# The Sale That Broke the Object > In this archive the commonest reason an object is in pieces is not war, time or accident. It is a sale. Breaking a thing up paid better than keeping it whole, and it destroyed the evidence too. > The Study - 2026-08-24 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/the-sale-that-broke-the-object/ ## Key points - Philip Duschnes bought the Beauvais Missal whole for 1,000 dollars in October 1942 and began selling its leaves at 25 to 40 dollars each within a month. The codex had 309 leaves. - The leaf carrying the 1356 ownership inscription, the document that fixed the missal's earliest known owner, was lost in the dismemberment. - Otto Ege published a defence of book breaking in the March 1938 issue of Avocations, four years before the missal reached him, arguing that scattering leaves put originals into many more hands. - The Binyang Central Cave reliefs were removed piecemeal in repeated illicit excavations by local looters selling to an international market; the Metropolitan's panel is now largely plaster infill. - Dismemberment corrupts the record as well as the object: of the six Aldobrandini Tazze that passed through the dealer Frederic Spitzer, three were mismatched when sold in 1893, one tazza in the set today is a wholly nineteenth-century composite, and the manuscript describing the set's scenes has been missing since that year. ## The commonest cause of a broken object in this archive is a sale ## The Beauvais Missal was worth more as leaves than as a book ## The dismemberment destroyed the document that proved the ownership ## At Longmen the demand commissioned the chisels ## A dealer cut the Cimabue apart for a better return on the pieces ## Breaking a set corrupts the record of what the set was ## What to do with a record that begins in fragments The market did not merely fail to protect these objects. It specified the damage. A price per leaf, set by the gold on the page, is an instruction to break a book, and a demand for fragments of a Chinese cave wall is an order that had to be filled with chisels. Nothing about that mechanism has been retired; only the objects it is applied to have changed. Anyone researching a broken thing should look first for the invoice, because in this archive the invoice is usually the cause. ## Questions **Was book breaking legal, and was it unusual?** It was legal, and in the middle of the twentieth century it was ordinary trade practice. Otto Ege published a defence of it in Avocations in March 1938 and set out rules he considered honourable, including not breaking a unique or complete museum piece. Philip Duschnes, a New York dealer, bought the Beauvais Missal whole in October 1942 and was selling its leaves within a month. Neither man was operating outside the norms of the market he worked in, which is the point: the destruction was a business model, not a crime. **Why does dismemberment damage provenance research so badly?** Because the evidence of an object's identity and history sits disproportionately on the parts with no resale value. Flyleaf inscriptions, collectors' marks, shelfmarks, bindings, inventory numbers, frames and panel backs are what establish where a thing has been, and they are the first things discarded in a break. The Beauvais Missal's 1356 ownership inscription was on a leaf that did not survive; it is known only from a 1926 auction catalogue transcription. **Can a dispersed object be reliably reassembled?** Sometimes physically, rarely with confidence about the original configuration. Radiography reunited two Cimabue panels by proving they came from one plank, which is strong evidence. The Aldobrandini Tazze show the failure mode: dealers separated dishes from figures, replaced feet, and recombined the pieces incorrectly, and the manuscript that described the original scheme has been missing since 1893. Treat any reassembly as a documented hypothesis and record which parts of it rest on physical evidence. ## Sources - [1] The Story of the Beauvais Missal, Reconstructing the Beauvais Missal, giving the 1926 Sotheby's sale at 970 pounds to Permain for Hearst, the 1,000 dollar sale through Gimbel Brothers to Duschnes in October 1942, and the 25 to 40 dollar price per leaf. - [2] Beauvais Missal, virtual reconstruction, Fragmentarium F-4ihz. - [3] Beauvais Missal, Fragmentarium description, recording the dispersal through Duschnes and Ege and the portfolio distribution. - [4] Manuscript Road Trip: Reconstructing the Beauvais Missal, Lisa Fagin Davis, on the 309-leaf codex and the progress of the reconstruction. - [5] Tearing Books for Education's Sake: Otto Ege and His Manuscript Leaves, Medieval Art and the American Public, Fordham University, on the March 1938 Avocations article and Ege's stated rules. - [6] Emperor Xiaowen and his entourage worshipping the Buddha, object number 35.146, Fletcher Fund 1935, Metropolitan Museum of Art collection record. Read 23 August 2026. - [7] Longmen Binyang Central Cave, Whose Culture?, Harvard University, on the piecemeal removal of the two donor processions, the plaster infill of the emperor's panel, and the market demand that drove the destruction. - [8] Longmen caves, Luoyang, Smarthistory, on the commissioning of the Central Binyang Cave and the present locations of the two imperial procession reliefs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. - [9] Otto F. Ege Collection finding aid, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. - [10] Beinecke Library acquires treasure trove of medieval manuscripts from a famed book breaker, Yale News, 15 November 2015.