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They Let You Take Photos in the Museums

I spent nearly an entire day at the Chester Beatty Library, and it was absolutely worth it. It was even worth the sprint to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells, just before they stopped selling tickets for the day.

A page from a yellowed Arabic manuscript, with four lines of text in black above a pink panel with a grey and tan anteater frolicking through a field of bright coral, blue, and purple flowers over rolling green grass.
The Best Anteater Ever.
I'm starting off with possibly my favorite illustration from the whole museum, even counting the many stunning Q'urans, Bibles, and painters' model books. It's an anteater! from a bestiary! Isn't he charming? I love his frolic, I love his carefully detailed field of flowers, I love the pink sky and rolling green turf. Just delightful all around.

An open Q'uran with white parchment pages and two rectangular panels bordered in gold and fine blue detailing, holding three lines of black text each. Lozenges of text are contained within the top and bottom gold borders of both panels as well.
This isn't even one of the complex ones.
The glass was a very good choice, because it kept me from drooling on the books. The gold work (and calligraphy, and fine pen detailing) in the Q'urans was just astonishing. As always, faith that manifests in art moves me.

An outspread leather book cover, with the spine roughly centered, showing intricate tooling detailing the edges of each sections, with filigree over deep blue and bright gold sections in lozenges, quarter-circles, and tessellated leaf designs.
I have enough photos of this single cover to make a little book.
This cover isn't painted (or it mostly isn't painted)—it's got a fine leather filigree overlaid on the sections of gold leaf and blue. It's also exactly the shape of cover I've been thinking was a fairly recent creation—standard codex shape, with a flattened pentagonal flap that closes over the front cover. Turns out, that's an old, old design.

A close-up of Arabic script, primarily in black ink, with the name of god in gold with a fine black outline, and small blue and red marks above the main text in places.
I like this calligraphic style especially, and the little colorful marks.
This is a page from another Q'uran, more sparsely decorated, but with the name of god inscribed in gold. Unfortunately I didn't quite get the round decorations marking the intersections of verses into the photo, but they're interesting, too. The gold leaf is actually a small square, drawn over in black and blue ink to make an almost floral roundel.

A gold book cover, completely covered in dense spiral filigree, raised gold beads, and inset polished carmine and emerald gems. In the center, an arched rectangular frame contains a raised gold figure of Christ on the cross, also surrounded by raised gold beads and inset carmine and emerald gems.
Treasure bindings! Imagine if this was your default image of a 'book.'
I got to see treasure bindings in person, and they are stunning! All that precious materials and skill to make a fitting cover for a book.

A large manuscript, held open in a glass case as though by invisible hands, with five lines of staff music and lyrics on each page and a very large polychrome illumination in the upper-left corner of the right-hand page.
If there were a quarter on this book for scale, it would be the size of one of the music note dots.
This choral is massive, having been written for an entire choir to read from at once. Wonder who was in charge of turning the page?

A narrow book, with the binding running horizontally and the upper page lifted at a right angle to the lower page and table, with fine umber ink sketches of elephants reaching up to a tree, laying doen, and calves playing.
Elephants!
I also loved the wide variety of non-Western books and book-adjacent objects, though many of them didn't photograph well. These elephants are from a Burmese painter's model book—drawings they could use as references for future compositions to speed the process (and to avoid going and finding an elephant to model, I would imagine).

A close-up of the tan border of a painting, the uppermost borders of which show teal, gold, and red geomtric motifs in bands, and a pair of white doves on corners of blue sky. In the margin, fine umber sketches of soldiers riding from the left up to women in saris at a well under a tree, with two more women at right walking to the well and chatting
There's basically a whole story told in the margins of this one.
Constantly delighted by marginalia of all kinds, but the little scenes in the margins of this painting of a pari riding a composite animal—I'm serious, it's an animal depicted as being composed of a variety of other animals interlinked, chasing each other, sometimes eating each other—are just so lovely and fine. The composite animals seem like an artistic oneupmanship game to me:

"Oh, see, Rajan made his bull out of a dozen animals. Well, I'm going to use two dozen for this deer. Your move, Rajan!"

People are people, etc.

A large book with a glossy green leather cover, bordered in tooled and dyed red cleome flowers twining around double black borders, with a faun bust and a pale green snake in the lower left corner.
Glossy covers are very hard to photograph.
And just to prove I do occasionally have interests in periods post-1200 C.E., here is an Art Nouveau/Deco (I really don't remember and am not clear enough on the distinction to make it here) book cover of beautifully tooled and dyed leather.

Not pictured: the best of the best books, which were in a special exhibition and the only area off-limits for photos. I did sketch out a few of the letters and illuminations from the two 12th-century manuscripts in there, and hovered near the pages from the first known four-gospel Bible while a guard explained about the later addition of punctuation to make the text more readable, and how we know the pages were in a codex because of the clear fold lines and stitching holes still visible. There were a few jade books, with incised and gold-filled writing in slabs of beautiful clear or deep green-black jade, and some even-more-stunning-than-the-others Q'urans. Altogether an excellent place for someone like me to spend a day.

And then I zipped to Trinity College just in time to see the Book of Kells exhibit (also, alas, a photography-free zone). The Book itself is quite large, and the text and decorations shockingly small. The little halos of red dots surrounding the illuminations are teeny. Pixel teeny. I think they must have been made with a single-haired brush.

Another of the four books in that exhibit had text with downstrokes maybe two millimeters wide, and all the letters were perfectly formed. I begin to understand medieval scribes' complaints about their aching hands and eyes.

A shot straight down the center of a two-storey library with tall shelves of old, brown and taupe books on either side, and a section of molding separating the two levels of shelves on either side. The dark wood center ceiling is a half-round, spanned by dark arches that spring from the tops of the upper bookshelves. Between each upper set of shelves, the ceiling is lighter, though still arched and paneled in wood.
I know everyone takes this photo, but it's just such a lovely space.
I'm gonna haunt this library when I die. It's so pretty. I love the intersecting barrel arches of the ceiling, and the light pouring in from the stacks is gorgeous.

A large, very dark lap harp, with a deeply ess-curved neck and rounded-out column. The wood is glossy, and the strings are fitted into a narrow brass band inlaid into the lower rim of the neck. The reflactions off the glass case are somewhat confusing, and in the background, tall shelves of tan and brown books, a tall library ladder, and a white bust look on.
This harp is about the size of my torso.
And I got to stand near the purported harp of Brian Boru, and the model for the Irish heraldic harp, and take a photo that has approximately equal amounts of glare as the ones I used to take on school field trips with those little disposable cameras. The glass case didn't play well at all with the sunny day outside. It's a lovely shape (clearly), and larger than I expected, from what's considered a lap harp. I'd love to hear it sounded.

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