the disappearing hours

Having lots of books around the house can be a real delight but sometimes one will just disappear. It won't be in the place that I'm sure it should be. The most recent disappearing title was the small and inexpensive, and long-owned, partial facsimile of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France. This fourteenth-century manuscript illuminated by Jean Pucelle even has a Wikipedia page. 

The facsimile is just under five and a half inches tall. When the book of hours, now in the Cloisters collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was being restored, the Met displayed the disbound manuscript before it was cleaned and rebound. The "facsimile" is actually slightly larger than the original.

The other day, I was thinking about something and the facsimile came to mind. I went to that shelf of small books in my bedroom and the Hours facsimile was not there. The facsimile of the Hours of Mary of Burgundy was there. I went down the shelf book-by-book several times. I looked on a few shelves where other books of manuscript illumination are kept. I thought, for a while, that I might have lent the facsimile to an art student who was in the manuscripts class. No luck. I was about ready to resign myself to no longer having the facsimile.

This morning, it is cooler outside and I was opening the window in the middle room of my part of the family house. I realized that there was another cluster of little books at the end of the shelf just to my left. And, there was the facsimile of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux. Happiness. Made my day.

P.S. (an hour later) I went to move some of the other little books from the shelf near the window to the shelf in the bedroom, the most expectable collective spot for shelving my little books. There was the book on the Bosch and other Flemish paintings in the Prado that I'd really spent a lot of time looking for a year or more ago. I looked among the travel books and among the folders of stuff from trips to Spain. Nope, it was hiding in the little stack of little books.

the big thrill

I was in Beaufort, South Carolina, last night, with early supper at the Lost Local for tacos (one ahi tuna and one carnitas) and a yummy margarita (Perfect Margarita on the menu). It was Saturday night so I asked the waiter if she knew where I might get a Sunday New York Times the next morning. She didn't know but asked one of her colleagues. One place was City Java & News so I figured there was a good chance they'd be purveyors of a good selection of papers including the Times. They weren't open after I left the restaurant so I couldn't ask. The waiter said she saw folks with Sunday papers so the chances seemed good with both City Java and the other coffee shop, over on the waterfront.

Well, when I went 'round on Sunday morning, neither of the coffee shops had any papers other than the local weekly. So I asked the City Java clerk if there were any big grocery stores. Yep, there's a Publix over on Boundary Street, on the way out of town, said she. And I'm delighted to say they had quite a stack of Times but one less after I got mine.

There was a fine used book store in Cleveland named Publix Book Mart. We medieval art history graduate students at Case Western used to find great treasures there. Like manuscript leaves (at least one of mine is from the Ege album), early prints (at least one of Chuck's was a Dürer and I found a page from the Nuremberg Chronicle), and other good stuff. 

Ege 13

Nuremberg Chronicle

Wingårdh & Nordenfalk

One of the things I really like about my Avery indexing is that I get to learn about architects and buildings that have escaped my ken until now. A recent revelation was the work of Gert Wingårdh of Sweden. His firm Wingårdhs has over 200 employees so it's a big practice. Wingårdhs and Erik Wikerstål have just completed the renovation of the Swedish National Museum which was designed by Berlin architect Friedrich August Stüler in 1866. It's a grand Renaissance Revival building. Stüler also designed the Friedenskirche at Sanssouci in Potsdam-Berlin.

(Nationalmuseum, from the Wingårdhs website)

Erika Gerdemark for The New York Times

This picture is from an article in the New York Times, dated October 16, 2018. They misspelled Wingårdh as Wingard and left the angstrom off Wikerstal.

Whenever I think of the Swedish National Museum, I think of Carl Nordenfalk, one of the most important art historians of medieval manuscripts and director of the museum from 1958 to 1968. He was a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh when I worked there in the 1970s. A specialty of his was canon tables which are especially close to my heart since I had done a paper on a manuscript leaf at the Cleveland Museum of Art during grad studies at Case Western Reserve. As usual, everything loops around and I was thrilled to see two Burgundian mourners from the CMA collection in a special exhibition at the Frick Collection in New York City last week. I also saw the Armenia! show at the Metropolitan Museum which included a lot of canon tables.

canon tables, bureaux plats, and cribs

When I was in grad school at Case Western Reserve University (1968-1973), one of the great advantages of the art history program was the close collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art and its curators. The curators taught courses, mostly seminars and mostly collection-related. Our regular library was the CMA Library. Memorably, I took a medieval seminar with William Wixom and worked on a 12th-century manuscript leaf, with Matthew on one side and canon tables on the verso. Working on the calligraphy of the canon tables to date and place the leaf was delightful.

