Beth stepped out of the elevator, pushed through the ponderous glass doors of the research institute, and then scurried across the outdoor court toward the gardens, where the party was being held; it was going to be a balmy and beautiful summer night. And the Central Garden, as it was known, was going to provide the perfect setting for the kickoff event. Entered through a circular walkway, shaded by London plane trees and traversing a running stream, the garden contained hundreds of different plants and flowers, from lavender to heliotrope, crape myrtle to floribunda roses, all gradually descending to a plaza with bougainvillea-covered arbors and an ornamental pool; the water in the pool sparkled blue, under a floating veil of azaleas.
Tables had been set up, covered with gold damask cloths, and waiters circulated with trays of champagne, Perrier, and whatever else anyone requested. About two dozen guests had already toured the exhibit in the museum, and were now, some of them still clutching a program, enjoying the artfully arranged hors d’oeuvres.
The first person who caught Beth’s eye was Mrs. Cabot — an older woman, she had no use for the Ms. business — and she did not look pleased. She was standing with the Critchleys, a prominent couple on the Los Angeles art scene. Beth grabbed a glass of champagne from one of the passing trays and went to join them.
“We were hoping you’d stop by,” Mrs. Cabot said, with a smile that only Beth knew wasn’t genuine.
“So sorry,” Beth murmured, nodding hello to the Critchleys. “I got immersed in something, and lost track of the time.”
“Oh, I do that all the time,” Mrs. Critchley said; she was a dithery sort of woman, but right now, Beth was glad to have her there. “I once forgot to go to my own birthday lunch because I was so busy planning my daughter’s.”
Mr. Critchley, an old-school gentleman in a seersucker suit, looked on, beaming. He never said much, but Beth always felt he radiated goodwill.
“The Los Angeles Times sent that Rusoff woman,” Mrs. Cabot confided to Beth, “and the Art News writer is over there, in the bow tie.” Beth turned to look — at events like these, bow ties weren’t that uncommon. “The red one,” Mrs. Cabot said, intuiting her question.
“Oh, fine, I’ll be sure to speak to him.”
“I’m sure the Critchleys won’t mind if you do that now,” Mrs. Cabot said. “I believe he said something about having to go to a LACMA event after this.”
Beth knew when she had her marching orders, and left to go introduce herself to the red bow tie. This was the part of her job she didn’t relish. She loved doing her research, she loved studying the Old Master drawings, the antique manuscripts, the precious incunabala that the museum possessed in such abundance; she loved working with the expert conservators on preserving and protecting the invaluable works of art that time and tide had begun to decay.
But she didn’t love doing public relations work.
The Art News writer — who told her his name, Alexander Van Nostrand, through a mouthful of puff pastry — was indeed going to a second engagement. But upon seeing Beth, he lit up and decided he definitely needed to hear more about the genesis of the exhibition.
“The Getty Museum, as you know, has one of the most extensive collections of illuminated manuscripts in the world,” Beth said, “and these ecclesiastical works, most of them dating from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, were produced for English priories and monastery libraries.” She was doing her standard spiel, parts of which she had recorded for the audio tour, but Van Nostrand didn’t seem to mind a bit. “These manuscripts were considered prized possessions, and many monasteries — including Abingdon, Waltham, Worcester, and Christ Church in Canterbury — kept a list of exactly what they had in their catalogue. They also kept their books chained, literally, to pulpits and lecterns.”
“Yes,” Van Nostrand said, “the exhibition made all that quite clear. What I was wondering, though,” he added, a pastry crumb still clinging to his lower lip, “was what fascinated you about them? What makes a beautiful young woman, if I may say so—”
He waited for a reaction, and Beth simply smiled, saying nothing.
“—decide to devote herself to such an arcane and, some would call it, dusty, subject?”
Should she tell him about the crumb? She elected not to. “Their beauty, I think, was what first attracted me to illuminated manuscripts.”
“All that glitter and gold?”
“In some cases,” she said, warming, despite herself, to her subject. “Many of these medieval works are pretty spectacular, especially the ones made for emperors and kings. But many of them are more humble than that; we call them illuminated, using the term loosely, but technically they’re not. They don’t have the metallic gold or silver decoration that the word ‘illuminated’ connotes. But they’re still quite beautifully made, and beautifully written, objects.”
“And how did you make this selection, for your current exhibition?”
Beth had the uncomfortable feeling that he hadn’t heard a word she’d said, that he was just asking these questions to keep her there and occupied. But if the alternative was to return to Mrs. Cabot and the Critchleys, she would stay.
“I had noticed some interesting things about these particular manuscripts. Although they had been owned by different monasteries, sometimes in quite different parts of the country, they all had a distinctive writing style and decoration. These books, as I’m sure you know”—it never hurt to flatter your interlocutor—“were generally unsigned, written anonymously by monks in open cloisters and drafty scriptoria. But the books in this exhibition all displayed, to my mind, a common creator.”
“How? The text was always pretty much the same, wasn’t it? Bibles, patristic commentaries, Gospels?”
So he was paying some attention, after all.
“Yes, that’s true, though even in that respect there was greater latitude than is generally accepted. There’s a lot of room between the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry. Room for Livy’s History of Rome and Aristotle’s Ethics, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Adventures of Marco Polo. In fact, King Charles V of France was such a Marco Polo fan that he had five copies of the book, one of them bound in gold cloth.”
“But those books span centuries.”
“That’s correct, but the monk, or scribe, to whom I’m attributing the works collected in this exhibition, lived in the mid to late eleventh century, and he wrote, whatever his subject, with a distinctively sloping script, tilted slightly to the left. He might have been left-handed, or he might have had a problem with his vision. His illustrations are remarkable — they have a rare psychological acuity to them.” Where most such figures were stiffly drawn and without expression, Beth felt that this unknown scribe had found a way to convey feeling and nuance to his work.
“Hold on,” Van Nostrand said. “I bow, of course, to your superior wisdom in these matters, but weren’t the scribes, who did the text, and the illuminators, who did the artwork, two different people?”
“Yes,” Beth said. “Generally they were. But something tells me that this one man — the Michelangelo of the illuminated world — did both. When I called this exhibition ‘The Genius of the Cloister,’ I meant the phrase to be taken in two ways: as a tribute to the talents of the monks in general and as a nod to the one man I believe surpassed them all.”