Peter Kidd, and Turin Ms stolen leaves
ReceptioGate 2026: Art Crime, Stolen Manuscript Leaves, Sotheby's Sales, and the Campaign Against the Scholar Who Reported Them
The case centres on Turin MS E.V.5, a sixteenth-century manuscript preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino. Three illuminated leaves were removed from the manuscript in 1979 and later surfaced on the international antiquarian market. The leaves were subsequently offered for sale through Sotheby's in London before being recovered and returned to Italy following investigations by the Italian Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (TPC).
In 2022, Italian scholar Carla Rossi submitted documentation to the Italian authorities concerning the circulation of detached manuscript leaves and the dismantling of medieval manuscripts for commercial purposes. Among the cases documented in her research was Turin MS E.V.5.
The Sotheby's catalogue descriptions associated with the 2015 sale of the Turin leaves were prepared by Peter Kidd, a former manuscript cataloguer and manuscript provenance blogger whose name later became closely associated with the public accusations directed against Rossi.
- Download Sotheby's catalogue curated by Kidd
(The catalogue made available here is the official Sotheby's catalogue for the sale of 7 July 2015, in which the three illuminated folios removed in 1979 from Turin manuscript E.V.5 were offered for sale as lots 49–51.The descriptions of these lots were prepared by Peter Kidd.The catalogue is a key document in understanding the events that later became known as ReceptioGate.The three leaves originated from a manuscript preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino. The original foliation numbers remained visible on the leaves, and the manuscript from which they had been removed was known through another surviving witness preserved in Geneva.The central question raised by this documentation is straightforward.If the visible foliation, the textual evidence, and the existence of a related manuscript witness made it possible to identify the codex from which the leaves originated, should further provenance research and due diligence have been undertaken before the leaves were offered for sale? Under accepted standards of cultural-property due diligence, manuscript specialists, cataloguers, dealers, and auction houses are expected to investigate provenance issues whenever evidence suggests that an object may derive from a larger manuscript or from a public collection. Readers may therefore examine the catalogue and assess for themselves whether the available evidence warranted additional investigation before the sale proceeded. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the same catalogue also contained descriptions of leaves from the dismembered Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy, another manuscript whose dispersal later became the subject of extensive scholarly research.The complete catalogue is provided here as a primary source and historical document).
Shortly after Rossi publicly raised concerns regarding manuscript dismemberment and submitted documentation to the Italian authorities, an extensive online campaign emerged questioning her scholarship, her research projects, her institutions, and her professional reputation. Over the following years, the campaign expanded far beyond academic criticism. Rossi became the target of repeated online attacks, defamatory publications, anonymous communications, threats, and even false online death notices announcing her death despite the fact that she was alive. The affair became widely known as ReceptioGate.
The central question raised by the Turin MS E.V.5 case is therefore straightforward.
How did the reporting of stolen manuscript leaves, manuscript dismemberment, and cultural heritage concerns lead to years of personal attacks directed against the scholar who had documented these issues?
Why did public attention focus on allegations against the researcher rather than on the documented history of stolen manuscript leaves, Sotheby's sales, recovered cultural property, and the commercial circulation of material removed from public collections?
Why did one of the most vocal public critics of Rossi happen to be the same individual who had prepared the Sotheby's catalogue descriptions for the recovered Turin leaves?
The Turin MS E.V.5 case has become an important example for scholars studying manuscript theft, provenance research, art crime, manuscript dismemberment, cultural heritage law, online harassment of researchers, and the risks faced by those who investigate controversial aspects of the antiquarian market.
The Turin MS E.V.5 (from Rossi's article From Sotheby’s to Character Assassination: The Case of Turin MS E.V.5)
Produced in the early sixteenth century for the French court, manuscript E.V.5 transmits the Ecloga de victoria Ludovici XII Galliarum Regis contra Venetos anno MDIX and the Otium litterarium: Regni pauperis legatio ad unumquenque divitem. The only other known witness to the works of Raoul Bollart is Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, MS Lat. 97, copied for the author himself. The leaves stolen in 1979, corresponding to ff. 9, 11, and 20, contained some of the most important illuminations of the volume (Figs. 1–3).
