Modernism Meets the Robber Barons

Renzo Piano and the Morgan Library

Federico da Montefeltro and His Library

Somehow, as the summer of 2006 continues, the Morgan Library has not yet drawn blockbuster crowds. Yet a critical New York institution has returned after three years—with an old face but a new look inside. Renzo Piano, the architect, uses a soothingly tall glass box as a gateway to the old display spaces, where one can see an unrivaled collection of manuscripts, prints, and other rarities. One passes through layers of architecture's recent past in order to enter the library's still more layered tradition.

A year later, the Morgan plays host to another library, that of Federico da Montefeltro. Like J. P. Morgan, he sought an image of ruthless power combined with unequaled learning. Do they show how artist and patron will always remain at odds, or do they reflect the dream of an all-seeing eye from the Renaissance through late Modernism? With "the cube," a chamber for new exhibitions, Piano indeed imposes Modernism on, this time, Urbino.

Still me, babe

Even after $106 million and months of anticipation, one can have a quiet visit to the Morgan Library. Instead of what guidebooks like to call a destination, one comes here for the journey. In a second, one can pass from Alexander Pope's efforts to pin down the proper study of mankind to a sheet of stationery from London's Mayfair hotel, on which Bob Dylan discovers that "It Ain't Me, Babe." One can wander amid drawings by Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Antoine Watteau, and others so familiar and so fine as to have become a New Yorker's personal textbook of Western art. One can still look forward to temporary exhibitions on rare prints, drawings, manuscripts, and books, only to find that the permanent collection has a home for it all.

Perhaps that quiet already certifies the architecture as a success, quite as much as the lines for MOMA must please Yoshio Taniguchi or the demand for late Goya must make the Frick feel that it has become a player. That room to reflect could attest that Renzo Piano has preserved the feeling of a private library, devoted to immersion in art and text. Yet it hardly feels that way at first encounter. Piano relies on a new central court to connect three separate structures—Morgan's original library and study, the former museum areas for temporary exhibitions, and the dining area and bookshop relocated to Morgan's old house up the street, open to the public for the first time. From the outside, the extension appears largely as two sets of opaque glass and metal panels, one to the right of the old entrance and one around the corner on Madison Avenue. Both resemble utility cabinets waiting for someone to read the meter.

Things get better, however, even before one enters what the museum collegially calls its "midtown campus," which now fills an entire block. The new doors on Madison set back significantly from the street line, framed by the older buildings to either side. As people assembled restlessly one Friday for free evening hours, which begin only two hours after the peons most in need will have left work, the exterior felt a bit less like a barrier and more like a gathering place. Inside, it feels far better still. With its high ceiling and tall west windows onto a row of trees, the lobby pays something of a homage to the Ford Foundation. One has natural light from every side and illuminated manuscripts like Le Livre da la Chasse further within.

A glass elevator offers still more open views, outside and in. No doubt it also plays on the new architecture's form as the Modernist glass box, while creating a science fiction vision of the future. Additional dining tables contribute to the spaciousness, as well as sending the message that the cafeteria, too, is about common space rather than exclusivity. From here, one can head for consumerism or a proper Victorian tea at left, galleries to the right, offices upstairs, and areas downstairs for art education and a small concert hall, and an upstairs terrace offers further views. In the lobby, people settle right into computer terminals, as if immediately at home—surely a model for what museums should and soon will become. Touch screens elsewhere assist with musical scores, each allowing a comparison of two performances.

Piano—the architect again, not the sound track—has a reputation for caution and attention to detail, and both apply here. Despite the lobby, much will seem comfortingly untouched to stodgy visitors like me. The exhibition space grows slightly, largely owing to an upstairs room, but the new galleries themselves are unremarkable, and the bookstore has not yet expanded its wares noticeably. The extravagant dome separating Morgan's study looks brighter than ever, but rooms to either side remain untouched. One could still press one's nose up against the library's glass cabinets, if not for the guards. I still imagine myself ascending its tiers to hold the books in my hand.

