The leaf from the book owned by Shah Tahmasp (reigned 1525-1576) was sold by Sotheby’s in London for £7.4 million ($12.1 million at the current rate of exchange).
With at least seven people bidding via phone or in-person, it took almost 10 minutes to reach the final price, which was triple the pre-sale expectations of £2-3 million.
Sotheby’s had come close to setting a higher record for Islamic art in 2008. It then 
sold a 900-year-old key to the Kaaba in Mecca for £9.2 million. But the key’s authenticity came under question, and the sale was canceled.
Prior to last week sale, the auction record for Islamic art was set at Sotheby’s rival Christie’s, which sold a mid-17th century Kerman “vase” carpet from southeast Persia for £6.2 million ($10.1 million) last year.
The Shahnameh of Book of Kings was written 1,001 years ago and describes the legendary history of Iran up to the Arab conquest.
The highly-valued Shah-nameh leaf was sold in part one of two planned sales by Sotheby’s of the late Stuart Cary Welch’s collection. Welch, curator emeritus of Islamic and later Indian art at the Harvard Art Museum, was a well-known US collector and curator of Indian and Islamic art who helped bring the genre to the West.
His passion for collecting began in elementary school and he continued acquiring new pieces until his death in 2008 at the age of 80. In 1957, he learned of the death Maurice de Rothschild, who at that time owned the copy of the Shah-nameh that Michael Brand, adviser to Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum, dubs “probably the greatest illustrated manuscript ever produced.”
Eager to obtain it, but realizing he could not afford its suggested price tag of $500,000 (equivalent to about $4 million today), Welch approached wealthy book collector Arthur Houghton, hoping he would buy it and contribute it, as he had many other treasures, to Harvard’s rare-books library. Houghton did buy the volume in 1959—but immediately split up its pages, much to the dismay of Welch and many other scholars.
Sixteen years later, Houghton auctioned seven of those pages, grossing four times what he had paid for the entirety of the book. Seventy-eight pages were later donated to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the 120 remaining pages were returned to Iran in 1994 (after Houghton’s death) in exchange for the abstract expressionist “Woman III” by Dutch painter Willem de Kooning, both valued at $20 million.
In 1977, Welch bought one of the seven pieces Houghton had sold. The cost was a “terrible effort,” but he still called it “a triumph.”
The miniature, depicting Fereydun testing his sons while disguised as a dragon, was described by the Sotheby’s as “universally acknowledged as one of the supreme illustrated manuscripts of any period or culture and among the greatest work of art in the world.”