A 700-year-old glimpse of Camelot is about to hit the auction block—with a price tag that could top $2.5 million. Christie's will sell the so-called Clermont-Tonnerre Grail in London on July 8, and it's expected to fetch between $2 million and $2.7 million. Created around 1290–1310, the Guardian reports the lavishly illustrated volume is one of the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Old French Lancelot-Grail cycle, the core legends of King Arthur, Merlin, and the Holy Grail. It includes 126 miniature illustrations, among them a rare image of Merlin transformed into a talking stag.
It's one of three comparable Arthurian manuscripts known to remain in private hands, according to Christie's medieval manuscripts specialist Dr. Eugenio Donadoni, who says this one is both the earliest and the most heavily illustrated. Attributed to the anonymous "Master of the Liège Apocalypse," it's packed with burnished gold and the artist's trademark square-jawed faces and red-cheeked figures—work that would have cost a fortune even in the 13th century.
Its owners over the centuries have ranged from a 15th-century knight to Victorian collector Sir Thomas Phillipps and, more recently, French industrialist and war hero Jean Lebaudy. Christie's isn't revealing who consigned it, however. Scholars are hoping the next buyer will be a public institution. The manuscript has never been fully accessible to researchers, and as Artnet reports, "Numerous versions of the story exist, attributed to numerous authors, rendering scholarship all the more important."
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