Krishna’s Victory

Manuscripts and scrolls fueled the spread of auctions, from North India to Almohad Spain.

Experts focused on this folio from Book10 of the Bhagavata Purana —a foundational text of the Vaishnava tradition—which sold for as much as 112,540€ against a high estimate of 18,000. Depicting an episode from Krishna’s youth in a dynamic composition spanning multiple planes, it depicts the blue-skinned god and his brother Balarama confronting the champions of the usurper king Kamsa, under the frightened gaze of the ladies of the court and the benevolent gaze of celestial beings throwing garlands of flowers at them. Carefully copied in Almohad Spain during the12th or13thcentury, BookVI of *The Revival of the Religious Sciences* (see Gazette No.22), by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), was estimated at 52,960€ for the precision of its Andalusian calligraphy displayed on high-quality Hispano-Arabic paper. Yemen was represented, at a price of 39,720€, by a manuscript copied for the library of the Zaydi Imam al-Mutahhar in the late16th century. It contains a major treatise on Yemeni agronomy of the period—this fifth cataloged copy is believed to be the only one to include the last two complete chapters —and an abridgment of the agronomic treatise attributed to the Greek Vindonius Anatolius (4th–5thcenturies), previously known only from two Iranian copies preserved in Tehran. A similar amount was paid for the *Portrait of a Dignitary Holding a Rose*, painted by Awadh’s workshop around 1785 on a page from an album commissioned by Antoine-Louis-Pollier in northern India.