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Rossini

346 - [ABBAYE DE SAINT-DENIS -TRÉSOR]. DOM BOUCHER. Autograph lett…
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Estimate €200 - €300
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Description
[ABBAYE DE SAINT-DENIS -TRÉSOR]. DOM BOUCHER. Autograph letter signed. Saint-Denis, 20 August 1749. 6 pp. in-4. Very interesting and long letter from Dom Boucher, Benedictine monk of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, former prior of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, concerning Virgil's Mirror, from the treasury of the Abbey of Saint-Denis. Dom Boucher begins his letter with a physical description of this artefact: "fourteen inches high and twelve inches in diameter, it forms an oval, its weight is thirty pounds and more, and it is flat". The monk specifies that in the past "a curious person" broke it while handling it, "There still remains a whole half of this mirror, and a considerable piece of the other half and several other small pieces: I am sending you one of these pieces; you will thus know for yourself that this mirror is transparent; it has a green colour, softened by yellow. In the largest part that remains, you can see the tests of the curious who probed it several times to find out what it was made of. [Jacques Doublet, in his Histoire de St-Denis, said that it was made of say. True say, or sayet, is a particular fossil whose colour has always been very black [...]". This is followed by a long presentation on glass, glassmaking and its techniques, and then on Virgil himself and Naples. Boucher drew parallels between Vigrile's "magic" mirror and other mirrors, using reference works such as those by Jean Bodin and other "demonographers"; he ended his demonstrations by evoking the mirrors of Pythagoras, and so on. Exciting and mysterious.
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About the sale Classic furniture and objets d'art
Auction location
Auction time 06/18/2026 at 2:00 PM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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