Morgan Library to Return
Rare Items to Germany
New York’s Pierpont Morgan Library has decided to return two rare 16th-century items in its collection to the city library in Nuremberg, Germany, after establishing that they were stolen at the end of World War II. A visiting scholar recently identified a 1599 manuscript containing liturgical music compiled by Nuremberg church cantor Johann Schirmer as having disappeared from the Stadtbibliothek between 1944 and 1952. The Morgan Library had purchased it from a London dealer in 1997, according to the April 20 New York Times.
A bookplate on the manuscript led to the discovery that two books with an identical bookplate, Quadrivium grammatices and Tetrachordum musices, published in Nuremberg in 1511 and written by German theologian Joannes Cochlaeus, had been stolen as well. The books, set together in a binding with a coat of arms designed by Albrecht Dürer, had been purchased from a different dealer in 1997 and are also being returned.
“We bought them in good faith, thinking the provenance was clear,” Director Charles E. Pierce Jr. told the Times.
German Culture Minister Julian Nida-Ruemelin has announced a redoubling of the government’s efforts to track down art and literature lost or relocated during the war, the Associated Press reported April 24. The Lost Art Internet Database contains descriptions of German cultural assets still missing.
Posted April 30, 2001.
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