Piano's Expansion Key to Morgan Library's Grand Reopening

By Stan Parchin
Friday November 18, 2005

New York City's Pierpont Morgan Library, with its estimated $102 million, three-year expansion by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano coming to completion, reportedly will reopen on Saturday, April 29, 2006. Piano's exquisite addition increases the museum's existing campus by some 75,000 square feet. The Morgan's new addition is designed to provide sorely needed space for its growing permanent collection, special exhibition programme, scholarly study, administration and public areas.

The Morgan Library's inaugural exhibition will include many of its spectacular holdings, from Mesopotamian cylinder seals through Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, replete with its author's notes. Marvelous medieval and resplendent Renaissance manuscripts, rarely on view, will be accompanied by a Gutenberg Bible and exceptional drawings by Italian High Renaissance masters Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo.

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, Senior Correspondent for Museums and 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: Jeweled Upper Cover of the Lindau Gospels
Lindau Gospels, ca. 880
Court School of Charles the Bald
Abbey of St. Gall, Switzerland
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1901; MS M.1
© 2005 the Morgan Library.