Autograph letter signed.
8vo. 4 pp. on bifolium. On stationery with blindstamped floral border.
€ 350.00
To a colleague about an antique aspersorium of considerable artistic value: "I do not know that I can add much (concerning the Otho Holy Water Bucket), to what I said in my article in the Literary Gazette February 14, 1857. You will there see in addition to a description of the article itself several circumstances mentioned which seem undesignedly to prove its genuineness. I have again compared it with the Casts of the Milan Diptych [...] & I notice that whilst all the 6 scenes represented in one of the leaves of the diptych [...] are copied almost servilely in the bucket, the four scenes on the other leaf of the diptych are represented much differently on the bucket proving that the artist of the bucket had only one of the leaves of the diptych (or a cast of it) before him. The various figures on the bucket are much better drawn, the heads more individualized, & the proportions finer than in the Diptych [...] Dr. Waagen indeed thinks that the work is far too good for the 10th or beginning of the 11th Century [...]".
