Despite previous accounts of a $200 million asking price, a recently authenticated Leonardo da Vinci painting, which depicts Christ holding a crystal globe in one hand and giving a blessing with the other, is now said to be off the market. As was already announced at the end of June, "Salvator Mundi" will be shown as part of "Leonardo da Vinci: Painter of the Court of Milan" at the National Gallery starting November 9. Since the museum has strict rules about not exhibiting art that is for sale, the announcement that the work is off the market seems to be specifically intended to permit its inclusion in the upcoming show.

"There were some discussions with a museum concerning the possible acquisition of the painting, but it hasn't been offered for many months," New York-based private dealer Robert Simon, a spokesperson for the consortium of dealers who own the painting — and reportedly himself one of the owners — told Bloomberg. "I've assured the National Gallery that the painting isn't on the market and that there are no plans to sell it after the exhibition." This statement ensures that the museum will be able to show the work, since the National Gallery has a strict policy forbidding the exhibition of works that are for sale: "Any painting for sale is removed from display and returned to the owner, following a standard procedure for returning a loan picture," the museum explained to Bloomberg.

Simon declined to reveal the painting's price when it was on the market, but according to several reports citing anonymous sources in the art world, potential buyers were quoted the figure of $200 million and the owners rejected an offer of $100 million. If the price of $200 million were achieved, it would make "Salvator Mundi" the most expensive work of art ever, beating the sale of Jackson Pollock's "No. 5, 1948" for $140 million by David Geffen (which was reported by the New York Times in 2006, though never confirmed), and Ronald S. Lauder's $135 million purchase of Gustav Klimt's "Adele Blochbauer I" that same year.

"Salvator Mundi," which means "Savior of the World," is the first new Leonardo attribution since 1909 and one of only about 15 oils by the painter to have survived. It once belonged to King Charles I and was sold at auction in 1958 by a descendant of the British art collector Frederick Cook. Amazingly, at the time it fetched only £45, which seems a pittance even considering that it was thought to be the work of Leonardo's pupil Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio. For the remainder of the 20th century, the painting was part of an American collection until it was sold following the death of a family member, Simon said in a statement.

The National Gallery show will mark the first time that the work has been exhibited in public since its cleaning and subsequent attribution to Leonardo. From 1763 to 1900, the painting's history is unknown, and its attribution to Leonardo seems to have been forgotten during that period. At some point, the painting was repaired and painted over, and the stucco fill that was used obscured its vivid colors. A split remains in the wood, and "local areas of paint loss and abrasion are scattered throughout the painting, as is typical of many works from the period," Simon said in a statement. "The recent restoration of the painting has attempted to minimize the visual impact of these damages with a minimal amount of restoration to those areas where losses occurred."

The long list of scholars who have identified the painting as an authentic Leonardo includes curators and art historians at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the University of Oxford, the University of Leicester, and the Politecnico di Milano. "Once you walked into the room, it had that uncanny presence that Leonardos have," Martin Kemp of Oxford told the Telegraph. Yet some naysayers persist. German expert Frank Zöllner thinks that the painting is the work of a talented pupil of Leonardo's. Christ's hand giving the blessing is "rendered with extraordinary precision" and the light is very suggestive, he told the Frankfurter Rundschau. "But one must also ask whether a face with such a long nose absolutely corresponds to Leonardo's perfectionism."

Next fall, the painting's nose and other features can be discussed at leisure by experts and non-experts alike. The exhibition "will obviously be the moment to test this important new attribution by direct comparison with works universally accepted as Leonardo's," a National Gallery spokesperson told the Telegraph. The newly attributed Leonardo will appear in the company of the National Gallery's own "Virgin of the Rocks," which was itself only definitively accepted as a da Vinci painting after a thorough cleaning last year.