 Hello and welcome to the average artist channel. I'm an artist who likes to double in many different forms of storytelling. If I'm not drawing comics I'm reading or writing a book. I'm illustrating or I'm doing YouTube videos. So this video is something I wanted to do for a while and is completely different to my usual types of illustration videos so please bear with me. Before we start I would like to say that this video is not an opinion of mine and I am simply stating facts and interesting conspiracies that I found online. With that let's begin. I will be telling you a short conspiracy theory involving an important work of art. So what do Da Vinci an Arabic prince and an American president all have in common? Well stay tuned as I walk you through this theory that has been floating around the conspiracy sphere. Let's start at the beginning. We all know who Da Vinci was, a world famous artist and inventor. He was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance era and he did a lot of stuff during his 87 years on our planet. You probably had to study him at one time or another. If you've ever taken an art class or even if you haven't, his name is probably as well known today as it was back then I'm sure. His works include Mona Lisa and The Last Supper just to name a few. Though he wasn't a very prolific artist he has 20 great masterpieces of work and though his works often seems genius and mysterious to us, he was actually a very rational person who liked to be educated and reasoned with science. This now turns us to one of his well known pieces Savatour Mundi which has been headlining a few interesting stories through its history. This painting was created in the 1500s. It depicts Jesus Christ in a Renaissance dress making a sign of cross with his right hand and holding a rock crystal orb in his left. Savatour Mundi is Latin for saviour of the world. Just to jump forward a little bit, in 1958 it was sold for an auction for $45 in New York. Then it disappeared for half a century. It was found at a house auction and then went under repairs for almost six years. It was then thought of as being a copy of the original painting. Some still patern in to believe this. Whilst many experts claim it is the original. Oh and guess what? In 2017 it sold for a whopping $450 million. That is the largest amount ever paid for a painting in the history of the universe. And to whom you might ask? Well that's where the Prince comes in. Sorry if I said that completely incorrectly but as you can tell by the names this guy is obviously very rich and very important. He is currently the minister of culture in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which I think must be quite nice for the country to have somebody be able to just slam down 150 mil for a very important piece of art history. However this is where the conspiracy theory arises. Many people think that he overpaid for the painting that for some reason he went over the estimated going rate of what the people consider an original Da Vinci painting should cost. In fact he overpaid for it by 300 million dollars. The 500 year old painting was to take pride and place in the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism. But two weeks before the unveiling of this piece the exhibition was indefinitely postponed. Everyone started believing that the painting had been stolen, misplaced or was missing. A Da Vinci scholar told the Times that nobody outside the immediate Arab hierarchy knows where it is. Now stay with me on this one but this is where the conspiracy delves deeper. When the painting was then considered by special counsel Robert Mueller to have played a part in the Trump-Russia theory and became part of his investigation. The painting was now at the center of an international money laundering scheme which implicated Donald Trump his campaign staff, the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi and the painting's previous owner, Dmitri Rai Belolev. It is said that Dmitri put the painting up for auction knowing that the Saudi prince would buy it. The funds were then apparently sent straight to a group which had ties with the Trump campaign which would mean that they were money-laundering 300 million dollars straight from Dmitri to help fund Trump into the White House. It is a very outlandish theory and so much show that many people have debunked it citing that it would have been too stupid to do such a thing with highly well-known work of art at such a high price but then sometimes that's a stranger than fiction. It also brought attention and highlighted how unregulated the art market is today. So in conclusion why did the prince pay so much more than the original price? Because he could. Lots of people believe that buying art is a sport and paying 300 million more for a painting was his way of showing his dominance in the art world. Oh and lastly that Salvador Monday painting it hasn't been seen since 2017. Well that concludes the conspiracy theory of Salvador Monday. If you like this conspiracy theory and want to see more let me know in the comments down below and I'll try and find more art conspiracy stuff to tell you. Well that's it for today thanks for watching guys please like and subscribe and I will see you next time. Bye!