[ABBAYE DE SAINT-DENIS -TRÉSOR]. DOM BOUCHER. Autograph lett - Lot 346

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Lot n° 346
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[ABBAYE DE SAINT-DENIS -TRÉSOR]. DOM BOUCHER. Autograph lett - Lot 346
[ABBAYE DE SAINT-DENIS -TRÉSOR]. DOM BOUCHER. Autograph letter signed. Saint-Denis, August 20, 1749. 6 pp. in-4. Very interesting and lengthy letter from Dom Boucher, Benedictine monk of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, former prior of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, concerning Virgil's Mirror, from the treasury of the Abbey of Saint-Denis. Dom Boucher begins his letter with a physical description of this artifact: "fourteen inches high and twelve inches in diameter, it forms an oval, its weight is thirty pounds and more, it is flat". The monk specifies that in the past "a curious person" broke it while handling it, "There still remains a whole half of this mirror, and a considerable piece of the other half and several other small pieces: I am sending you one of these pieces; you will thus know for yourself that this mirror is transparent; we only discover a green color, softened by yellow. In the largest part that remains, we can see the proofs of the curious who have probed it several times to find out what the material was. [Jacques] Doublet, in his Histoire de St-Denis, said it was made of say. Le véritabler say, ou sayet est un fossile particulier dot la couleur a toujours été très noire [...]". This is followed by a long talk on glass, glassmaking and its techniques, then on Virgil himself and Naples. Boucher draws parallels between Vigrile's "magic" mirror and others, using reference works such as those by Jean Bodin and other "demonographers"; he ends his demonstrations by evoking the mirrors of Pythagoras, and so on. Exciting and mysterious.
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