its age. Its varnish is cracked. I mean, it's 500 years old. And not only that, at some point the face was retouched or restored, but it was done so badly that one critic says it looks like a drug-crazed hippie. But this doesn't dissuade Warren and Minnie. They have an eye for old art, so they decide to place a bid. No one else puts in a bid, so they snatch up the Poltrafio painting for 45 pounds, the equivalent of $120 back then. They're not big art dealers. Nobody knows about them in the art world, so this doesn't make a huge splash. And so it goes back to Louisiana with Warren and Minnie. Warren and Minnie pass the painting on to a nephew who hangs it in a stairwell in his house in Baton Rouge, and it sits there collecting dust for years. When the nephew passes, the painting by Boltrafio hits the auction block in 2005 for a second time. This time, it sells for just over $1,000 to a couple of art dealers from New York. The art dealers know that there are at least 30 different versions of Salvatore Mundi attributed to Leonardo's workshop, including this one by Boltrafio. This is how it worked in the Renaissance. The masters, the Michelangelos and the Leonardo's of the time, did not work in isolation. They had teams of young artists who came as apprentices and would often finish and assist the master with their own works. It's all about the brushstrokes. You can't emulate the brushstrokes. It's like a signature. It's like a fingerprint. Once you identify the brushstrokes of the master, it's unmistakable that this is not of a student. The dealers want to find out a little bit more about this work, so they take it to Diane Modestini, an expert in Renaissance art. Her job is to clean it, stabilize it, and see what's underneath all those years of grime and cracked varnish and that horribly done touch-up. The restoration process is slow and painstaking. It takes months or even years. A moment comes when Diane tries to retouch some damage on the figure's upper lip, but she can never quite get it right. So, as a guide, she's going to take inspiration from the master himself. She puts it side by side with a copy of the Mona Lisa. It's then, for the first time, that she sees the remarkable resemblance. As she looks at the of her restoration of Salvatore Mundi and looks at the lip of Mona Lisa, these are a one-to-one match. She suddenly believes that what she's looking at isn't a copy of a Leonardo. It is an original Leonardo. This thing is as historically significant as the Mona Lisa itself. What follows rings like a thunderclap through the art world. There are only so many Leonardo da Vinci paintings in existence. For another one to come on the scene is earth-shattering. What follows is years of analysis, radiography, x-rays to ensure that its provenance of the hand of Leonardo himself is verified. And there are claims and counterclaims. Some say it's not a Leonardo. Others say it's partly by Leonardo. And others still say it's a Leonardo masterpiece. Even though no one agrees, it still heads to auction. When it reappears back at auction in 2017, a bidding war breaks out. $190 million. Give me $200 million. $200 million is bid. These guys are throwing down. $264 million. $300 million. $370 million. We're still not done. And when the gavel drops, it sells for, get this, $450 million, $300,000. Hidden treasures can be found absolutely anywhere and maybe even in your backyard. For the last 15 years at this small market town in England, there have been these two figures standing at the bottom of this couple's garden. They're instantly recognizable, though. They're basically mini models of the Sphinx, the famous Sphinx from Egypt. Now, the couple had originally bought these at a country house sale for 300 pounds, which is the equivalent of around 500 U.S. dollars today. So you look at these, and yeah, they're not terribly remarkable. So they're maybe like two feet high, maybe like three feet in length. You know, not even that big. They show their age. One of them, the head became detached, and it's been stuck back together with cement. So there comes a point when the couple are downsizing, and they're going to take these two Sphinxes, along with a lot of other things from their home, and they're just going to take them to the local auction house and try to raise some money. In the auction catalog, they've listed this as a pair of 19th century carved stone garden models of Egyptian Sphinx. They have an estimated value of somewhere between 300 and 500 pounds, and the opening bid is 200 pounds. And this is where it gets interesting, because this auction is online, and people in the know have been sniffing around the auction catalog, and they've smelled a bargain. Slowly, the price begins to creep up, and then it creeps up again, and it creeps up again, and again, and again. And a bidding war breaks out. The auctioneer and the couple have had no idea what's been sitting at the bottom of their garden for the bidders. Clearly do. Among the bidders are international gallery owners, antiquity dealers, people who know their stuff. The clues have been staring them in the face all along. For one thing, they're made of a limestone. That is consistent with ancient Egyptian artifacts. But then the other thing is that all that weathering might look like it's from decades of English weather, but it's actually from centuries of desert weather. The clincher is the size of the head relative to the rest of the body. When you look at it from the side or head on, it looks weirdly big, like the head is swollen. But that's exactly how the ancient Egyptians would build these things, because they usually had them sitting in a way that people would look up at them. And when you look up from an angle, the head looks just right. So get this. The bidding, which begins at 300 bucks, reaches 200,000. And after 15 minutes of this back and forth, the Sphinxes are sold to an anonymous museum for their final selling price of 300 grand.