Mr. Morgan Throws a Party

By Stan Parchin
Wednesday April 27, 2005

Museum Expansion Near Completion, on Time

Manhattan's Pierpont Morgan Library, New York's preeminent repository of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, rare drawings, literary, musical and historical documents in Murray Hill, will reopen in Spring 2006 after a massive expansion above and below ground.

Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, it's his first architectural commission in New York City awaiting completion. Piano's three rose-hue steel and glass structures unite the Morgan campus' three existing buildings. They add some 75,000 square feet to the museum for permanent installations, special exhibitions, subterranean state-of-the-art storage space, a skylit reading room with retractable screens for scholars, curatorial/administrative offices, a new auditorium for lectures and concerts, an expanded shop and two cafes.

The inaugural special exhibition of some 300 objects from the Morgan's world-class collection of more than 350,000 objects will focus on highlights of the Library's holdings spanning the course of Western civilization. It'll feature: Mesopotamian cylinder seals; masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance manuscript illumination; one of the Morgan's Gutenberg Bibles; drawings by Italian High Renaissance masters Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo; Mozart's manuscript for the "Haffner" Symphony; and Mary Shelley's copy of Frankenstein with the author's notes.

For further reading:

The Morgan Library: An American Masterpiece.
New York: The Pierpont Morgan Library, 2000.

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From your Guide: Stan Parchin, Contributing Editor for Museum/Special Exhibitions, is a specialist in ancient, late-medieval and Renaissance art and history. His interests include: the art and culture of Old and New Kingdom Egypt; the Italian and Northern Renaissances; Church history; and witchcraft, heresy and social dissent in late-medieval and early Modern Europe.

Image credit: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson [Lewis Carroll] (1832-1898)
Sir John Tenniel's hand-colored proof of The Mad Tea Party for The Nursery "Alice" ca. 1889
Gift of Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., 1987; AAH 590.8
© 2005 the Morgan Library.