Grand Scale

September 2008 Datebook

Facing Forward

Quel Panache

Back to School

Royal Collection

Well Punctuated

Detour Worthy

American Perspective

Asia Specific

Making Noise

Gio Ponti Jacques Quinet Auguste Rodin Claude Monet Jean Leon Gerome Camille Pissarro Paul Gauguin Chana Orloff

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Brussels-based Gisèle Croës is offering two gilt-brass crowns from the Liao Dynasty (907–1125), founded by Khitan nomads. One is decorated with a phoenix, dragons and flame-ringed pearls, the other with disks representing apsaras, or nymphs. A Bactrian Princess at least 3,000 years old is on display at Paris’s Galerie Kevorkian next to a circa 1000 B.C. Transcaucasian bronze processional figure bearing a stag on its head.

Standouts at Phoenix Ancient Art, of New York and Geneva, are two items made in Thrace around 400 B.C.: a gilded silver bowl decorated with a bearded rider, possibly Odysseus, and a bronze and iron helmet in the shape of a peaked Phrygian bonnet. A gold aureus from the reign of the Roman emperor Carinus (283–85) is a showstopper at the Parisian coin specialist Sabine Bourgey.

The London Medieval art specialist Sam Fogg is bringing a dramatically carved circa 1340 white marble Virgin Annunciate. Also on offer at Fogg is a 15th-century brass fountain from Saxony shaped like a castle with a crenellated top that climaxes in a spout depicting a ferocious animal head. Catching eyes at Dr. Jörn Günther Rare Books, of Hamburg, are two vellum manuscripts: the 32-page circa 1330 Vita Sancti Antonii, from Bologna, illustrated with 48 miniatures by the Maestro del Leggendario Angioino Ungherese, a disciple of the Italian painter Ugolino di Nerio (1280–1349), and a 300-page Flemish book of hours, circa 1480, with 9 full-page miniatures and 69 historiated initials.

Jewelry provides the modern and contemporary glamour. Cartier is unveiling a Prism Clock in rock crystal, mother-of-pearl, platinum and diamonds that features an obelisk adorned with an ancient Egyptian statuette of the god Osiris. Harry Winston has a diamond necklace mounted with a 37.92-carat padparadscha sapphire, a rare pink-orange stone.

“The Grand Palais is the ideal venue to showcase our most beautiful collections,” says Harry Winston CEO Thomas J. O’Neill. Indeed, visitors—expected to number 100,000—should be dazzled by the 8,000-some pieces to inspect at the jeweler’s booth.

"Grand Scale" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.