Forget the Gutemberg….

It was a thing to see, and somehow I had missed it. So I circled back, after reading somewhere on one of the walls of the J. P. Morgan Library that an edition of the Gutenberg Bible was always on display in the East Room of the original library. And yes—there it was, and why had I missed it? Not because of its size, which is as large as you would imagine (think coffee table book). No, a docent had been in front of it, along with 20 other people. And so blown away was I by the room itself, that I had somehow missed the Gutenberg. Here’s what I was standing in….

Not bad, hunh? And by the way, the little display case by the door holds the Gutenberg Bible.

Which was a bit…well, ordinary. Which come to think of it may be the point—it was the first book printed in moveable type. And that means that it was designed to be mass-produced, it was meant to be available to many more people than the rich patrons who commissioned hand-copied books. And so there are decorative elements, yes, but nowhere near the elaborate ornamentation of illuminated manuscripts. Here’s a juicy manuscript:

And here’s the more sober Gutenberg….

Right—and that’s the first page—the rest is much simpler.

Well, Pierpont—as he liked to be called, so happy to oblige!—had the dough to do what he wanted, and what he wanted was to collect. He had been left 12 million plus by Pop, named Junius—very classy name, though the computer is red-squiggling it—in 1890, when Pierpont was in his early fifties. And from then on, Pierpont combined finance with collecting on a major scale. Actually, two major scales—since among other things J. P. Morgan was the only man in the country that could step in, in the financial Panic of 1907, and save the American economy from collapsing. How did he do it? He got all the big boys together, knocked their heads together, and put together a deal for how to save the day. Then he went back to collecting.

And Pierpont, educated with a degree in Art History from a German university, certainly knew what he was doing. Here, from the Morgan’s website, is a description of his habit:

During the last two decades of his life—from the 1890s until 1913—Morgan spent some $60 million on art (about $900 million today). From the beginning, it was clear that Morgan's collecting tastes could only be described as encyclopedic—what he amassed in such a short period encompassed virtually the full range of artistic and human achievement in Western civilization, from antiquity to modern times. 

He acquired art objects numbering in the thousands, in a wide range of media—from bronzes, porcelains, watches, ivories, and paintings to furniture, tapestries, armor, and ancient Egyptian artifacts as well as the rare books, manuscripts, drawings, prints, and ancient artifacts that are the core of the Morgan.

For years, the bulk of Morgan’s collection was in London, and to accommodate it all, he had to buy the house next door to the one he inherited and knock through the walls. Why? Because at the time, there was a 20% import fee for art coming in to the United States. So he and Isabella Stewart Gardner and some others got together and scotched, and then he began to move it all over to the States. (One ship he had intended to use was the Titanic—fortunately, the collection couldn’t be appraised in time to make the voyage….)

And the bulk of his art went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which he was the trustee and then president from 1904 until his death in 1913. But the manuscripts? They stayed in the library—which his son Jack opened to the public in 1924.

And so, today I saw a document signed by Elizabeth I, a Mozart manuscript, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with marginalia in the composer’s hand, and a ravishing drawing of da Vinci. But what fascinated me the most?

This:

Cuneiform—from a couple millennia before Christ. It was the world’s first written language, and was etched by reeds into clay and then hardened. And it is, as you can see, exquisitely small, and virtually illegible. And how had anyone possibly deciphered it, given that the language had died out some centuries after Christ?

As it turns out—the same way that someone deciphered the Rosetta Stone. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Meanwhile, in 1835 Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company army officer, visited the Behistun Inscriptions in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522–486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Mesopotamian Aramaic, and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

I stared for some ten minutes, went away, and came back again. And though the exhibit stated that the language had been invented for mercantile purposes, none of the texts quoted had anything to do with commerce. Instead, they were of love, birth, eagles, fertility. A whisper of immortality chiseled in a lump of clay, hurled through millennia….