(description below)

Four of us were in a seminar with decorative arts curator Henry Hawley. The topic was French furniture from 1735-1750. We got to crawl around in the gallery, on the rug, under the furniture. I got to work on a bureau plat by noted cabinetmaker Bernard II van Riesen Burgh (BVRB). It has a twin in the Jones Collection which is now in the Victoria & Albert.

(description below)

As I was finishing up my M.A. and starting my M.S. in Library Science, also at Case Western, we went on a field trip with Mr. Wixom to New York. We visited Ella Brummer whose late husband Ernest had been a dealer and collector. We also visited Ruth Blumka whose late husband Leopold had also been a gallerist and dealer. She still had the wonderful Crib of the Infant Jesus which has now been given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's just over a foot tall.

(description below)

I was reminded of our trip today when Michael Carter, now a librarian at the Cloisters, sent me a scan of a letter he had found in the archives. It was a thank-you note to Mrs. Brummer from a group of Clevelanders. Yes, our little group of eight grad students had sent a note, in the fine hand of Henry Kleinhenz.

When we were at the Blumka apartment on Park Avenue, Mrs. Blumka opened a linen-fold cabinet and took out a velvet-wrapped item. She carefully uncovered an ivory, a beautifully carved French High Gothic ivory. It was somewhat damaged so not considered "museum quality." It was not cheap but one could imagine finding the few hundred dollars and starving a bit. Oh how I wish that Dorothy and I had been more adventurous and bought the ivory.

A few years later when I was working at the Frick Fine Arts Library at the University of Pittsburgh, Carl Nordenfalk, noted manuscript scholar, was a visiting professor. We talked about "my" manuscript page. He read my seminar paper and thought it was publishable. I did not proceed with that. I don't regret that nearly as much as not buying the ivory.

Descriptions of the objects:

(Top)

Miniature Excised from a Gospel Book: The Symbol of St. Matthew (recto) and Canon Tables (verso), c. 1125-1150 - Italy, Florence - ink and tempera on vellum.

Purchase from the J.H. Wade Fund 1950.373 (photo from the CMA website)

(Middle)

Table Desk (Bureau plat), c. 1750-1760 - Bernard II van Riesen Burgh

wood marquetry with gilt bronze mounts, leather top.

The Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Collection 1944.123 (photo from the CMA website)

(Bottom)

Crib of the Infant Jesus, 15th century. South Netherlandish.

Wood, polychromy, lead, silver-gilt, painted parchment, silk embroidery with seed pearls, gold thread, translucent enamels.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Ruth Blumka, in memory of Leopold Blumka, 1974 (1974.121a-d) (photo from an article on the Met's website)

codex aureus epternacensis

Codex aureus Epternacensis (um 1030)
http://www.comicforschung.de/tagungen/06nov/sackmann/06nov_sackmann3.html


I'm sitting in on the manuscripts class taught by Kate Dimitrova and am really enjoying seeing the pictures and thinking about great manuscripts.

Bo Bartlett and Saint Luke

I hadn't thought about Bo Bartlett and his realist paintings for some time. And then, last Saturday morning, Moira and I were going to the cafe in Amenia for a coffee and a visit to her studio which is at the top of the same building. A young artist that Moira knows from the Wassaic Project was sitting at a cafe table with a couple friends. We had a nice chat, it was crowded, we went up to the studio. As is so often the case when you meet someone, I didn't catch the name. Moira said he was Man Bartlett and his dad was Bo Bartlett, the painter. I remembered the haunting realist paintings I'd seen several years ago at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. This video is Bartlett's words describing his medical librarian mother who brought home issues of JMLA with old-master covers and about telling your stories in your art and also about letting them go.


One of Moira's in-progress paintings is an Evangelist portrait drawn from imagination but based on looking at many early medieval illuminations. There's an ox in the upper right so it must be Saint Luke. I misspoke and said "Saint Mark" and then found a postcard in my postcard stash of a manuscript at the Morgan which has Saint Mark with the ox of Saint Luke. Hmm. No wonder iconography can be so compelling, so appealing.

The image of the Evangelist is drawn from americanlady's photostream on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanlady/3831120935/in/photostream I'm not sure why the white spot appears in the center, perhaps the residue of the scanned postcard's journey through the mail.