Piano does not try to impose a new order on the old rooms or, conversely, to imitate the old—and in architecture those refusals count for a great deal these days. On the down side, he does not try anything original beyond the elevator or anything much to pull the elements together. The central lobby, replacing a narrow hall between two old buildings, also loses something of the older display's integrity, as Jed Perl complains. From the central court, the old rooms for temporary exhibitions look at first like broom closets, and one can no longer imagine Morgan himself strolling between his library and the exhibitions, each now far too much their own worlds. He just makes it nice to visit them both. His next task is to placate everyone involved with the Whitney's expansion.

A postscript: a little learning

As it happens, the same summer makes an excellent test for Piano's vision of where Modernism leads, with a more imposing view of architecture's future by Zaha Hadid. It makes one compare two visions of who will rebuild New York after Postmodernism, and yet for now, if I need to feel a privileged New Yorker, I know where to go. In J. P. Morgan's library and study, I can share the rewards of capitalism at its most pitiless. I can pretend to stand above the fray, as a patron of the arts and sciences, at once worldly and noble. I can happily take credit for the expertise of others. I can even overlook that the Morgan Library's greatest treasures lie elsewhere.

Morgan would feel at home again now, alongside a worthy predecessor. A year after its opening, the Morgan Library has recreated the library of Federico da Montefeltro, who ruled Urbino until his death in 1482. The duke's lectern, still preposterously grand and tall, occupies the center of the room, surrounded by a selection of rare and, of course, weighty volumes. They hit all the right notes for a man of piety, learning, and ruthless ambition—from the Gospels in Latin and Pope Gregory's Commentary on Job to Virgil, a history and maps of territory ripe for conquest, and a horoscope for advice on how and when to pull it off. On the walls, photographs reproduce the original study's paneled walls, painted with a convincing illusion of still more symbols of an age. Why not commission paintings of the ancients and their books like this, and leave their contents to others?

Morgan would have a lot to live up to. Italy back then had more than enough warring tyrants and city states. Leonardo da Vinci served one of the worst in Lombardy. If Florence recalls Athens, suggests one textbook, Federico's ideal of a state led by its warriors approaches Sparta. Rome, which had lost all claims to greatness by early Renaissance, had not yet had its rebirth under Raphael, Michelangelo, and renewed papal power. Ironically, the show commemorates the Vatican Apostolic Library's acquisition of Federico's collection in 1657.

The duke lived in interesting times. An illegitimate son, Federico took power after his brother was assassinated by his own angry citizens. He and the pope may have conspired to take out the Medici clan in Florence. The curator, Marcello Simonetta of Wesleyan University, believes he has the evidence in an abstruse secret code. Federico posed twice for Piero della Francesca, once kneeling at the foot of the Virgin in full armor. Another portrait, included in the show, shows him in his library reading, perhaps, that very edition of Job—but in regal fabrics again draping the instruments of war.

The portrait has a Northern Renaissance attention to detail and texture, but the lighting comes off flat and mute, and the composition has more to do with Italy. Scholars still debate whether to assign it to a visiting artist, Justus of Ghent, or an assistant in Urbino, Pietro Berruguette. The duke's strict profile reflects Italian models, and it also hides the loss of his right eye at sword point. His intact helmet pushes outward from a ledge at the painting's bottom edge. Its perspective positions the viewer below his feet, as his subject. His son's left arm curls comfortably and dutifully on his right knee, while the boy's robe, scepter, and upright pose mark him as an heir to power.

The Morgan hopes to convey the privacy and scale of the study, by staging it in the Thaw gallery off the new atrium. It looks out of place. One has to cope with others as the duke himself never would, and one has to strain to make out text high on the walls, above the display cases. Gaps between the false paneling only emphasize the bare walls and high ceiling of Renzo Piano's Modernist architecture. Museum staff will direct you to "the cube." Could it stand for yet a third stage of luxury, art, and empire?

jhaber@haberarts.com

The Morgan Library reopened to the public on April 29, 2006, with additions by Renzo Piano. I first saw the renovation in late May. "Federico da Montefeltro and His Library" ran through September 30, 2007. A review of Zaha Hadid includes further elaboration on Renzo Piano's architecture.