This volume explores Wolfgang Beltracchi’s unusual painting series, The Greats.

In recent years, painter and legendary art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi has opened a new chapter of his career. The core of his latest work is an extensive series of paintings, titled The Greats, which have been put on sale as digital artworks using NFT technology. Its starting point was the Salvator Mundi, a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and sold in 2017 in an auction at Christie’s in New York for 450 million to an unknown buyer. Beltracchi studied the picture meticulously and created several hundred versions of the motif in a variety of styles. The result is a fascinating game of deception with the disputed painting and its symbolism.

This large-format book combines photographic insights into Beltracchi’s everyday life in the studio by renowned Swiss photographer Alberto Venzago with documentation of The Greats collection. Essays by luminaries such as Stanford University professor emeritus Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, German philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Markus Gabriel, and others, as well as a conversation between Beltracchi and Swiss writer René Scheu round out this volume that describes and interprets the phenomenon of this extraordinary artist from a range of perspectives.