Lovely to See (and Sing): Sacred Music Pages at Les Enluminures Gallery

THE NEW YORK TIMES

NEW YORK---“Sacred Song: Chanting the Bible in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” an exhibition that opens on Friday at Les Enluminures gallery in New York, contains about 30 books of religious music (at prices from $5,000 to over $1 million per volume). The songs were written down between the 13th and 18th centuries for worshipers in Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and Ethiopia. In the 1800s and early 1900s, army looters and book dealers dismantled music manuscripts into salable pieces. Vellum leaves from music manuscripts are widely scattered in museums. At the Cloisters in New York, a parchment sheet painted in Prague around 1405 for Benedictine services has saints and songbirds surrounding a prayer. (The page sold for $326,000 at Christie’s in London in 2012. [link]