Everything is illuminated

Detail of a 13-th century Italian Bible, the most valuable item in the Arcana sale

On July 7, Christie’s is offering the finest collection of illuminated manuscripts to appear on the market in a generation. It was assembled over three decades by Ladislaus von Hoffmann, a secretive Washington-based financier, and the 48 lots are expected to bring in up to £18m. Two more tranches of the 150-strong collection will appear at Christie’s over the next year, with the proceeds going to Hoffmann’s Arcana Foundation.

Illuminated manuscripts have been the holy grail among connoisseur collectors for centuries, sought by the wealthy and the aspiring, from kings in the 16th century to American industrial barons in the 19th. Today it might seem that their time has finally passed: the new billionaire predators in the global art markets – from China, the Middle East and Russia – have little interest in the spirituality or history of European medieval miniatures.

But in practice the most important illuminated manuscripts have more than held their value, appreciated by a small coterie of Americans and Europeans, bolstered by richly endowed museums and libraries. There is also an encouraging number of new buyers, an emerging generation of wealthy collectors who furnish their homes with an eclectic range of treasures, and a richly coloured medieval manuscript more than holds its own with a Tang horse or a late Picasso. So consistent has been the appeal of medieval manuscripts, and so rare are the finest examples still in private hands, that even hedge funds have started to invest.

The most valuable item in the Christie’s auction is a Bible produced in Bologna around 1260 for use by Dominican friars. It is reckoned to be the finest Italian Bible of the period outside a museum, with almost 200 miniatures, including colourful scenes of the daily life of the times. It made £836,000 when sold as part of the celebrated collection of Major John Abbey in 1989 but could fetch more than £3m in July.

There are collectors who specialise in early Bibles but the mainstay of the manuscript trade are Books of Hours, illuminated prayer books designed for private devotion – and public acclaim. As Margaret Ford, head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s, says: “They were intended to reflect the wealth and status of the owner and leading artists and craftsmen were engaged in their creation.”

They often include idiosyncratic illustrations at the request of their patrons, and the Hours and Psalter commissioned by Elizabeth de Bohun, the Countess of Northampton, is profusely decorated with illuminated initials and full-length borders. It was compiled in East Anglia around 1340 and was once owned by the Anglicised American tycoon William Waldorf Astor. It was sold to Hoffmann in 1988 for £1.5m, then a record price for an English manuscript; now it might make £3m.

A great attraction in owning an early manuscript is the link with past owners. Francis I of France, patron of Leonardo and the first owner of the “Mona Lisa”, commissioned in 1540 one of the Books of Hours in the auction (estimated at up to £500,000, as against the £180,000 paid for it in 1987), while a copy of the first edition of Boccaccio’s On Famous Women, printed in Ulm in 1473, bears the bookplate of the British prime minister William Gladstone. It might make £350,000.

The Arcana collection will do well because the market has been starved of items of great provenance and rarity in recent years. Not that this has unsettled the trade. As Sotheby’s expert Tim Bolton says: “It has been slow and steady trading since around 1420, with a bit of a dip at the time of the Reformation. We have not had a recession recently, nor a bubble before that. Over the centuries illuminated manuscripts have the staying power of gold.”

Hoffmann favoured the aesthetics of a manuscript and its condition over its history, and nothing in this sale pre-dates 1250. In contrast Sotheby’s, in its auction of July 6, has a real curiosity, a single leaf of the Venerable Bede’s Homilies, written in the Benedictine abbey of Fulda in Germany in the early 9th century, and estimated at up to £15,000. It is also offering a rare survival from the Jewish communities of medieval Spain: a Hebrew Bible written in Toledo in the early 13th century, which could go for £300,000. Lower down the price scale the market ticks over nicely and predictably. A good French Book of Hours from the late 15th century, with perhaps a dozen illustrations, will probably make £20,000 – Bonhams has an example in its June 8 sale – while an individual illuminated initial can be acquired for less than £500. A group of three leaves, one dating from a 13th-century manuscript, is estimated at £500 at Bonham’s Oxford book sale on June 29.

In the past many Books of Hours were broken up by mercenary dealers, and the miniatures and leaves sold off separately. Now, with more interest in the origins of individual manuscripts and in their bindings, this is less common, but it does mean that anyone with antiquarian inclinations can own a tangible link with the Middle Ages for a very modest sum.

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