If the past is a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley wrote, customs make it so. One is the late medieval period’s belief in marvels: dragons, unicorns, underwater palaces, wells of water so hot they could melt steel.
In reality, it was an age of travel. Europe was meeting Asia and the Middle East on the Silk Road, and Africa through the Mediterranean. Who believed these tales?
Unanswerable. But the Morgan Library and Museum has a good go of this question in “The Book of Marvels: A Medieval Guide to the Globe.” Spanning mainly 1200 to 1550, this exhibition, on view only through May 25, brings together about 20 books, manuscripts and maps (and one globe) that echo the visual language and wanderlust of the show’s main attraction: two copies of the “Livre des Merveilles du Monde,” or “Book of Marvels of the World,” both from one anonymous author and illuminated in Angers, France. The book reads like an illustrated atlas to the creatures and phenomena rumored to occur worldwide, from neighboring French provinces to China.
The “Marvels” text is at least as old as 1428. Of four known copies, the two on view in this show are thought to have been produced simultaneously, around 1460. One is complete; it lives at the Morgan. The other, a partial copy, was recently acquired by the Getty Center in Los Angeles. (The exhibition premiered there last year with an all-Getty checklist.) Almost identical, both copies are also attributed to the same illuminator, or group: the so-called Master of the Geneva Boccaccio.
At the center of the Morgan show, the Getty “Marvels” lies open to the section on Traponee, or Sri Lanka. At right, hunters chase a giant snail up a hill, their spears tall and sharp. At left, a man and wife make their home in one snail’s hollowed-out shell. Displayed beside it, the Morgan’s version shows Arabia. There, two hunters slice open an asp to extract the precious stones it keeps in its belly. Other hunters, shimmying up a stand of trees, dismantle nests that birds have built with the coveted cinnamon twig.
The “Marvels” illuminators worked in a soft and fluffy style that the Getty’s Larisa Grollemond calls “colored-grisaille.” What keeps you looking is arrangement. The Arabia scene, in particular, is laid out on a boxed X, with the objects of interest — belly, nest, a phoenix, some dragons — falling at the visual intersection points.
“Menu pictures” are what the show’s curators (three from the Getty and one, Joshua O’Driscoll, from the Morgan) call this indexical way of illustrating the text. The original buyer of these luxury “Marvels” — one is thought to have been Duke René of Anjou (1409-80) — would have enjoyed a scavenger hunt between its dutiful visual paragraphs and its swoopy French bastarda script, uncertain as to which describes which.
The Morgan show obeys a similar logic. If you walk the gallery, the maps that have been hung on the wall, and the printed and illuminated manuscripts under glass from the Morgan’s collection, amplify the myths and visual strategies enshrined in the “Marvels.”
For instance, the “Abridged Divine Histories” illuminated in Amiens, France, circa 1300, has a pair of conjoined twins against a background of gold leaf. Hans Rüst’s interpretive map of the world, circa 1480, is quite detailed in Africa and Asia, though populated by cannibals and other human oddities rendered large, in a graphic language similar to those tourist maps of the United States where a lobster dominates Maine and an ear of corn Kansas.
Marvels seem to have occupied a special compartment of belief: like miracles, except earthly. Scholars upheld the distinction, like Gervase of Tilbury, who in the 13th century deemed “things marvels which are beyond our comprehension, even though they are natural,” and included fairylike beings in his study of English folklore.
In the biblical account of Exodus, God revealed himself to Moses through the burning bush, but the Provençal giants and headless Ethiopians of the “Book of Marvels”? You can doubt those without fearing damnation.
The medieval world was big enough for both kinds of oddity, judging by these books’ treatment of Christianity. The conjoined twins appear across the page from an illustration of the baptism of Constantine, the Roman emperor who was probably more responsible than any other monarch for the spread of the Bible.
Elsewhere the godly and earthly seem to collide through implication. In an illuminated German “History of Alexander the Great,” also circa 1460, the Greeks meet a group of Indian Brahmins who are comfortably nude in the presence of newcomers. Their nonchalance recalls nothing so much as Adam and Eve, apple tree and all.
Most of these items are illuminated by hand. But several were printed with movable type. The rise of early printed books, or incunables, show an industrial efficiency that happened to dovetail with the European arrival in the Americas and Martin Luther’s rebuke of the pope. The timeline had me thinking: Perhaps this intrigue with marvels in a God-given world encouraged a certain anxiety for proof.
The Morgan’s stellar selection impresses least when it attempts to prove the ways in which medieval marvels explain modern racism. In the catalog and wall text, curators argue that marvels enabled the racial “othering” of foreign cultures, which in turn stoked a desire to dominate them and the things they treasured.
Christopher Columbus brought annotated copies of Marco Polo, the most fantastical and widely read of all marvelists, across the Atlantic to seize the New World. Volumes by both Italians appear in the show.
But the appetite for marvels was reciprocal. Of three Middle Eastern books here on display, the secret star of the show is a copy of Nizami’s Persian poem “The Quintet” from around 1550. The illuminator Siyavush Beg depicts a backdrop of stone and plant life that is astonishing in its painterly looseness and control of transparent pigments. Maple leaves explode from the text block like fireworks. Again the scene is from the Alexander the Great myth: the discovery of a fountain of youth. But this time with turbans and a distinctive, almost Mughal flatness. More than cinnamon traveled the Silk Road.
By focusing on the potential harm done in part by exotic mythologies, this exhibition leaves us with less answerable but also less explored questions about the past. Such as: How did dominant religions absorb newer legends? And how did these tales shape the medieval reader — or more often, listener — back home? To the scholar Norbert Ohler, for instance, marvels kept people humble by asserting the authority of ancient authors rather than feeble eyewitnesses.
However it worked, that past is vanishing fast.In the TikTok age, a stack of pressed linen with layers of scenery as vigilant as Siyavush Beg’s feels as exotic as the Cinnamologus bird must once have seemed to the courtiers of Burgundy.
Both are marvelous. One was real.
The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World
Through May 25 at the Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; 212-685-0008, themorgan.org.
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