THE VALMADONNA LIBRARY, exhibited by Sotheby's, is reviewed in The New Republic:

The Valmadonna Astonishment

by Peter N. Miller
Five hundred years of sacred history in one place.
Post Date Tuesday, February 24, 2009

For medieval Christians, Jerusalem was the omphalos of the world--the navel. It was there that this world was connected to the world to come. Dante parodied this spiritualized geography in his Divine Comedy, where the descent into and beyond the bottomless pit of Inferno inverted into the mountain of purgatory whence the ascent to paradise could begin. On the Bebelplatz in Berlin, between the opera house and the old university, the Nazis celebrated their ascendency by burning the books of Jews and other degenerates in 1933. Visitors since 1995 can peer through a small glass porthole into a room carved into this ground by the Israeli artist Micha Ullman. It is a square white room filled floor to ceiling with shelves. But the shelves are empty. The books are gone, buried in the air.

If one were able to descend into that room, and if that room were as bottomless as the agonies for which it stands, and if our universe were shaped like Dante's, we would re-emerge from the Bebelplatz monument into another white square room--even bigger--also lined floor to ceiling with shelves. Only this time, in a reversal as breathtaking as it is improbable, the shelves would be filled with books. Tall and short, thick and thin, with pretty bindings and quotidian ones, a few open to spectacular illustrations, most open to ordinary pages of print. This way out of a bookless dystopia, this emergence from the collapse of civilization into a sanctuary of civilization, was available to the roughly 10,000 people who in recent weeks packed the tenth-floor galleries at Sotheby's in New York to view the 13,000 books of the Valmadonna Trust collection. They were vouchsafed a vision as hallucinatory as any in Borges.

[...]

Nice image.

See also The Valmadonna Slideshow.