Basically nobody seriously thinks it's an actual Da Vinci, but at this point it doesn't really matter. The narrative around the painting makes it a far more interesting work than any second rate actual Da Vinci could ever hope to be.

The surrounding narrative bit also worked wonders for another Da Vinci hit "The Mona Lisa". Had it not been stolen it would still be relatively obscure.

This was a good (long) article from a couple of months ago that goes through the story: https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/salvator-mundi-leonardo-da-v...

It's an interesting story, anyway.

You don't even have to be an expert to tell it isn't. Compared to Leonardo's paintings, Salvator Mundi is just boring.

Unless Leonardo just phoned it in. But I don't think there is a way to tell if a work was painted by a student or by Leonardo pretending to be a student anyway.

I never liked the explanation for the crystal orb. Oh, Leonardo knew about optics, but he painted the orb naïvely to show some sort of miracle.

Why don't you like that explanation? Leonardo was obsessed with detail, and he would study things intensely, it's not that much of a stretch.

Which is why you'd expect an orb painted by Leonardo to have the correct optics.

Wasn't the orb supposed to symbolize Jesus performing another miracle by not having the light warp the fabric?

That's exactly the argument I'm dismissing. It's not much of a miracle for the orb to transmit light as one would naïvely expect. Rather, it suggests that somebody didn't do their homework.

Marketing, confirmation bias and price tag. Nobody would pay half a billion for a ruined painting with interesting hands... right ?

All that, plus high "values" (prices) make them convenient objects for money-laundering