Century-Old Vandalism of Islamic Art, and Its Price

LONDON — A chorus of praise greeted the “record for an Islamic work of art at auction” achieved when a painted page torn from a royal Iranian manuscript, the Shah-Name or Book of Kings, brought £7.43 million at the Sotheby’s auction of the Stuart Cary Welch collection on April 6.

Little was said about the destruction of the greatest manuscript from 16th-century Iran, intact until 1957 when the French collector Maurice de Rothschild who owned it died.

The extraordinary manuscript commissioned for the library of Shah Tahmasp (1524-76) was acquired by Arthur A. Houghton Jr., a bibliophile whose interest lay in rare English books. He was presumably advised by Mr. Welch, who had long been buying manuscript paintings from Iran and Moghul India. Soon after, Mr. Houghton began breaking up the manuscript. In November 1976, seven pages appeared at Christie’s. Many more would follow, sold through art galleries and at auction, notably at Christie’s London on Oct. 11, 1988.

This astounding example of calculated vandalism perpetrated by a cultivated man is perhaps the most extreme where Eastern art is concerned. But it was by no means unusual.

Ripping apart the thousands of precious painted manuscripts removed from Iran, India or Turkey and taken to Europe in the 19th and 20th century was routine among Western dealers. It allowed them to make a bigger profit, as Joseph Soustiel of Paris remarked to me one day in the 1960s, when I asked why he was cutting paintings from a 15th-century Persian manuscript of Nezami’s “Five Poems.”

Sotheby’s recent sale included several pages from a 16th-century manuscript of the Golestan (Rose Garden) written in the 13th century by Sa’adi. The columns of text in a beautiful Nasta’aliq calligraphy by a great master are surrounded by blue or salmon-pink margins painted in gold with motifs relating to royal symbolism.

One page brought £217,250, or about $355,000. A bunch of other pages from the same manuscript, some suffering from staining, made £133,250. The book had been broken up in the early 20th century by the German collector Peter Schulz, who owned it in its entirety before sending one page to the 1910 “Exhibition of Mohammadan Masterpieces” in Munich, as Fridrik Martin, his fellow collector, noted.

Manuscripts from Moghul India, where Persian was the language of literature and administration, suffered a similar fate. In the Sotheby’s sale, a page painted with a scene featuring a ship sailing in choppy waters had been cut from a manuscript. The upper line reproduces a couplet by the 14th-century poet Hafez (not identified in the catalog) and the lower line has a couplet by another poet that does not rhyme with the former, which Sotheby’s does not mention. This botched assemblage, carried out in the 20th century, would be unthinkable in a manuscript of Persian poetry. Pompously dubbed “a page from the Salim [the future emperor Jahangir] album,” the beautiful but mishandled painting brought an astonishing £193,250.