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King of the Confessors
Thomas Hoving

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PROJECT STATUS: This project was proposed by the Hol Editors and is open for anyone to take the lead on. Using the links at left, apply to join the team and help make this book happen. King of the Confessors is Thomas Hoving's first-person account of his 1963 acquisition of a Medieval ivory cross, as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Hoving later served as the Met's director, and the cross itself now rests in the collection of the Met's Cloisters. Hoving is the author of several other works, many still in print, and is regarded—for better or worse depending on your point-of-view—as an art "popularizer". This excerpt from Chapter 16, sums the book up nicely: "I actually began to believe it might be possible, after all, to persuade a cautious director and a wary Board of Trustees to set aside six hundred thousand dollars for a partly damaged and incomplete ivory cross of unknown origin and mysterious provenance, engraved with a series of viciously intolerant verses, and then to hand the money over to a suspicious Yugoslav who worked out of Morocco and concealed his art collection, of which ninety percent was fake or misattributed, in a bank vault in Zurich." Project Notes: There was an updated ebook edition put out in 2001, but there is no print edition currently available. If an interested team were to form, their first step would be to contact the author's estate to determine copyright status and seek their involvement in the project.