It watched as its then-owner, King Charles I, was beheaded in 1649.
It was hanging in Buckingham Palace back when it was still called Buckingham House in 1703.
It survived the Nazis’ 1940 London Blitz, when its keepers abandoned it in their basement.
By 1958, its origins had become so lost in time that it was sold for a paltry $90 to a collector from Louisiana.
The long, strange journey of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterwork “Salvator Mundi” takes its next turn Wednesday at Christie’s, when it goes under the hammer for a hoped-for $100 million.
It is the first Leonardo to emerge in nearly a century, and one of just 16 surviving paintings by the Renaissance Italian polymath.
“Salvator Mundi” — which translates to “Savior of the World” and depicts Jesus Christ holding an Earth-like glass orb — was nearly forgotten forever during its 500-year journey from Italy to the Big Apple.
“We came pretty close to losing it,” Alan Wintermute, a Christie’s vice president and specialist in Old Masters paintings, told The Post.
“It’s so rare that anything this important reappears in the way it has that you can’t help but be excited.”
Battered by time and marred by ham-handed attempts to restore it, the so-called “last da Vinci” was, for centuries, thought to be no more than a pupil’s copy of the original.
