With torrents of money flowing in from newly rich American hedge fund managers, Russian and Asian oligarchs, and investors from the Middle East, auction prices for art started to go through the roof. The Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Moderns were the first to go. And then, partly because of the growing scarcity of paintings from those periods and partly because of the tastes of the wave of new buyers, demand turned to contemporary works. While many in the art world lament the current state of the market, for Salander it was almost a moral offense that masterpieces by artists like Corot or Courbet were selling for less than a million dollars, while a shark in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst was fetching $12 million, a Balloon Dog sculpture by Jeff Koons could command $19 million, and Basquiat’s stick-figure paintings could go for nearly $15 million. “He was outraged,” Steiner says.

It was partly this outrage, people say, that led Salander to make his first foray into the market for Baroque and Renaissance art sometime around 2001. “Here were all these rich Americans buying the stupidest things around,” says one friend, “and with old masters, you could have real paintings for a fraction of the price. He was a great salesman, and he thought he could convince them. But it was a gamble.” With the exception of the rare sale of a work by a top artist—a Tintoretto, for example, a Canaletto, or, rarer still, a Caravaggio—the business in old masters had become relatively lackluster.

Selling old masters also had its perils—most notably what the dealer David Tunick calls “the shifting sands of attribution.” The provenance of most works has grown very murky over the centuries, and it requires experience and scholarship on the part of dealers to distinguish a real masterpiece from a work by an artist’s followers or an outright fake.

But none of this seemed to daunt Salander. He set about hiring some of the top scholars in the field and, in 2002, stunned the art world with his first major purchase. At Sotheby’s London old-master auction that July, his gallery paid $3.2 million for a terra-cotta figure attributed to Bernini, the sale price of which had been estimated at $250,000.

What Salander had set out to do, people say, was to create, in effect, an entirely new market for old masters. And he was utterly convinced that he would be able to make it happen. But his motive, some say, was not just his passion for art. He’d seen the effect that the cascade of new money was having on the market, how the power was shifting to contemporary dealers like Larry Gagosian, who worked the moneymen so well. And Salander was tempted, some say. It wasn’t the money but his ambition that drove him, friends say. There was no question that art was his great love, but his other passion, and perhaps the stronger of the two, was his desire “to be the greatest, the most important, dealer in the world,” says one prominent artist. “Larry talked about it openly, and you could also feel that was his idea. It just radiated off him.”

Raised in Long Beach, New York, Salander came from a family of dealers. His grandfather and uncle owned a small shop on Madison Avenue that sold antiques, and his father ran an antique-furniture dealership on Long Island, where Salander worked throughout his youth. It was not an easy business in which to earn a living, and though the Salander family lived well, they were far from prosperous. Salander was 20 in 1969 when his father died and he was forced to drop out of the University of Miami to help his family make ends meet. For several years, Salander ran his father’s store, until 1972, when he opened his own furniture and antiques shop in Wilton, Connecticut. The following year, he opened a second antiques store in Manhattan, where he also began to sell works of art.