The most expensive painting ever sold is Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, which achieved a record price of approximately $450 million at a Christie's auction in New York in 2017. This sale established the highest publicly documented price for any painting at auction as of the latest widely reported figures through 2025.

If you’d like, I can summarize how the value of such works is assessed and compare Salvator Mundi to other extremely valuable paintings that have traded or been valued highly in recent years.