A Las Vegas art gallery will soon sell the bronze cast of Horse and Rider, the only known surviving wax sculpture made by the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci.

The cast was made by American Fine Arts Foundry in 2012 from a latex mold pulled from the original beeswax sculpture by Leonardo that he made in the early 1500s.

The beeswax sculpture is believed to be a scale model study for a larger monument to Leonardo’s friend and patron Charles d’Amboise, the French governor of Milan who is depicted in the sculpture on horseback, according to research about the sculpture. But the larger work was never completed.

D’Amboise died in 1511, and Leonardo followed a few years later in 1519, leaving the wax sculpture to his protégé Francesco Melzi. It is believed by provenance researchers that the sculpture passed with Leonardo’s other drawings, notebooks and unfinished works through Melzi to his son, Orazio, whose own heirs began selling off Leonardo’s unfinished works.

The exact manner it changed hands over time is not entirely known but it was later recorded to be included in the Sangiorgi Collection in Rome in the late 1800s. In the 1920s, its Italian owner removed the wax sculpture from war-torn Italy and put it in a bank vault in Switzerland.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse and Rider on display in Milan in 2016. Photo: Courtesy Art Encounter

The last Italian owner of the wax Horse and Rider was a man named Arturo Bassi, who shared information about it and photos to his friend, the Leonardo scholar Carlo Pedretti—who then helped facilitate its sale to a group of investors through the antiques dealer Mallet at Bourdon House in London.

In 1985, the investor owners of the wax sculpture commissioned the latex mold to preserve the sculpture for posterity because of the degrading nature of the beeswax model. U.S. businessman Richard Lewis purchased the latex mold from them in 1987 but waited until 2012 to have the bronze cast made from the mold. He eventually sold the mold and the bronze cast to a business named Silverpoint Holdings in a private sale.

Silverpoint Holdings, the current owners, are now offering the bronze cast for sale through Art Encounter, a Las Vegas gallery led by father-son duo Rod Maly and Brett Maly, for a price of $100 million—which includes the one-of-a-kind mold used to make it. If the sculpture does not outright sell for that price, Rod Maly told Artnet in a phone interview that Art Encounter would explore working with an auction house or other options.

Maly was asked whether the buyer could cast another bronze edition from the mold.  “If they wanted to cast it from the bronze, yes, if they wanted to cast it from the mold they could,” he said. “The mold is not in great shape. And the wax is not in good shape either. I saw it two years ago in London.”

He said that the owners of the wax sculpture “would probably entertain an offer on it” but he said that, as far as he knows, it’s not for sale right now. It is currently housed in a climate-controlled environment in London.

“It’s not in wonderful condition. Beeswax wasn’t meant to last for 500 years, but they’re doing what they can to preserve it,” Maly said. “The left front leg, the ears of the horse, the arms of the rider are missing because over the years it has decomposed.”

Still, it is widely believed that the original wax sculpture is an authentic work by Leonardo. It has the artist’s fingerprint on it, it bears his initials and was scientifically analyzed by independent teams at Oxford University and Sotheby’s which dated it to the era when Leonardo worked.

The art dealer, which has been involved in efforts to authenticate the sculpture for about a decade, said it is currently in a vault in Las Vegas but is inviting any interested scholars who wish to see it to book an appointment.