In 2007 the Museo Nazionale di Arte Orientale “Giuseppe Tucci” (MNAO) in Rome acquired from a private collector seventy-two folios and one binding drawn from an almost equal number of Islamic manuscripts originating from Persia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Turkey. The seller was a renowned Italian historian of art who purchased them from antiquarians (or through other channels...) starting from the late 1960s and would in turn resell them at auction. Once acquired, he placed them one by one in wooden frames and protected by glass, as if they were paintings destined to be hung on the walls of the owner’s personal art gallery. However, the National Museum of Oriental Art came across the sale and started negotiations with the owner, requiring my expertise to evaluate the material at the fairest price. When the purchase was finalized on the most favorable terms, I focused on their study, recovery, and digitization. These disjecta membra belonged to valuable Arabic manuscripts (11th-17th centuries), including a 10th-11th century parchment Koran, and Persian manuscripts, richly illuminated and decorated. Through examining their contents, textual layouts and physical features (papers, inks, pigments), an endeavor has been made to trace them back to their primal codicological dimension, as well as to their provenance and origin. The practice of dissecting and dismembering codices with a powerful visual impact highlights the unscrupulous exploitation carried out by antique dealers and collectors over the past decades. Focusing on this practice, which has also made its way into the large pool of Middle Eastern book production, might shed light on the historical-artistic and aesthetic trends which have influenced the tastes of Western collectors. Not always knowledgeable about the content and origin of the purchased materials, they chose according to mere aesthetic criteria, which often played a part in devaluing the intrinsic and unitary value of the manuscript as a whole. Treating single illuminated pages of Middle Eastern codices as if they were stand-alone paintings, right to be exhibited in an art gallery, implies a conception which is ideologically based on the complacency of owning an object of exquisite workmanship and exotic provenance, without going beyond these outward connotations and betraying the intrinsic unity of the whole of which they were indispensable parts.