The most famous paintings in the world, especially old master works painted before 1803, are generally owned or held at museums for viewing by patrons. Since the museums rarely sell them even to the highest bidders, they are considered priceless. Guinness World Records lists da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as having the highest ever insurance value for a painting. On permanent exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa was assessed to be worth $100 million on December 14, 1962. Taking inflation into account, the 1962 equivalent would be 10 times that. Salvator Mundi, a painting by an Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci dated to c. 1500, was sold at auction for a total of $450.3 million on 15 November 2017 by Christie’s in New York to Prince Badr bin Abdullah, setting a new record for most expensive painting ever sold to date at public auction.
Here is the list of the top 20 most expensive paintings in the world.
| Rank | Painting | Artist | Price/Worth |
| 1. | Salvator Mundi | Leonardo da Vinci | $450.3 million |
| 2. | Interchange | Willem de Kooning | $300 million |
| 3. | The Card Players | Paul Cézanne | $250 million |
| 4. | Nafea Faa Ipoipo | Paul Gauguin | $210 million |
| 5. | Number 17A | Jackson Pollock | $200 million |
| 6. | No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red) | Mark Rothko | $186 million |
| 7. | Pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit | Rembrandt | $180 million |
| 8. | Les Femmes d’ Alger (“Version O”) | Pablo Picasso | $197.4 million |
| 9. | Nu couché | Amedeo Modigliani | $170.4 million |
| 10. | Masterpiece | Roy Lichtenstein | $165 million |
| 11. | Nu couché (Sur le côté gauche) | Amedeo Modigliani | $157.2 million |
| 12. | Le Rêve | Pablo Picasso | $155 million |
| 13. | Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II | Gustav Klimt | $150 million |
| 14. | Three Studies of Lucian Freud | Francis Bacon | $142.4 million |
| 15. | No. 5, 1948 | Jackson Pollock | $140 million |
| 16. | Woman III | Willem de Kooning | $137.5 million |
| 17. | Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I | Gustav Klimt | $135 million |
| 18. | The Scream | Edvard Munch | $119.9 million |
| 19. | Reclining Nude With Blue Cushion | Amedeo Modigliani | $118 million |
| 20. | Untitled | Jean-Michel Basquiat | $110.5 million |
