Bonhams: Islamic and Indian Art, Spring 2021

March 30, 2021
11:00 BST

Bonhams New Bond Street, 101 New Bond Street, London W1S 1SR, UK

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Once more, India dominates the Bonhams spring sale on March 30. But Cornucopia readers will find a few enticing lots.

Among the fine manuscripts is İbrahim Hakkı’s Ma’rifatname (left), an encyclopaedia of cosmological subjects, copied by Dervish Muhammad Bin ‘Ali Al-Erzurumi, probably in Erzurum, dated AH1238/AD 1822-23 (est £6,000–8,000). The work is still in print. In Turkey you can buy a handsome hardback edition of the complete text from the Hepsiburda website for TL108.90.

Lot 41 (est £3,000–4,000) is a pair of portraits of Süleyman the Magnificent (below left) and his grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha (bottom left), pages from Augustissimorum imperatorum, serenissimorum Regum, atque Archiducum…verissimae imagines (Innsbruck, 1601), a book of 125 portraits engraved in Augsburg by the Flemish artist Dominicus Custos (d1615) after drawings by Giovanni Battista Fontana (d1587).

They illustrate the Archduke Ferdinand II”s collection at Scholss Ambras in Innsbruck, particularly of his armoury. Each portrait is accompanied by a biography by the Archduke’s secretary, Jacob Schrenck von Notzing. For more on the Süleyman portraits see Cornucopia 62.

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