Highest Auction Prices 2004

Someone posted this in rec.arts.books. I thought it might be of interest to
this group.


Francis A. Miniter


http://www.americanaexchange.com/New...&page=1&id=214

In article ,
"Francis A. Miniter" wrote:

Someone posted this in rec.arts.books. I thought it might be of interest to
this group.


Francis A. Miniter


http://www.americanaexchange.com/New...&page=1&id=214

Very interesting, thanks!

I'm fascinated by the year's top seller, the Macclesfield Psalter
(1,685,600 GBP).

http://search.sothebys.com/jsps/live...p?lot_id=47XL2

It's presumably from the same artisans as the well-known Gorleston
(~1315) and Douai (~1330) Psalters, falling between the two if certain
similar images were done in sequence.

The Douai was effectively eliminated by the end of WWI.

"As the German armies were advancing towards Douai in the autumn of
1914, the authorities buried the precious Psalter for safety in a zinc
box in the forecourt of the library. When the box was removed at the end
of the First World War, the Psalter was found to have been almost
entirely destroyed by water and acidity."

So don't protect your books by burying them in zinc boxes, no matter who
tells you it's a good idea.

Luckly, the two had been compared (and copied apparently, or at least
described in great detail) in 1905. The Gorleston has been at the
British Museum since 1958. This new little (108x170mm/4.25x6.69in) book
similarly has (mostly) the same text and hundreds of illuminated
illustrations, some that sound very bizzare, not unlike Bosch's work
hundreds of years later.

I don't know much about Psalters. It seems strange to have such
'irreverent' art decorating religious texts!

The Macclesfield is in pieces and pretty beaten up. I can't begin to
guess how this happened: "...upper margins cropped close with loss of
upper extremities of much illumination..." I wonder if the Sotheby's
catalogue has more pictures.

--
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