{"id":4379,"date":"2014-06-18T08:50:54","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T06:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=4379"},"modified":"2014-06-21T07:34:31","modified_gmt":"2014-06-21T05:34:31","slug":"marks-of-genius-works-from-the-bodleian-at-the-morgan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2014\/06\/marks-of-genius-works-from-the-bodleian-at-the-morgan\/","title":{"rendered":"A History of Awesome in One Room"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4 class=\"story-heading\" style=\"font-weight: 200; color: #000000;\">Source: New York Times<\/h4>\n<h4 class=\"story-heading\" style=\"font-weight: 200; color: #000000;\"><span class=\"byline\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\">By\u00a0<span class=\"byline-author\" data-byline-name=\"WILLIAM GRIMES\">WILLIAM GRIMES\u00a0<\/span><\/span><time class=\"dateline\" style=\"font-weight: 300; color: #000000;\" datetime=\"2014-06-12\">JUNE 12, 2014<\/time><\/h4>\n<div style=\"color: #000000;\">\n<p>Papyrus fragments of Sappho poems are part of the \u201cMarks of Genius\u201d show at the Morgan.\u00a0Credit\u00a0Emon Hassan for The New York Times<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>THE MORGAN LIBRARY &amp; MUSEUM does not usually put trash on the wall, but there are exceptions. Among the nearly 60 rare books, manuscripts and objects on exhibit in \u201c<a style=\"color: #1155cc;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themorgan.org\/exhibitions\/exhibition.asp?id=94\" target=\"_blank\">Marks of Genius: Treasures From the Bodleian Library<\/a>\u201d is a constellation of khaki-colored papyrus scraps retrieved about a century ago from an ancient dump outside the vanished Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. Over the years, excavations at the site have yielded census forms, invoices, bureaucratic correspondence and the occasional literary find \u2014 in this instance, a fragment of verse by Sappho, inscribed in Greek in the second century A.D., from the first of the nine books of poems she is known to have written.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">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\u2019s plays, Euclid\u2019s \u201cElements,\u201d Newton\u2019s \u201cPrincipia Mathematica.\u201d 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 \u201cthe best group the library has traveled in 400 years.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s \u201cGeography\u201d 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\u2019s immortal works, beautifully printed and bound, are, in the end, math books.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s \u201cMessiah.\u201d Yes, it lifts the heart. Here are the very notes that the composer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>A locket with hair from Mary Shelley and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Credit Bodleian Library, Oxford<br \/>\nAt 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?<\/p>\n<p>That said, the overriding emotion elicited by the works in \u201cMarks of Genius\u201d 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 \u2014 for example, a bivalve locket containing strands of hair from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary Shelley, the \u201cFrankenstein\u201d author \u2014 to delight the eye and kindle the imagination. It has gravitas but also a sense of whimsy.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The First Folio of Shakespeare\u2019s plays.<\/span><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Credit\u00a0Emon Hassan for The New York Times<\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"color: #000000;\">Even though the objects on display fit neatly in one compact room, \u201cMarks of Genius\u201d is a wanderer\u2019s exhibition. A few short steps from Magna Carta, an imposing parchment document with two dangling seals, a small gem awaits: a souvenir score of Felix Mendelssohn\u2019s \u201cSchilflied\u201d (\u201cReed Song\u201d). Mendelssohn, an avid amateur artist, notated the song by hand as a gift for a friend, then illustrated it with a romantic watercolor depicting the first lines of the text, by the poet Nikolaus Lenau: \u201cOn the lake\u2019s unruffled surface rests the moon\u2019s fair beams.\u201d<\/div>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">The sheet music falls within a section of the exhibition titled \u201cA Touch of Genius,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>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. \u201cThe wind of change,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis blowing through this continent.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Quite pointedly, Macmillan\u2019s speech is paired with William Wilberforce\u2019s notes for an address to Parliament in 1822, arguing that slavery should not be introduced in England\u2019s settlements in southern Africa.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">\u201cMarks of Genius\u201d works hard at its theme. Stephen Hebron, the Bodleian\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cMap of Virginia\u201d (1612) appears in \u201cThe Genius of the Place.\u201d \u201cThe Patron of Genius\u201d 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 \u201cLes Proverbes de Salomon,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">The \u201cRegula Sancti Benedicti\u201d (\u201cRule of St. Benedict\u201d), inscribed in an early-eighth-century English book, finds a place in the \u201cOn the Shoulders of Giants\u201d 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\u2019s ravishing script, a bold fusion of Roman and Celtic lettering, known as English uncial, that jumps right off the page.<\/p>\n<div style=\"color: #000000;\">Likewise the wistful elephant squeezed into a corner of Pliny\u2019s \u201cHistoria Naturale\u201d (\u201cNatural History\u201d); the coral-colored diving bird in the 13th-century \u201cAshmole Bestiary\u201d; and the celestial dragon in Peter Apian\u2019s \u201cAstronomicum Caesareum\u201d (\u201cAstronomy of the Caesars\u201d).<\/div>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Apian\u2019s work, put forth as an example of \u201cThe Genius of Printing,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">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,\u00a0<a style=\"color: #1155cc;\" title=\"An article about the auction of a copy\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/06\/10\/science\/10auct.html\" target=\"_blank\">Copernicus\u2019s \u201cDe Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(\u201cOn the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres\u201d) placed the sun at the center of the solar system, and the dunce cap on Ptolemy\u2019s head.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Genius, it turns out, can be a temporary license, granted in one age, revoked in the next. The volvelles, however, spin on.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\"><a style=\"color: #1155cc;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/06\/13\/arts\/design\/marks-of-genius-works-from-the-bodleian-at-the-morgan.html?emc=edit_th_20140613&amp;nl=todaysheadlines&amp;nlid=44778459\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/<wbr \/>06\/13\/arts\/design\/marks-of-<wbr \/>genius-works-from-the-<wbr \/>bodleian-at-the-morgan.html?<wbr \/>emc=edit_th_20140613&amp;nl=<wbr \/>todaysheadlines&amp;nlid=44778459<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: New York Times By\u00a0WILLIAM GRIMES\u00a0JUNE 12, 2014 Papyrus fragments of Sappho poems are part of the \u201cMarks of Genius\u201d show at the Morgan.\u00a0Credit\u00a0Emon Hassan for The New York Times THE MORGAN LIBRARY &amp; MUSEUM [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,90,10],"tags":[602],"class_list":["post-4379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-and-literature","category-editor-selection","category-world","tag-culture-and-arts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4379"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4426,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4379\/revisions\/4426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}