Page 14 - The Secret Museum

IF THE MUSES LOOK FOR heaven here on Earth, I think they must find it in museums.

Originally more like libraries, museums were conceived as ‘shrines for the muses’,
filled with books. It was only in the seventeenth century that they became showpieces
for wonderful objects. The Morgan Library and Museum is a museum in all senses of
the word: a library, as the first museums were, a treasure chest of artefacts, as
museums are today, and a gift to the muses.

The Morgan is in the former home of Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), one of the
most brilliant financiers America has ever seen and a generous and devoted patron of
the arts. Each day, hundreds of people wander around Pierpont’s sumptuous library,

built for $1.2 million, with a mantelpiece and ceiling sourced from Rome. They
marvel at the books and artwork on show in his home and his library, which his
banking colleagues dubbed ‘The Up-town Branch’.

Only a fragment of the work at the Morgan is on display. Most of their treasures
are beneath the buzzing city of New York, resting in three floors of quiet, humidity-
controlled rooms carved out of the rock. The long rooms are filled with grey, steel-
enclosed safes, each one fiercely protective of its delicate contents: ideas that shaped
the history of human feeling and thinking, touchstones of our culture.

Few people know they are there, waiting, deep in the calm, beneath Manhattan,

but I imagine the muses love to flit around there, exulting in the hidden treasures: the
only manuscript of Paradise Lost, dictated by the blind poet Milton, notebooks
containing lyrics by Bob Dylan (the first moment ‘Blowing in the Wind’ came to
Dylan is scribbled in pencil), neat scores by Mozart and Debussy and messy scores
by Beethoven, drawings by Dürer and Picasso and hundreds of ideas produced by
some of the most creative people that have ever lived. The muses laugh gleefully, for
they have been listened to. The archives of the Morgan are proof that we humans can

sometimes hear the quiet calls of the gods of art and find the skill to translate this
calling into physical form.

Only the curators of the Morgan go down to the archives. They swap things in and
out of display and bring items requested by people who want to see them up to the
beautiful Morgan reading room. I came into the reading room to view a Gutenberg
Bible, the first book ever printed in the western world. The Morgan owns three
copies, more than any other institution in the world. There are only 50 or so copies in
existence, and only 12 of those are on vellum. I had a morning to myself with the

Morgan’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible on vellum.

Inge Dupont, one of the librarians, brought it up out of the vaults of the Morgan
and there it was, in two enormous volumes – Old and New Testament. It was sitting
on a trolley, which Inge and her colleague wheeled across the reading room to a
desk. Together, they heaved the New Testament up on to a lectern. They handed me a
piece of acid-free card with which to turn the pages and asked me to turn them
holding the bottom right-hand pages only. Then they left me alone with one of the
most valuable books in the world. It was sublime. I felt so lucky. I’d seen a copy on