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May-June 2008
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 The Dumbarton Oaks library, originally assembled to make sense of the Blisses’ collections and their gardens, has grown into a staple of scholarship for all three research fields. Their 10,000 volumes in Byzantine studies have grown to 150,000, plus half a million images of various sizes and formats. The pre-Columbian collection now numbers 32,000 volumes, up from the 2,000 collected by Robert Bliss. And the garden and landscape library, first curated by Mildred Bliss, grew from 5,000 volumes at the time of the Blisses’ conveyance to 27,000 today. The holdings of the library as a whole grow by 3,000 to 4,000 volumes a year. Its home, a new building that opened in 2005, is a dramatic improvement: previously, books were kept in the main house, “literally shelved in closets and under stairs,” says library director Sheila Klos. “Every time the fire marshal came through, he said, ‘You shouldn’t have books here.’ We said, ‘Just a little longer.’ ... We were shelved on eight different levels, four of which had no elevator or book-lift access, so everything was carried.” The library holds many rare and important resources, including the Princeton Index of Iconographic Art, one of only five copies of this card catalog in the world. Brandeis University anthropologist Charles Golden, a pre-Columbian fellow this year, says the library’s excavation reports have been particularly useful for his effort to understand why the Maya destroyed a royal palace after a sixth-century military defeat and rebuilt it, in different form, on the same site half a century later. The project requires “a shovelful-by-shovelful description of what came out of the ground and how it came out of the ground,” says Golden. “The only place to find that is the original excavation reports. Not all libraries are willing to buy them for the use of just a few scholars, but Dumbarton Oaks has them.” And the fellows find that the library’s small size and ease of navigation make for productive research. “At Widener,” says Mavroudi, “you have to walk several minutes—sometimes half an hour!—within the building to go from one book to the next. If you are playing with an idea in your mind, maybe the idea is not the same by the time you reach the book. At Dumbarton Oaks, it’s just one floor up. It’s an immediate satisfaction of curiosity that allows one’s mind to work faster.”
While many are unaware of Dumbarton Oaks’ existence, even fewer know of the breadth of its offerings. Klos recalls a recent conversation with a book dealer who said, “Oh, Dumbarton Oaks, you do pre-Columbian.” Klos’s reply: “No, no, there’s so much more!” To members of the general public, the estate’s name may be familiar in the context of international relations: late in World War II, representatives of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and nationalist China gathered there to hammer out the details of the United Nations. Washington, D.C., residents may know the gardens (unlisted in many guidebooks), but even they often don’t realize that the museums are open to the public. (For visiting information, see www.doaks.org.) 
Photograph courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks Curator and museum director Gudrun Bühl Both Ziolkowski and museum director Gudrun Bühl are eager to increase the estate’s public profile. Bühl edited Dumbarton Oaks: The Collections, a 380-page book being published this spring under the Dumbarton Oaks imprint. With photographs of, and descriptive essays about, more than 170 objects from the Byzantine, pre-Columbian, and house collections, it is the first attempt to represent the holdings, in color, in all their breadth. (Among the smattering of previous books, some focused on the estate’s history, some on the gardens, some on one museum collection, often with images in black and white or no illustrations at all.) A recent wave of renovations will also help. The new library building cost $18 million and comprises 43,000 square feet. The museums, closed for renovations since December 2005, were scheduled to reopen in April. And renovations to the Blisses’ former residence—which their sundry additions expanded to an awe-inspiring 77,000 square feet—were completed last year. (The building comprises offices for staff and fellows, rooms for concerts and lectures, the museum galleries and storage, the publications department, and a rare book room that was the only part of the library to stay behind after the new building’s construction. The holdings, all from the Blisses’ collection, include a first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a signed copy of Leaves of Grass, and a fifteenth-century illustrated manual of medicinal plants.) The new museum galleries—the first update since initial installation in the 1960s—attempt to integrate the collections and make them more user-friendly: for example, by adding new labels and educational display formats. One case holds a map of the Byzantine Empire, which serves to educate viewers but also to display Byzantine coins, arranged according to where they were minted. 
Photograph courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections A pendant representing the crocodile god, one of the most widespread deities among the pre-Columbian peoples of what are now Costa Rica and Panama. Made of a gold and copper alloy, the pendant is believed to be between 500 and 1,300 years old. The exhibits aim to be succinct, not exhaustive. “If you want the person to stop and look closer, then you have to cut back on the number of objects in one case,” says Bühl. But, she says, “It hurts. You want to show what you have.” Objects will rotate in and out of displays, while a new study space in the basement allows scholars to view objects from storage by appointment. Bühl tries to use objects’ settings to suggest their original uses. “Most of these objects were never meant to be independent pieces of art,” she says. Floor mosaics, for example, were walked on—and so a mosaic from a Roman bathhouse floor adorns the museum’s entrance lobby, even though the constant foot traffic is a nightmare from a preservation standpoint. But the displays stop short of wholesale reconstruction. One case contains early Byzantine liturgical instruments, including a reconstructed altar with a tabletop, chalices, a flabellum (a fan used during services to keep flies away from the communion host), and a liturgical book cover. It is significant, says Bühl, that this altar diorama appears inside a case, rather than in a full-scale reproduction of a chapel: “People should always know that these objects are lost to the original context.” 
