Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
A document detailing payments by Michelangelo to his assistants and a letter from Catherine of Aragon trying to block her divorce from King Henry VIII were among a batch of rare manuscripts sold at auction in New York Monday.
The 31 lots belonged to an anonymous private US collector who amassed the letters over several decades. They were described by Sotheby's as outstanding for their historical value and fetched 2.6 million dollars in total.
Michelangelo's signed letter dates from 1521 and records payments in gold ducats made to two sculptors who worked on his statue of the Risen Christ in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome.
The manuscript went for 576,000 dollars, well above the pre-sale estimates.
The letter from Catherine of Aragon is dated 1534 and addresses her nephew Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, asking him to use his influence with the pope to uphold her marriage to Henry VIII, then on the first of his six wives.
The letter, which reached 156,000 dollars, was described by Sotheby's as a pivotal document in the controversy between the Roman Catholic church and the English monarchy.
Among the other highlights of the sale were a letter from Beethoven to a Viennese magistrate pleading on behalf of his suicidal nephew, which reached 33,000 dollars, a reprieve from Stalin for a condemned army officer (18,000) and a letter from Fyodor Dostoevsky to a literary admirer (39,000).
"This collection features absolute gems of history and culture. To handle just one of these outstanding manuscripts would be an honour," Marsha Malinowski from Sotheby's books and manuscripts department said.
Other lots up for sale included a letter in which Leo Tolstoy explains that being in love is harmful emotion, which reached 18,000 dollars, and a missive from a 16-year-old Napoleon, then an artillery lieutenant, trying to calm his family's fears for his safety, which sold for 22,800 dollars.
Other well known figures whose handiwork went under the hammer included Albert Einstein, Frederic Chopin, Richard Wagner, Sigmund Freud and Marilyn Monroe.
jah/mac
AFPLifestyle-US-art-people-auction-politics
AFP 112303 GMT 12 06
COPYRIGHT 2006 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
