At 10 am on Friday 23 March 1990 the bookseller Heribert Tenschert rang the Kulturstiftung der Länder (see p. XX) (the Arts Foundation of the German government) with the news that an anonymous American group in Switzerland had offered him a ninth-century Gospel Book of the highest quality, written in gold, with decorated canon tables, full page Evangelist portraits and ornamented initials, which had disappeared from view when the Quedlinburg Cathedral Treasury was looted in 1945. Rumours of its survival had been circulating for some time, and an asking price of $9 million was mentioned, but Herr Tenschert had managed to negotiate a reduced “finder’s fee” of $3 million, payable in instalments. By noon on the same day the government had agreed these terms, with the proviso that Florentine Mütherich and Karl Dachs would examine the manuscript’s state of preservation and verify its authenticity.
At this stage the press took an interest, and further details started to emerge. In 1942 various works of art, including objects from the Cathedral Treasury, had been moved for safety to a cave in the Altenburg Hills. In April 1945 the area was occupied by U.S. troops and the cave placed under guard. During an inspection of the store by the Quedlinburg authorities several items from the Cathedral were found to be missing, and the U.S. government initiated an investigation, but this was suspended when the D.D.R. was founded in 1949.
The garrison had been commanded by Lieutenant Joe Meador, a Texas hardware store owner who died in 1980, leaving his “trophies of war” to his heir. The re-emergence of the manuscript in 1990 led inevitably to further legal proceedings, which are still under way. One consequence of this, however, was a further reduction in the price paid by the German government, since the final instalment of the “finder’s fee” has been waived.
The manuscript was sent to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich where its thirteenth-century binding of embossed silver and filigree work set with enamels and precious stones was removed, and the book was dismantled into single leaves for restoration. While in Munich it formed the centrepiece of a small exhibition earlier this year, organised in only a few months and designed to celebrate its recovery and to reinstate it to its rightful place in the canon. Das Quedlinburger Evangeliar, edited by Florentine Mütherich and Karl Dachs, is the catalogue of the exhibition, but it is much more besides. It includes an account of the recovery of the manuscript by Klaus Maurice, head of the Kulturstiftung de Länder, with essays on the decoration, the script, the text and the binding by leading German scholars, as well as Horst Fuhrmann’s useful article on Quedlinburg. Its major importance for art historians, however, is in the series of plates showing all the full-page miniatures and examples of the canon tables and the glorious chrysography which have never been illustrated in colour before.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Studying the lost Quedlinburg Gospels'