Photograph courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections This jade figurine from the Olmec culture, which flourished from about 1200 B.C. to 400 B.C. along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, was the first pre-Columbian object Robert Bliss acquired. It appears in an exhibit about the Blisses that was installed for the museums’ grand reopening in April. The pre-Columbian collection resides in a distinctive honeycomb-shaped structure, designed by the architect Philip Johnson ’27, B.Arch. ’43, that was added as a wing of the main house in 1963. The holdings focus on Mexico and areas south. The post-renovation orientation of the displays is geographic, and each gallery also has a theme. One—featuring objects from the classic Veracruz culture, on the east coast of modern Mexico—informs viewers about the culture’s widespread ball games, believed to have served both ritualistic and recreational functions; the athletic equipment on display includes stone elbow and knee protectors. In another gallery, visitors learn about Maya religion by viewing a bust of the maize god and a bowl with a carved image of the chocolate god. The Blisses snubbed the sensibilities of their time in favor of collecting pieces that brought them pleasure. Just as they were early Byzantine enthusiasts, Robert Bliss “was ahead of his time” in collecting pre-Columbian artifacts, says Bühl: his collection, first displayed at the National Gallery, was one of the earliest to recognize the objects’ artistic value, as well as their status as historical artifacts. A special exhibit for the grand reopening features his first acquisition, a nine-inch-tall jade Olmec statuette he found at an antique shop in Paris in 1912. Here, the figure assumes a double meaning, commenting on both Olmec culture and the Blisses’ life history. The main house, which dates to 1801, is a museum in itself, exquisitely decorated with floors of exotic Hawaiian wood and furniture collected during the Blisses’ travels around the world. After buying the property, they added a greenhouse, a stable (which by the time they completed it was a garage instead), an orchid house (today a periodical room attached to the new library), servants’ quarters, the museum wings, and, of course, the gardens. But their main structural addition was the music room. 
Photograph courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks The Blisses spent just seven years at Dumbarton Oaks after Robert Bliss retired from the Foreign Service in 1933; they gave their estate to Harvard in 1940. This photograph shows them in 1938 in the music room, which they designed as a setting for chamber-music performances and spared no expense in decorating—the sixteenth-century mantelpiece of carved limestone came from a chateau in France’s Dordogne region. Today, the room is the setting for a monthly concert series presented in accordance with the Blisses’ wishes. In decorating this room, they spared no expense. The appointments include a fireplace with a hulking sixteenth-century limestone mantelpiece that stretches to the 15-foot ceiling. Its previous home was the Château de Théobon, in the Dordogne. (The Blses had to have the foundations of the house reinforced beneath the spot where it would sit.) They also commissioned a multicolored, ornate ornamental ceiling as well, copied from a chateau in the Loire Valley. A monthly, public concert series fulfills their wish to have the room used for chamber-music performances. On one December evening, the concert is by the vocal ensemble Pomerium. (Fittingly, its medieval Latin name translates as garden or orchard.) In the minutes before the concert begins, people crane their necks unabashedly to stare at the ceiling, recently restored to its original state after years of bad restorations that had, staff members ruefully recall, left cherubs looking like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Along the sides of the room are a work by El Greco; an early Renaissance painting depicting the martyrdom of Saint Peter, painted in the fifteenth century by Jacobello del Fiore; and a wooden sculpture of the Virgin holding the Christ Child, carved as a model for a life-size version by the fifteenth-century German sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. The ensemble sings in front of a Palladian arch; tapestries from the fifteenth century hang above the singers’ heads. The scene is framed by the floor of red Verona marble, the Italianate columns, the gilded bronze wall sconces—designed for candles but now electrified—and the massive silvered-brass light fixtures, said to be from the cathedral of Segovia in Spain. The program is songs of Christmas, but not those that would be familiar to modern ears. The ensemble sings in Latin, starting with a monophonic Gregorian chant version of each song—haunting in its sparsity—followed by its layered and textured polyphonic elaboration, like a stove with all its burners going at once, different dishes bubbling and boiling. Some listeners are undoubtedly considering this a commentary on stylistic change between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; others, just as certainly, are simply appreciating the lush sounds. The Blisses’ names may be unfamiliar to many listeners, but this scene fulfills their wishes just the same.
Elizabeth Gudrais ’01 is associate editor of this magazine.  
 
 
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