Displaying items by tag: manuscripts

Likely created in 1240 for King Louis IX of France, the Crusader Bible originally had no text, designed to appeal to a largely illiterate population. Biblical characters are depicted in guises familiar to medieval Europeans, including battling armored knights brandishing arms, and the setting is 13th century French villages and castles.

The Crusader Bible does not illustrate the entire Bible, but rather 346 episodes from Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Ruth and Samuel.

For centuries, antique prints, drawings and manuscripts were sliced apart, a standard practice that created individual pieces of vellum and paper for sale or display, in the hopes of drawing attention to the art forms. Institutions are now trying to reassemble the dispersed pages and fragments.

Last month, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired medieval works — books, loose pages and bindings — from descendants of Otto F. Ege, a dean at the Cleveland Institute of Art who died in 1951.

Aristophil, the scandal-hit French company that amassed the world’s largest private collection of manuscripts, has been liquidated and its stock will be put up for sale. The August 5 judgment in the Commercial Court, Paris, was based on its “complete insolvency”.

The company’s accounts were frozen in November 2014 by state prosecutors, who described Aristophil as a type of Ponzi scheme (in which existing investors are paid by new investors, rather than out of profits). A mansion owned by the company in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, was sold in July for around €28m, the proceeds of which went to Aristophil’s bank, Société Générale.

The fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent once declared of his partner Pierre Bergé: “The world will talk about a Goût Bergé, just as it speaks of a Goût Noailles.”

As the $484 million auction of the couple’s art collection at Christie’s in 2009 can attest to, this “Bergé taste” is the epitome of a keen eye, and a penchant for objects with great history and pedigree. Over the next two years, more examples of Bergé’s fine collectibles are scheduled to go under the hammer in Paris, this time at Sotheby’s — in the form of 1,600 precious books, manuscripts and musical scores from his personal library that date from the 15th to the 20th century.

The Morgan Library & Museum announced the appointment of Roger S. Wieck to head one of the institution’s core curatorial areas, its internationally recognized Department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. Wieck is a world authority on medieval Books of Hours, and previously served as associate curator and curator in the department, where he has worked since 1989. He replaces William M. Voelkle who has been appointed senior research curator.

The Morgan also announced that Joshua O’Driscoll will become assistant curator in the department.

Two rare 17th century books stolen from the National Library of Sweden are being returned to the Scandinavian country.

U.S. authorities say a repatriation ceremony was held Wednesday in New York.

The books were among dozens of precious manuscripts stolen by a library employee between 1995 and 2004.

Fraktur—decorated Germanic manuscripts and printed documents—have long been admired as an extraordinarily vibrant and creative art form (Fig. 1). A European tradition brought to America by German-speaking immigrants, who began settling in southeastern Pennsylvania in 1683, fraktur are among the most distinctive and iconic forms of American folk art. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was one of the first major institutions to collect Pennsylvania German fraktur and decorative arts. In 1897, then-curator Edwin Atlee Barber acquired the museum’s first fraktur and, in 1929, the museum opened to the public the first period rooms of Pennsylvania German art. Many of the furnishings were donated by J. Stogdell Stokes, with additional furniture, ironwork, textiles, redware, and other objects acquired from Titus C. Geesey. The museum’s fraktur were never on par with the rest of the collection, but with the recent promised gift of nearly 250 fraktur from the collection of Joan and Victor Johnson (Fig. 2), the museum’s fraktur collection is now one of the finest in the country.

The Johnsons, Philadelphia natives, began collecting fraktur nearly sixty years ago, initially to help fill the walls of a historic farmhouse they bought and restored after their marriage in 1955. Joan, who studied contemporary art at Goucher College, loved the Bauhaus and planned to collect accordingly—but Victor, who worked in the computer industry, didn’t want to live with modern art.

Visit InCollect.com to read more about Pennsylvania German Fraktur.

Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence, on loan from The New York Public Library, and the Delaware copy of the US Bill of Rights, on loan from The US National Archives, two of the most iconic documents in American history, are in the UK for the first time and on display at the British Library from last Friday in the world’s largest exhibition about Magna Carta.

"Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy" unites over 200 exhibits, including iconic documents, such as two of the four surviving 1215 Magna Carta manuscripts, artworks, medieval manuscripts, Royal remains, weaponry and 800 year old garments, through to modern interpretations and satires of the document, to tell a revealing story of how Magna Carta has become a global symbol of freedom.

Thomas Kren, the associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum, will retire after more than 35 years, the museum announced Thursday.

When Kren leaves the Getty in October, Richard Rand, senior curator of paintings and sculpture at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., will replace him. Rand began his career at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989.

Kren arrived at the Getty in 1980 as the associate curator of paintings. In 1984 he became the first senior curator of manuscripts, a position he held until 2010, when he took on his current role.

Princeton University has announced the largest gift in its history: a trove of rare books valued at nearly $300 million, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original printing of the Declaration of Independence, all four of Shakespeare’s Folios and significant musical manuscripts written by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner.

The Scheide Library, named for the family of the philanthropist and scholar William H. Scheide, has been housed in a special room in Princeton’s Firestone Library since 1959, when Mr. Scheide, who died last November at age 100, moved it there from his family home in Titusville, Pa. The bequest makes Princeton the permanent home of what the university’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, called “one of the greatest collections of rare books and manuscripts in the world today.”