Ahead of Wednesdays record-breaking auction at Christies, during which a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci sold for a throat-clenching $450 million , art critic Jerry Saltz voiced some doubts.

Saltz, in an essay for New York magazine , called the portrait of Christ dead and inert, suggesting that the artwork which had been predicted to fetch only $100 million is a sham. Its no Leonardo , he wrote. Saltz, neither a historian nor an expert in old master work, went on to suggest that Christies sale would end poorly. No museum on Earth can afford an iffy picture like this at these prices.

And then Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World) a 500-year-old portrait of Christ thought to be a copy when it was plucked from an estate sale for a measly $10,000 in 2005, sold for nearly half a billion dollars to an undisclosed private buyer. Suddenly, the controversy surrounding the paintings authenticity its whereabouts over these last few centuries and whether multiple restorations had indelibly altered its surface became white noise. Christies had managed to rocket past previous auction benchmarks, brokering a historic sum for the seller, Russian billionaire Dmitry E. Rybolovlev s family trust.