“Pandemics, sadly, are nothing new,” as Bonhams points out. The auction house in New York is holding an online sale of two pages containing Sir Isaac Newton’s handwritten notes on Flemish physician Jan Baptist van Helmont’s treatise Tumulus Pestis (The Tomb of the Plague). Van Helmont had practised in Antwerp during the plague of 1605, during which time he had searched for a cure. “Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area, drove away the contagion and drew out the poison,” Newton noted carefully in around 1667. But perhaps the best advice, much as now, was simply that “places infected with the Plague are to be avoided”. Newton’s notes were expected to fetch up to $120,000 last Wednesday when the online auction ended.
Auction houses, galleries and art fairs have all heeded that latter advice. But while the “big-name auction houses may be making great strides online… there is a lot to make up for since the Covid-19 pandemic took its toll on live events”, says Melanie Gerlis in the Financial Times. May is usually an important month in the art-market calendar. But this May, sales totals worldwide fell 97% at the big three action houses, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips, to just $93m from $2.9bn in May of last year, according to analysts Pi-eX. “This is the lowest public auction total ever recorded for the month by the database (which tracks from 2007),” says Gerlis.
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