The French Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns caused a massive dispersal of aristocratic and monastic collections, which had far-reaching consequences for the antiquarian market in the nineteenth century. During the Napoleon’s invasion of Rome in 1798, the Vatican’s treasures were looted, including the sacristy of the Sistine Chapel, which contained a priceless library collected over the centuries by successive popes and church dignitaries. The largest group of Vatican manuscripts came into the possession of Abbé Luigi Celotti (1759–1843), a priest employed by the Barbarigo family in Venice, an art connoisseur and dealer. The first auction in history entirely devoted to miniatures, fragments, borders, initials and single leaves cut from medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, which then spread to libraries and private collections around the world, was held by Christie’s in London, on 26 May 1825. The National Museum in Cracow holds a collection of initials cut out from sixteenth-century Italian illuminated manuscripts, derived from the papal library in the sacristy of the Sistine Chapel, glued into seven identical albums. As attested by inscriptions and family and personal emblems, the initials come from manuscripts of Leo X, Clement VII, Julius III, Sixtus V and an unidentified person from the Barberini family, and the style of the illuminations corresponds to the production of the papal scriptorium in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The cuttings were donated to the Museum in 1938 by Stanisław Ursyn-Rusiecki (1862–1944), but their provenance is unknown and they had been unpublished until now. The aim of the present paper is to discuss the style of the miniatures and to set the albums in context of nineteenth-century collecting practices.