Secrets From The Vault

From Subiaco to Salzburg: St. Augustine in Austria

Submitted by John McQuillen on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 9:54am

One of the first books printed in Italy is St. Augustine’s De civitate dei. It was printed at the Benedictine monastery of Subiaco on 12 June 1467 by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz. A recent reference request took me to our copy of the Subiaco De civitate dei. As was traditional, the printers left space in the type-set page for the addition of hand decoration and painted letters. The style of painting often tells you were the book ended up after it left the printing press and hopefully who its first owner was. The Morgan’s De civitate dei left Subiaco and crossed the Alps to Salzburg, where the artist Ulrich Schreier decorated the book for Bernhard von Kraiburg (1412–1477), Bishop of Chiemsee (Bavaria).

Happy Birthday, William Wordsworth!

Submitted by Carolyn Vega on Thu, 04/07/2011 - 12:38pm

Today marks the 241st anniversary of William Wordsworth’s birth. He was a founder of the so-called Lake School of poetry, and I have a mental image of Wordsworth wandering “lonely as a cloud” through the mountainous Lake District, penning his lines in the very settings he describes. He has been called “our greatest nature poet,” and was a master of the walking tour – Thomas de Quincey estimated that he “must have traversed a distance of 175 to 180,000 English miles.”

Henry James's "splendid American summer"

Submitted by Declan Kiely on Tue, 07/04/2017 - 10:30am

Celebrating the July 4th holiday in New Hampshire, I was reminded of Henry James’s sojourn in the White Mountains in the summer of 1865. In his Notes of a Son and Brother, published almost fifty years after that memorable visit, he would recall it as a “splendid American summer,” spent in the company of his witty and gregarious cousin Minny Temple and her sisters, and his close friend Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Humanistic Relics: the vision of Jannis Kounellis

Submitted by Francesco Guzzetti on Sun, 02/14/2021 - 7:00pm

During my residency at the Morgan as a postdoctoral fellow at the Drawing Institute, I was particularly struck by a drawing in the collection. Made by the Greek-born Italian artist Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017), it was acquired in 2016 thanks to the generosity of the Morgan’s Modern & Contemporary Collectors Committee. The drawing related directly to my research, which focused on Italian drawing in the 1960s and 1970s.

In Conversation with Jessica Hagedorn: Poetry, Counterculture, and AAPI Identity

Submitted by Sam Mohite on Mon, 05/05/2025 - 10:00am

Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn was born in 1949 in Manila, Philippines. Since moving to the States in 1963, she is often referred to in scholarship as an American playwright, writer, and poet. My take: by commanding language and blurring the boundaries of national and artistic categorizations in her work, Hagedorn weaves together investigations of life and culture through exploratory multimedia performance art.

In the King's Garden with Madeleine Françoise Basseporte

Submitted by Mary Creed on Wed, 06/30/2021 - 12:00pm

The mid-eighteenth century witnessed the flourishing of scientific illustration in Europe. In an intellectual climate that valued curiosity and experimentation, the goals of the artist frequently merged with those of the scientist. Before the invention of photography, artists needed to document botanical specimens quickly before they decayed. These visual records of plants aided in their identification and classification and also functioned as aesthetically pleasing works of art.

It was a dark and stormy night... and Arbaces cogs his dice with pleasure

Submitted by Carolyn Vega on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 3:26pm

His novels were Victorian best-sellers, but Edward Bulwer Lytton is not one of those authors you could say has aged very well.

Admired by King George IV (who, it is rumored, kept a Lytton novel at all of his residences), his popularity was on the same scale as that of Charles Dickens. Now, however, his name is used as a "byword for aesthetic embarrassment and incompetence," and he is perhaps best remembered for the opening line to Paul Clifford : "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals..."

John Ruskin's "Great Horse-Controversy"

Submitted by Carolyn Vega on Thu, 05/05/2011 - 12:57pm

"Give a horse a nut," says John Ruskin, "and see if he can hold it as a squirrel can."

The great English critic was, in the fall of 1857, apparently in the midst of a "great horse-controversy" with Tinie, the young daughter of Ruskin's close friend Robert Horn. It seems that Tinie had recently come to the defense of the horse, and in a very lengthy letter (shown below) Ruskin attempted to convince her that "the horse is the most contemptible of animals."

John Ruskin's Puppet Show

Submitted by Carolyn Vega on Thu, 12/08/2011 - 1:49pm

John Ruskin was just ten years old when he wrote and illustrated The Puppet Show: Or, Amusing Characters for Children. The little book is filled with twenty-nine short poems, each of which is accompanied by two pen-and-ink drawings. The poems, as far as I can determine, are Ruskin's own, although some of the illustrations are copied from George Cruikshank's vignettes in Grimm's German Popular Stories, which was first published in London in 1823.