At Auction | Passover Haggadah from 1726
The story of this recently discovered manuscript was featured at The Antiques Trade Gazette back in September and then at the BBC in October; but it has received lots of attention over the past few days after being featured in The Daily Mail and The Independent. It’s estimated to fetch between between £100,000 and £150,000.
Update (added 24 November): As reported by the Manchester Evening News, the Haggadah fetched £210,000.
Silver, Judaica, Jewellery, and Watches Sale
Adam Patridge Auctioneers, Macclesfield, 22 November 2014
In July 2013 this important Haggadah was found in a routine house contents valuation. It will be offered for auction on the 22nd November at The Cheshire Saleroom as part of a specialist one day auction of Judaica, Silver, Jewellery & Watches.
A rare and important 18th-century Passover Seder Haggadah, written and illuminated on vellum by Aaron Wolff Shreiber Herlingen of Gewitsch, Pressberg, 5486 [1726 CE]. The pictorial title border depicts Aaron and Moses and is inscribed in Hebrew “Written by Aaron son of Benjamin Wolff 1726 for Mendel Oppenheimer. This Aaron was a friend of Moses Mendelsohn.” Aaron Wolff Herlingen was active 1721–1755 and held the position of official scribe at the Imperial Library in Vienna.
Original Viennese red-dyed vellum binding over pasteboard, 20-leaf, each 242mm x 162mm, containing 45 coloured vignettes of 27mm x 45mm and 11 coloured vignettes of 77mm x 120mm. Slight food and wine staining throughout.
It is thought that the manuscript was commissioned to mark the birth of Emanuel Mendel Oppenheimer (1726–80), the first child of Samuel Emanuel Oppenheimer of Vienna and a close descendant of the great banker and imperial court diplomat Samuel Oppenheimer (1630–1703).
Provenance: This was inherited by the current vendor in 2007. It has been in the family for over 100 years.
Call for Papers | The Enlightened Image: History and Uses of Projection
From ArtHist:
The Enlightened Image: History and Uses of Projection
Université du Québec à Montréal, 22–24 May 2014
Proposals due by 6 January 2014
The purpose of this conference is to reflect on the issues concerning the projection of still images as this way of presenting images, used by museums and universities, plays an increasingly important role in the visual landscape. A projection can be part of an exhibition by artists or curators, its vocation can be recreational or educational, in any situation, the projection still monumentalises the image, which is placed in the heart of a collective experience. Thus, from the early development of magic lanterns in the middle of the seventeenth century, the intermedial transposition has made the projection dedicated to the collective use of the image and gives it a status of mediator to the public.
The sharing of images provided by the projection is transformative: the projection dematerializes images, distances them, changes their scales and proportions, makes them ephemeral, etc. The projection also affects the way images are perceived in particular by focusing its iconicity at the expense of its texture. All these mutations influence how the projected image is received and creates perceptual habitus. The new visual literacies, which inaugurated the conception of numeric screens and their uses, seem to have been initiated by the luminosity of the projected image. Microsoft PowerPoint, for instance, borrows the word ‘slides’ from projection lexicon.
The aim of this conference is to investigate the issues concerning the intermedial transposition operated by projection in order to understand what projection does to the image, how it is used, perceived and its received. These questions will be investigated through a long historical period (from the eighteenth century to today), to build a cultural history of the projection including the paradigm, rather than considering the projection as a pre-cinematographic phenomenon. By tracing the genealogy of techniques dedicated to the exhibition of images, the conference will outline the anchoring of the transition between a print culture and a screen culture.
The expected contributions will explore various aspects of the projection and its history through specific cases (exhibitions, art history lectures, etc.), narratives or representation of projections (advertising posters, scenes in novels, etc.), specific relationships between projection and print, photography or soundscape, technical
developments (Kodachrome, e-readers, etc.) or metaphorical uses of the word ‘projection’ (psychoanalysis, etc.).
Organised by Joanne Lalonde, Vincent Lavoie and Érika Wicky (Department of Art History, UQAM), this conference is held under the auspices of RADICAL (Repères pour une articulation des dimensions culturelles, artistiques et littéraires de l’imaginaire contemporain), a component of FIGURA, centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire. A 300-word proposal in English or in French, with a brief CV, should be submitted by the 6th January 2014 to wicky.erika@uqam.ca.
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