summer exhibition
Crossings and Dwellings: Restored
Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814–
2014
. The shipping company was in the midst of returning
the objects a day earlier than expected. I scrambled to
contact the other lenders in the area to apprise them of
the situation. This was a busy week for the exhibitions
division. In the middle of the week, Mary Albert, LUMA’s
registrar, traveled to St. Louis to oversee the reinstallation
of roughly 50 pieces at our sister institution, the Saint Louis
University Museum of Art. Tim Duncan, LUMA’s Head
Preparator, returned loans to the University Libraries’
Special Collections, the Women and Leadership Archive,
and Campus Ministry on the Lake Shore Campus, and,
mid-week, Fr. Mike Gabriel dropped by to reclaim a
chalice borrowed from Holy Family Parish. It was to be
used during his installation as the new parish priest.
Even as we were returning objects from the previous
exhibition, we had another show to mount. It had to be
ready for the members’ opening for the seventh annual
Art and Faith of the Creche
on Thursday evening. The
art for the new Push Pin Gallery exhibition,
Exploring
Faces with Young Children
, was delivered on Sunday
afternoon by Irene Sufrin, the Principal of the Ginsburg
Solomon Schechter Early Childhood Center in Skokie. In
response to the exhibition
RACE: Are We So Different?
at
the Illinois Holocaust Museum, her young students, aged
2 to 5, explored faces—breaking them down into their
components—and then made self-portraits. I laid out the
exhibition in that manner; first, by facial features: mouths,
eyes, noses, and hair; then by portraits rendered in both
paint and collage. In all, it took about three days, working
with a couple of installers and our graphic designer, Jessica
Kleoppel, to get the exhibition up in time.
Over a cup of tea in the previous week while scanning
a Sotheby’s auction catalogue, my eye had been caught by
a small book of hours. Dated to the 1460s, it was made
in Flanders for export to England. The devotional texts
followed the Use of Sarum, a distinctively English rite,
and the book’s calendar of saints’ days was full of English
saints. I particularly liked that the decorated initial at the
opening of the prayer to St. Thomas of Canterbury had not
been defaced as happened with most such images in the
reign on Henry VIII. More importantly, the manuscript
had been in the possession of the Rookwood Family, a
family already represented in the D’Arcy Collection. Lady
Elizabeth Rookwood had commissioned our English
Chalice in 1684 and presented it to the Jesuits who secretly
administered to Catholics in Protestant England. The
cataloguer argued that the manuscript had long been in
Catholic hands. A number of Catholic devotions had been
added in the margins. Ownershipmarks revealed the book
had belonged to Lady Elizabeth’s son, Sir Thomas. I was
keen to discover if he might have inherited the book from
her and whether the Rookwoods might not have been the
book’s original 15th-century owners.
I contacted The Morgan Library’s curator of medieval
and Renaissance manuscripts. He was able to put me in
touch with a bookman in London. We spoke by telephone
on Thursday afternoon. By chance, the same little
manuscript had caught his eye and he was able to confirm
that it had been in very sympathetic—i.e. Catholic—
hands since its production. But he warned me that this
was not, nor had it ever been, a great manuscript. Books
of hours had been produced in their hundreds in Flanders
for the English market. This one was missing all but one
of its original full page miniatures. The sole survivor was
badly rubbed. A bookbinder in the 16th century had also
closely trimmed the pages and cropped part of the foliage
decoration painted in the margins.
I also contacted a historian of the Rookwoods, for
whose forthcoming publication of the family’s papers
Mary Albert recently had taken digital images of the
Images:
Book of Hours, Use of Sarum, in Latin
, illuminated manuscript on vellum, Southern Netherlands (probably Bruges), ca. 1460–70; Lian Basa, 4½ years old
15
