The Medici Secret

Chapter 11

THE TIMES, June 2003 Little remains today of room 16 of Sotheby's vault sixty feet beneath their London offices. The fire which yesterday destroyed several collections of near-priceless documents some dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was thought to have been started by an electrical fault in the computerised security system. A spokesman for Sotheby's said, 'The loss is tragic. Many of the documents stored there were irreplaceable. Boom 16 was a holding vault for prospective auctions, and from here the documents were microfilmed and stored on a database.'

It is believed insurers will be liable for a multi-million pound claim from Sotheby's. The greatest loss appears to be a unique collection of Renaissance manuscripts written by a prominent member of a Humanist movement linked to the Medici of Florence. Reports suggest that at the time of the fire experts at Sotheby's had been authenticating the authorship of these papers. Independent experts today placed the value of this collection alone at a figure in excess of five million pounds.