L.A. Archdiocese Nets $9.5 Million in Latest Auction
In what dealers called one of the most significant auctions of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in several years, a 12th-Century English illuminated manuscript was sold here Wednesday for $2.4 million on behalf of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
The manuscript was the most prominent among 46 medieval and Renaissance items from the Estelle Doheny collection, which brought a total of $9.5 million in a rapid-fire auction at Christie’s that lasted exactly one hour. The buyers paid a 10% commission to the auction house that raised the auction’s total to $10.4 million.
Christie’s is selling the Doheny collection for the archdiocese at a series of international auctions. Doheny donated her collection in 1940 to the St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, Calif.
The $2.4 million paid for the manuscript was more than five times the estimated value and one of the highest prices ever paid for a medieval manuscript. The elaborately decorated manuscript of a treatise on the four Gospels was bought after hectic bidding by a representative of Maggs Bros., one of Britain’s most prominent antiquarian book dealers.
The manuscript was believed to have been bought for a client in Britain, according to Christie’s.
Written in brown ink on 179 vellum leaves in a small, well-formed minuscule bookhand, the manuscript was most likely produced at one of the great centers of English Romanesque illumination, probably the cathedral town of Winchester, between 1170 and 1180. Its decorated initials were judged by valuers here as unequaled in style and detail.
“It is unlikely that anything of this kind will come up for sale again,” said Hans Fellner, the head of the book department at Christie’s. “It was probably the last and only chance to get an English Romanesque manuscript.”
Six weeks ago in New York, a Gutenberg Bible from the Doheny collection, printed in 1455, brought $4.9 million, the highest price ever paid for a book.
The 182 items of the Doheny collection sold so far at the two auctions have brought a total of $21.9 million to the archdiocese.
Other auctions are scheduled over the next 18 months.
Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony decided to sell most of the Doheny collection to raise funds for the recruitment and training of priests.
“Tonight went every bit as well as the New York auction,” said Msgr. Francis J. Weber, the archdiocesan archivist and liaison for the archdiocese on the Doheny sale. “It shows that Britain is still a great center of culture.”
Only three items were sold below their estimated value, he said.
Weber said Christie’s suggested that the illuminated manuscripts be auctioned in London, where there is a greater concentration of dealers.
Among the other prominent items sold Wednesday were:
- A Book of Hours in Latin produced in Tours, France, around 1528 and in nearly perfect condition. It went to the Paris book dealer Pierre Beres for $1.4 million. Books of hours are small volumes of illustrated prayers linked to specific hours of the day. Such books first began to appear around the turn of the 14th Century and by the 1500s they had become art forms in themselves. The condition of the book purchased by Beres suggests that it was never used.
- A 15th-Century Book of Hours in Latin with rubrics in Catalan. It is considered one of the finest, most elaborate Spanish grisaille manuscripts of the period. The manuscript was purchased by the National Library of Catalonia in Barcelona for $343,000.
- A 1544 Portolan Atlas by Battiste Agnese, one of the few secular manuscripts at the auction, which depicted the world as it was then known and is one of the first atlases to show California. It was bought by an anonymous buyer for $1.1 million. The price is believed to be the highest ever paid for an atlas.
