Why Leonardo's $450 mn masterpiece shouldn't disappear from public view

No painting by Leonardo had ever come up for auction

The sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for US$450m (£342m) raised many of the familiar questions about the authenticity of the painting, the astronomical sums of money paid for single works of art that bear no relation to anything else openly sold – and the audience for this image in the future.

Is this painting by Leonardo? For many years the painting was thought to be the work of an artist (some people believed Giovanni Boltraffio) in da Vinci’s circle. But after careful cleaning and analysis by scholars, before and since