[EKStationers] Fwd: ["EXLIBRIS-L"] Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts from Boston Collections

[Wendy Gale]

Possibly of interest for the northern folks!

Wishing everyone a joyful holiday season,
       Sabine


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lisa Fagin Davis <lfd at themedievalacademy.org>
Date: Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 1:19 PM
Subject: ["EXLIBRIS-L"] Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts from Boston
Collections
To: exlibris-l at list.indiana.edu, dm-l at uleth.ca


Upcoming exhibit:

*BEYOND WORDS: ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS FROM BOSTON COLLECTIONS*

*CHURCH & CLOISTER (Houghton Library: Sept. 12 – Dec. 10, 2016)*

*PLEASURE & PIETY (McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College: Sept. 12 – Dec.
11, 2016)*

*ITALIAN RENAISSANCE BOOKS (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Sept. 22, 2016
– Jan. 16, 2017)*

An *international conference* linked to the exhibition with one day at each
of the three venues will take place on Nov. 3–5, 2016.

The collections in the Boston area constitute one of the most important
ensembles of illuminated manuscript material anywhere in North America, yet
they remain, in large measure, virtually unknown to scholars and the wider
 public alike. Conceived by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of
German Art & Culture at Harvard, in 2000, his first year at the university,
the exhibition could not have been prepared and organized without the
collaboration of a team of local manuscript experts with whom he searched
the stacks and stores of libraries and museums on both sides of the Charles
River for buried treasures of illumination.

*Beyond Words* will be the first exhibition to showcase highlights of
medieval and Renaissance illumination in the Boston area. It follows in the
footsteps of other exhibitions which have vaunted the holdings of public
collections in American and British cities, such as *Leaves of Gold:
Treasures of Manuscript Illumination from Philadelphia Collections *
(2001-2002)and* Cambridge Illuminations *(2005). *Beyond Words*, however,
is a far more ambitious collaborative metropolitan project, in terms of the
size of its curatorial team, number of exhibits and lending institutions,
and multi-venue display:

The exhibition will be curated by a team of five manuscripts scholars with
complementary expertise in the holdings and history of collections of
manuscripts and early printed books in the Boston area: in addition to
Jeffrey F. Hamburger, his Harvard colleague Dr. William P. Stoneman,
Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts of the University’s Houghton
Library, as well as Nancy Netzer, Professor of Art History and Director of
the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Dr. Lisa Fagin Davis, Executive
Director of the Medieval Academy of America and co-author of the Directory
of Collections in the United States and Canada with Pre-1600 Manuscript
Holdings, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, (2015), an
update to Seymour De Ricci’s Census; and Dr. Anne-Marie Eze, formerly
Associate Curator of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the first
scholar to comprehensively study the museum’s rare books collection since
the 1930s.

260 outstanding manuscripts and printed books dating from the ninth to
seventeenth centuries have been carefully selected from Boston-area
repositories. These include numerous masterpieces by well-known artists,
such as Lippo Vanni, Benedetto Bordon, Jean Poyer, Jean Bourdichon, Simon
Bening, and the Boucicaut and Rohan masters, as well as many others no less
notable for being anonymous. Identifiable patrons include such renowned
figures as Charles V of France, Jean, duc de Berry, Pope Sixtus IV, Borso
d’Este, and Isabella d’Este among many others. These precious volumes will
be loaned by eighteen local institutions are: The Armenian Museum and
Library of America; The Boston Athenaeum; Burns Library, Boston College;
School of Theology Library, Boston College; Boston University; The Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston; The Boston Public Library, Brandeis University,
Harvard University Law School; the Countway Library, Harvard Medical
School; the Houghton Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Harvard University;
the Harvard Divinity School—Andover-Harvard Theological Library of the
Harvard University Divinity School; the Baker Library, Harvard Business
School; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology; Northeastern University; Tufts University, and Wellesley
College.  As well as lending manuscripts, these institutions are also
contributing the time and expertise of their in-house conservators and
photographers, whose  are working hard to prepare for display and digitize
the manuscripts, many of which have never been exhibited to the public or
previously reproduced.

*Beyond Words* will be exhibited at three venues on both sides of the
Charles River: Harvard University’s Houghton Library in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art, where it will
be the inaugural exhibition in the museum’s new building, a renovation of
the  neo-Renaissance palazzo built as a residence for Boston's archbishop
by the architectural firm Maginnis and Walsh in 1927, and the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Each venue will highlight one of the
three principal contexts for the production of books in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, and related developments in design, script and decoration.
The volumes will be presented to the public as the idealized libraries of
three readers—the monk at the Houghton, lay person at Boston College and
humanist prince at the Gardner Museum—to vividly bring to life books
produced for the communal use of religious institutions; collections that
served the educational, professional, and spiritual needs of individuals;
and the magnificent libraries that proclaimed the power and cultivation of
Renaissance rulers.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a single scholarly catalogue with
essays and entries written by an international cohort of around eighty-five
American and European scholars, including François Avril, Susan L’Engle,
James Marrow, Scot Mckendrick, Lillian Armstrong, Federica Toniolo and
Maria Thiesen. It will be edited by *Beyond Words’s* curatorial team and
published by Boston College.

The exhibition is supported by a generous grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities as well as by private donors.
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