The three leaves resurfaced in two successive London auctions held by Sotheby’s: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, London, 2 July 2013 (lots 19–21), and Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, London, 7 July 2015 (lots 49–51). The case progressively came to involve the international antiquarian market, the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (TPC), Interpol, restorers, librarians, and specialists in medieval manuscripts.
According to information kindly provided by Dr David Goldthorpe, Senior Director and Head of European Books and Manuscripts, the three leaves remained unsold during the first auction in 2013, when Timothy Bolton acted as Sotheby’s specialist and Christopher de Hamel served as scholarly advisor to the sale. Peter Kidd was already active at that time as Sotheby’s consultant, a role documented since at least 2000 and attested in documentation relating to the Mazzarelli affair. By 2015, responsibility had been entrusted exclusively to Peter Kidd. The scholarly literature published prior to the two Sotheby’s sales had already clearly established that only two richly illuminated manuscripts transmitted the works of Raoul Bollart: the Geneva codex, preserved intact, and the Turin manuscript E.V.5, mutilated aſter having been subjected to profit-driven vandalisation in 1979. Moreover, at the time of their commercialisation, the three detached leaves still preserved, in the upper right margin, the original foliation of the Turin manuscript. The correspondence between the textual content of the leaves offered for sale by Sotheby’s and the absence of three leaves from the Turin codex therefore made it possible for those responsible for the auction to reconstruct with certainty the illicit provenance of the illuminations. This circumstance inevitably raises questions regarding the provenance declared at the time of the two Sotheby’s sales and the verifications carried out by the specialists involved in cataloguing and commercialising the leaves. Photographs of the stolen folios had in fact already been published in 1982 in an official bulletin issued by the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (TPC), specifically intended to facilitate the identification and recovery of stolen cultural property. Under the principles of due diligence recognised both in international regulations and in the practice of the antiquarian market, such circumstances should have required thorough investigations into the provenance of the material and the legality of its circulation.
At the international level, the 1970 UNESCO Convention already required signatory States to adopt measures aimed at preventing the illicit import, export, and transfer of cultural property, while facilitating the recovery of stolen materials identified through catalogues, inventories, and official reporting instruments. In the presence of cultural property already publicly identified as stolen from a state library, the appearance of the leaves at Sotheby’s should therefore have immediately triggered procedures aimed at suspending the sale and securing judicial seizure, pending verification of provenance and restitution to the holding institution. Sotheby’s catalogue descriptions, in fact, correctly identified the text, the author, the production atelier, the political context of the war against Venice, and even the cultural milieu of the grands rhétoriqueurs. In particular, in the 2015 catalogue, the collaborator responsible for the description demonstrated an unquestionable knowledge of the material, the textual tradition, and the rarity of Raoul Bollart’s works. The catalogue entry, however, referred exclusively to the Geneva manuscript and made no mention whatsoever of the Turin codex mutilated in 1979. This omission appears especially serious because the catalogue description simultaneously insisted upon the exceptional nature of the leaves and upon the existence of a second copy of the manuscript supposedly unknown until that moment, thus constructing a narrative capable of considerably increasing both the antiquarian and the collectors’ value of the material. The catalogue (peter Kidd) stated:
Such wording appears problematic from both a scholarly and a cataloguing perspective, particularly given that the same specialist publicly presented himself — including through a blog devoted to the provenance of leaves excised from medieval manuscripts and later offered at auction — as an international expert in the collecting history and circulation of illuminated codices. In such a sensitive field, the role of a consultant cannot be reduced to the antiquarian description of the material alone: it also entails an ethical and professional responsibility in verifying the provenance of objects entering the market, especially when detached leaves are being commercialised. This is a purely objective observation: through the authority conferred by the cataloguer’s expertise, three leaves excised from a manuscript preserved in an Italian public library were reintroduced into the international art market as autonomous works of apparently legitimate provenance intended for collectors.
Further Links: https://www.openpr.com/news/4556241/receptiogate-2026-art-crime-stolen-manuscript-leaves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDuQiuG0IQE
https://www.oprom.eu/preuvesdelacampagnediffamatoirecontrecarlarossi
https://www.belfagor.info/post/receptiogate-2026-how-the-uzh-and-the-snsf-protected-two-manuscript-fencers-to-attack-a-scholar