From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Drawing largely on the collection of exquisite medieval manuscripts that first gave the Morgan Library its renown, ‘The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World,’ entices visitors with promises of giant snails, hints at a timely reflection on globalisation and its discontents, then delivers a richly coloured meditation on wonder and mastery.
The exhibition is intimate in scale, containing some 20 objects arranged around the perimeter of a small gallery. At the centre of the room stands the pair of exceptional manuscripts from which the exhibition takes its title: two closely related copies of the Book of Marvels of the World, one from the Getty, the other from the Morgan’s own collections, produced in Angers in c. 1460–65, probably for the court of Duke René d’Anjou. The narrative they contain belongs to a tradition that descends from Pliny the Elder and fuses medieval bestiaries, encyclopaedias and travellers’ tales. Whereas many texts in those traditions were sober affairs intended for monastic readers, these manuscripts contain dozens of illuminations, executed in a distinctive coloured-grisaille technique uniquely associated with the Master of the Geneva Boccaccio.
The Getty’s copy lies open at a domestic scene, set in Sri Lanka, where men apparently live inside giant snail shells. On the left, a woman leans towards her husband, as if to bring him a fresh cup of tea. The man, resting at the mouth of the shell, swings his legs off its ledge, as from a low garden wall. To the right, hunters blow their horns, and hounds give chase to an enormous snail wearing – if such a thing is possible – a haughty expression.
Traponee (Sri Lanka) in the Book of Marvels of the World (MS 124, fol. 31v (c. 1460–65; detail). J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The Morgan’s copy reveals an omnibus display of Arabian wonders. Barefoot men harvest birds’ nests made from cinnamon bark. Two men sporting beards and wearing turbans extract precious stones from the belly of a venomous monster. A crowned phoenix rises from flames while clouds, their silver tarnished, drift across a distant horizon. The illumination itself is no bigger than a person’s hand, but the image has also been used for a mural that covers one entire wall of the gallery space. Thus enlarged, the painted figures approach life-size. Contour and hatching lines in black ink bring definition to fields washed in blue, brown and green. The scene appears simultaneously blurry and sharp, the way our vision of the past itself tends to be.
The exhibition plays other wry games with scale and perspective, juxtaposing miniaturised views that take in all of creation, with what a single eye can perceive through a narrow gap. One illumination from 1475 is of a man leering at a female bather through parted foliage, taken from Dominican friar Vincent de Beauvais’s Mirror of History – part of another widely circulated text of encyclopaedic ambitions.
A sequence of contrasting maps, varied in style, format and technology, provides each wall with a centrepiece. The first, spread over facing pages of a Beatus Apocalypse copied in Toledo in 1220, offers sparse, hieroglyphic renderings of cities, rivers and mountains in saturated hues of orange and violet, sandstone and teal. At the top, painted in the austere style of Romanesque murals, and above labels for Jerusalem, Mount Sinai and the Jordan River, stand Adam and Eve, framed by the walls of the Garden of Eden, each clutching a giant fig leaf. Adam wears a beard, and an expression of wide-eyed innocence. The snake coiled round the tree between them holds his face so close to Eve’s that they overlap. Does he whisper to her, bite her or kiss her? Eve holds her left palm out towards the viewer, as if in silent warning, but if her face shows surprise, it reveals neither grief nor shame.
Map of the world in the Las Huelgas Beatus, (1220) (MS M. 429, fols. 31v–32r). Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Photo: Carmen González Fraile
The second, a hand-coloured mappa mundi printed on a single sheet of chancery paper by Hanns Rüst (Augsburg, c. 1480), is so cluttered that Where’s Wally? comes to mind. I found tiny stick figures battling giant storks, a fingernail-sized Sea of Galilee and Saint Brendan’s boat. Whereas the Beatus codex depicts history as a singular event – the Fall – Rüst’s map, cacophonous with characters and events, gives visual representation to the history of a bustling, busy world.
The final map (Venice, c. 1300) fills two end-to-end sheets of roughly trimmed parchment with a panoramic vision of the Holy Land. Buildings, many distinctive enough to suggest that they represent actual structures, indicate biblical cities and Crusader forts. Gridlines introduce the notion of proportion, thus signalling a conceptual turning point. This is a map one might conceivably begin to use for navigation.
The c. 1460–65 production date assigned to the highlighted Book of Marvels manuscripts places them at a narrow passage in the history of Christian Europe. To the East, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 had brought the Middle Ages to a definitive close. But to the West, the Pillars of Hercules, unbreached, still marked the furthest edge of the known world. On Rüst’s map, they resemble a trio of matchstick-sized industrial smokestacks.
Illustration from an edition of Baths of Pozzuoli (MS G. 74, f.21r), c. 1400, written by Peter of Eboli. Morgan Library and Museum, New York. Photo: Carmen González Fraile
Not until the exhibition’s final vitrines does Columbus come ashore in the New World. In the watercolour illustrations of Natural History of the Indies (c. 1586), naked men dance around a pregnant woman’s hut as part of an indigenous ritual. The palm-frond roof has been traced in lines sharp enough for the viewer to feel their scratchy fringe. A flock of tiny birds traverse the empty sky. Though faded, their colours still evoke plumage so dazzling it became a commonplace for 16th-century vfoyagers to compare the birds to angels.
Outside the gallery door, in the hubbub of the Morgan’s soaring atrium, an etched copper globe of 1530 from Dieppe, no larger than a cantaloupe, rests on a tripod of knuckled lion’s feet. The New World appears as a spiny ridge running North-South, all coastline, its interiors unmapped and unmeasurable, a marvel still waiting for discovery.
‘The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World’ is at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York until 25 May. An accompanying bok by Larisa Grollemond, Kelin Michael, Elizabeth Morrion and Joshua O’Driscoll is published by the J. Paul Getty Museum.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.