The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, owns one of the largest and most prestigious collections of block books in the world, most of which are attributed to the Netherlands and Germany and dated to ca. 1460–1490. Block books are rare examples of early multi-page works produced entirely from hand-colored woodcuts, with both imagery and text carved in relief from a single block. Although created for only a few decades in the late 15th century, block books are relevant in that they represent an alternative production method to the coeval invention of typographic printing, which, upon introduction, quickly dominated the book market. As little is known about the composition of early printing inks and, more broadly, of the materials constituting these unusual objects, an extensive campaign of scientific analysis was undertaken using various non-invasive and micro-invasive techniques. Examination of the paper and watermarks provided information regarding provenance and dating of the books. Their polychrome imagery was found to have been created through a widespread use of both mineral pigments and natural dyes, often present in complex mixtures and applied in various ways. Similarly, the printing inks typically consist of combinations of carbon-based and iron gall inks, sometimes mixed with red mineral pigments likely to adjust their hue. In a few cases, modern pigments were also identified on inserted replacement pages, pointing to later interventions. This research has substantially enriched the current knowledge of the materials and techniques employed in block books and securely links them to single-leaf woodcuts of the 15th century, placing them in a medieval illumination tradition.

One of the treasures of Modena’s Biblioteca Estense Universitaria is a small manuscript prayer book with five portraits of a young girl. Written in a clear humanist script and handsomely decorated with twelve miniatures, a rich series of floral or vegetal borders decorates every page. In this chapter, Roger Wieck carefully examines the book’s textual and pictorial contents, as well as the artist who painted the illuminations, in order to elucidate the historical and cultural circumstances surrounding its commission and its patron’s motivations. Wieck argues that Claude de France, Renée’s sister and Queen Consort of François I, commissioned this small, yet intriguing book, and he offers a detailed analysis of its genesis and artistry. This chapter highlights also the manuscript’s complicated history and fascinating journey, ultimately explaining perhaps why, upon her return to France in 1560, Renée preferred to leave her primer—and the Catholic tradition that it represented—behind.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, owns twenty-five works on paper by the 18th-century English artist Thomas Gainsborough. Scholarly publications over the past 20 years, as well as Gainsborough’s own writings, have highlighted his proclivity toward innovative methods and experimentation. In particular, a letter that the artist wrote in 1773 reveals details of his secret recipe for making oils on paper, such as his recommended use of lead white and the unorthodox practice of dipping his works in skim milk, possibly to prevent the pigments from discoloring. About a dozen of Gainsborough’s creations were included in a 2018 exhibition at The Morgan entitled Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing. On this occasion, an in-depth scientific study aimed to explore the artist’s work as a draftsman, with a special focus on his mastery of materials, his technical innovations, and his development of an original approach to drawing. Initially, a selection of artworks was examined using magnification along with transmitted and raking light to improve surface visualization and to investigate the structure of each piece. Further photographic documentation with ultraviolet and infrared light was performed to gather preliminary information on the variety of white pigments employed, on the wet and dry chalk techniques used in certain works, as well as on the possible presence of coatings and underdrawings. Subsequently, scientific analysis by means of X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and Raman spectroscopies aimed at characterizing the white pigments present in The Morgan’s drawings, which mostly consisted of calcite and lead white. Moreover, a combination of advanced micro-sampling tools, i.e. polyvinyl chloride (PVC)-free erasers and fine polishing films, ad-hoc sample preparation methods, highly sensitive proteomics analysis via nano-liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (nano-LC/MS), and sophisticated bioinformatics data processing was employed to assess Gainsborough’s use of skim milk as a “secret fixative” on some of his works. Results have revealed the presence of specifically bovine milk in all of the samples evaluated to date. Notably, only through the combined use of such advanced technical resources can the interrogation of all milk proteins retrieved from the samples provide evidence for the presence of a milk fixative and open the discussion about milk processing methods in the 18th century. In addition to granting conservators and art historians a deeper understanding of the complexity of Gainsborough’s drawing techniques, this study paves the way for further investigations to probe the use of casein-based fixatives by other artists working on paper such as Degas and Van Gogh.

Several early editions of Thomas More's “Utopia,” first published in 1516, include the Utopian alphabet, as well as a quatrain of poetry in Utopian and its Latin transliteration. This essay traces the material conditions for the Utopian alphabet, exploring the intellectual contexts and epistemological questions that underlie its presence in these early editions and its absence in others. Reproduced by four early modern European printers via woodcut, metal type, or engraved plate, the alphabet in its materiality becomes a key component of “Utopia,” underscoring the intersection between print technology and an expansive humanism extending to ever wider intellectual and geographic horizons.

How do such factors as the choice and placement of objects, the presence of a glass barrier, installation design solutions, and contemporary sociopolitical issues affect a museum visitor’s experience of literary artefacts? How does the material culture historian’s scholarly rigour intersect with the museum visitor’s emotional response, and how does the museum curator—never a neutral presence—mediate between the two? This chapter probes these questions by examining the curatorial considerations that resulted in the display of Charlotte Bronte’s so-called Thackeray dress at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum in the 2016 exhibition Charlotte Bronte: An Independent Will. It concludes that scholarship and sentimentality, often considered antithetical, both inform a complex and humane response to material remnants displayed under glass.

While Bernini and other artists of his generation would be responsible for much of the decoration at the Chiesa del Gesù and other Jesuit churches, there was more than half a century of art commissioned by the Jesuits before Bernini came to the attention of the order. Many of the early works painted in the 1580s and 90s are no longer in the church, and some do not even survive; even a major monument like Girolamo Muziano’s Circumcision, the original high altarpiece, is neglected in scholarship on Jesuit art. This paper turns to the early altarpieces painted for the Gesù by Muziano and Scipione Pulzone, to discuss the pictorial and intellectual concerns that seem to have guided the painters, and also to some extent to speculate on why their works are no longer at the Gesù, and why these artists are so unfamiliar today.

The ArtFrame Project, a part of the Linked Data for Production (LD4P) collaboration, was a domain-specific, linked-open-data (LOD) initiative that explored the metadata practices of art libraries and museums. The project, headed by Columbia University Libraries and including major art institutions and the Cataloging Advisory Committee (CAC) of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA), focused on developing an extension to the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) tailored to the needs of art catalogers. This article describes the history of the project and its collaboration with the LD4P Rare Materials Extension Group to produce a shared ontology, the Art & Rare Materials BIBFRAME Ontology Extension (ARM).[This article is an expansion of a presentation at the ARLIS/NA conference held in New York, New York, in February 2018.]

Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics. Erika Mary Boeckeler. Impressions: Studies in the Art, Culture, and Future of Books. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. xiv + 286 pp. $75. - Volume 72 Issue 2