Source: New York Times
Papyrus fragments of Sappho poems are part of the “Marks of Genius” show at the Morgan. Credit Emon Hassan for The New York Times
The Sappho scraps deliver just one of many gee-whiz moments in the exhibition, which runs through Sept. 14. The show explores and celebrates the notion of genius as it has evolved through the millenniums, using some of the loftiest texts ever published: Magna Carta, the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Euclid’s “Elements,” Newton’s “Principia Mathematica.” In remarks to the press before the opening of the show, Richard Ovenden, appointed in February to oversee the Bodleian Library, the main research arm of Oxford University and one of the oldest libraries in Europe, called the works on loan “the best group the library has traveled in 400 years.”
This sounds momentous, even forbidding. Historical weight can make heavy lifting, and there is only so much reverence to be mined in the average visitor before a layer of resentment is reached. For me, the moment arrived with the aforementioned scientific texts, displayed along with a 15th-century edition of Ptolemy’s “Geography” and a 12th-century book of constellations by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, a court astronomer in Isfahan, Persia, in the 10th century. For some of us, prolonged exposure to incandescent scientific genius brings back painful memories of defeat against the brute forces of geometry and calculus. Euclid and Newton’s immortal works, beautifully printed and bound, are, in the end, math books.
This is a purely personal reaction, but inevitable in any exhibition consisting of uninterrupted high points, a Himalaya of human endeavor. Consider the conducting score of Handel’s “Messiah.” Yes, it lifts the heart. Here are the very notes that the composer’s eyes gazed upon when, seated at the harpsichord, he rehearsed the orchestral players and singers who performed the work at its premiere in Dublin on April 13, 1742.
A locket with hair from Mary Shelley and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Credit Bodleian Library, Oxford
At the same time, a mean, grudging thought intrudes. Is it not time to give this masterpiece a long rest, to let it recover from years of abuse at the hands of the enthusiastic amateurs who arise every Christmas to take part in the musical equivalent of the wave?
That said, the overriding emotion elicited by the works in “Marks of Genius” is unfeigned awe. From the four corners of the earth, the Bodleian has gathered works of surpassing beauty and arranged them, if you can use the word, ingeniously. It has also varied the mix, sprinkling unexpected minor treasures here and there — for example, a bivalve locket containing strands of hair from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary Shelley, the “Frankenstein” author — to delight the eye and kindle the imagination. It has gravitas but also a sense of whimsy.
The First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Credit Emon Hassan for The New York Times
The sheet music falls within a section of the exhibition titled “A Touch of Genius,” which brings the exalted minds on exhibit within close range by personalizing their work. John Donne, in a small, precise hand, dashes off a verse epistle to two noblewomen. Elizabeth I, at 11, prepares a presentation volume for her stepmother at the time, Catherine Parr. It is her own translation of a French devotional poem, rendered in somewhat rickety calligraphy. Then, as now, it was the thought that counted.
In a room filled with illuminated medieval manuscripts and sumptuous Renaissance bindings, it is startling to come across a plain typewritten sheet, the 1960 speech by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Britain to the South African Parliament. National consciousness, he warned, was awakening all over Africa, as formerly dependent colonies demanded their rights. In his own handwriting, he added the words that shook his audience to the core. “The wind of change,” he wrote, “is blowing through this continent.”
Quite pointedly, Macmillan’s speech is paired with William Wilberforce’s notes for an address to Parliament in 1822, arguing that slavery should not be introduced in England’s settlements in southern Africa.
“Marks of Genius” works hard at its theme. Stephen Hebron, the Bodleian’s curator of the exhibition, carefully traces the changing meanings of genius since antiquity in a concise but wide-ranging catalog essay. To do justice to his protean subject, he has arranged the works on view in thematic sectors. Capt. John Smith’s “Map of Virginia” (1612) appears in “The Genius of the Place.” “The Patron of Genius” gathers together works for hire as various as the Kennicott Bible, produced in Spain in 1476; a miniature illustrated scroll of the Bhagavad Gita that looks like a filmstrip; and “Les Proverbes de Salomon,” created by a desperate 16th-century Scotswoman, Esther Inglis, who made a habit of sending samples of her exquisite calligraphy to noble patrons in the hope of financial reward.
This delicate conceptual architecture can often seem beside the point. The works at hand, as often as not, make their own appeal, independent of any idea they are intended to express. As so often happens in carefully organized exhibitions, the eye and the mind follow their own dictates.
The “Regula Sancti Benedicti” (“Rule of St. Benedict”), inscribed in an early-eighth-century English book, finds a place in the “On the Shoulders of Giants” section because of its status as the principal monastic code throughout Europe. This is no small thing. But visitors are just as likely to be impressed by the book’s ravishing script, a bold fusion of Roman and Celtic lettering, known as English uncial, that jumps right off the page.
Apian’s work, put forth as an example of “The Genius of Printing,” reminds us that genius can be a fleeting thing. The book is a glorious compendium of error, an elaborate presentation of the geocentric Ptolemaic system that dispenses with the usual mathematical tables and instead takes a clever graphic form, with spinning discs, or volvelles, showing planetary movements, eclipses of the sun and moon, horoscopes and portents. At the Morgan, the book is opened to a fanciful volvelle in which a green dragon with orange wings, representing the constellation Drago, serves as a pointer to indicate lunar and solar eclipses.
The book was spectacularly ill timed, although it earned Apian a position as court astronomer to Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire and eventually the title of imperial count palatine. Three years after its 1540 publication, Copernicus’s “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” (“On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”) placed the sun at the center of the solar system, and the dunce cap on Ptolemy’s head.
Genius, it turns out, can be a temporary license, granted in one age, revoked in the next. The volvelles, however, spin on.
