FAMOUS COLLECTION

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXV, Issue 3260, 29 January 1931, Page 2

FAMOUS COLLECTION

THE GUELPH TREASURES. medieval church objects. For the last time human eyes can gaze on the medieval treasure of the Guelphs as a single collection, stated the New York Herald-Tribune one day early last month. The 82 pieces, valued at £1,000,000, were to be on view in the Reinhardt galleries on sth Avenue for a month, after which they will be sold in separate lots. They have been intact since nine years before Columbus sailed to discover America. The collection has been designated the greatest medieval ecclesiastical treasure known. The first pieces were collected m the twelfth century by Duke Henry, lion of Brunswick, who was the great Guelph prince adversary of the Ghibelline emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. They were reliquaries and .holy vessels brought back from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land and his visit to the Byzantine Emperor m 1172. * * The Ghibellines were opponents ol the papacy; the Guelphs, defenders. The treasure reflects the Guelph devotion crosses, portable altars, reliquaries, caskets, book covers and plaques, busts of saints, brachia, monstrances, ciboria, Agnus Dei, and religious miscellany. The most important piece is a cupola reliquary of the school of Cologne, dated about 1175, and valued at more than £150,000. It is in the form of a Byzantine church made of oak wood covered with champleve enamel and carvings in walrus ivory. The carvings depict the crucifixion, the apostles, the three kings bearing gifts to the infant Jesus. Most of the pieces represent fine gold and silver work upon which unknown artists of the dark ages spent lifetimes. Every object was collected by some member of the royal Guelph family and handed down for nine hundred years. Last year the Duke of Brunswick, son-in-law of the former Kaiser, brought the collection from a safe deposit vault in Switzerland and sold to raise expenses of his royal court in Styria. Three art dealers of Germany made the purchase jointly. Six pieces already had been sold

to William M. Milliken, director of the Cleveland museum, and were loaned by him for the exhibition to make it complete.