I visited the museum to see one particular book, which is actually on display in the museum. Anyone who visits the museum can see it, but they will never see it open. For decades, not even the curators had a clue what was inside it. Its contents are a hidden treasure.
I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful Isabella’s museum would be. I walked into a flower-filled courtyard and looked up at the Venetian-style palazzo. It reminded me of being in Italy, where you can push open a plain wooden church door to find a dazzling feast of colour and beauty.
To see the museum, you visit each uniquely styled room in turn, twice climbing stairs and circling the central courtyard. I wandered through them all, including a tiny chapel, until I reached the final gallery of the museum – the Gothic Room – and the book I had come to see.
The final exhibit in the dark Gothic Room is a portrait by John Sargent of Isabella Stewart Gardner. It is the most prominently displayed image of her in the museum and hangs like a goodbye from the museum’s creator. Below her portrait is a wooden chest, and on the chest sits an enormous book that takes three people to open. Almost none of the curators who walk past it each day as it lies quietly closed inside the Gothic Room is sure what is inside. It looks like a book of spells.
The day I visited, the book was to be opened. It was heaved into a corner of the Tapestry, a big open room on the first floor of the museum, and placed on a lectern on the floor, under a spotlight. The area in which the book lay was roped off, like the VIP area of a nightclub. A cameraman started snapping away at the cover as the entire curatorial and conservation teams of the museum and their artist in residence assembled to watch. It was like a film set, complete with museum visitors peering from behind the rope to catch a glimpse of the star: a book.
When the cameraman was ready and everything was still, three conservators in white gloves gently and slowly opened the book. They were so careful, so curious. As a curator said, ‘It’s like it’s breathing … and we’re not,’ for we were all holding our breath in excitement. I think if Mrs Gardner could have seen the reverence in which her museum treasures are held and the curiosity of everyone watching, she’d have been leaping with joy.
Page one was a beautifully illuminated hymn. It was written by hand to be sung annually on 30 November, the feast of St Andrew. Hidden for decades, the song, in spirit at least, leapt off the page, and almost into sound.
Once everyone had taken in the colourful hymn, the pages of the book were turned and its illuminated pages photographed. As we watched the pages turn, the curator of rare books, Anne Marie Eze, a modern Miss Marple, told us everything she had been able to find out about the mysterious manuscript.
When Anne Marie was hired to research the vast collection of rare books in the museum and archive left by Isabella Stewart Gardner, all that was known about the old book sitting on the chest in the Gothic Room was that it was probably eighteenth century and Spanish, a present from Isabella’s brother-in-law, George. There was a story about it having been rescued from a shipwreck in Naples – there is a lot of water damage on the pages – but no one knew much more than that. Anne Marie/Marple began her detective work by looking at an inscription inside: ‘I brother Girolamo da Nola from the Province of St Catherine wrote this book in the year …’ He hadn’t finished the sentence. Still, Nola is near Naples, and so Anne Marie trawled through publications on Neapolitan illuminated manuscripts until, by luck, she found an identical book that had been scribbled in by the same Girolamo da Nola. Only, this time, he had finished: ‘… for the convent of Santa Maria dell’Arco in the year 1614’.
Santa Maria dell’Arco is an important pilgrimage site near Naples and has been since Easter Day in 1450. On that day, some men were playing handball in the street. On the wall where they played there was a fresco of the Virgin Mary. One man threw the ball at a tree in anger. It bounced off a branch and hit the left cheek of the Virgin Mary. She began to bleed. The little shrine quickly became a sensation. Pilgrims arrived from far and wide to see the miracle. A church was built to accommodate the pilgrims and, in 1593, a medal was struck to commemorate the laying of the first stone of the sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco. The image on the medal is of Mary and Jesus – and in his hand is the fateful ball. This same metalwork image is on the upper cover of the binding of the book in the Gardner Museum.
Once Anne Marie had discovered the provenance of the book, she uncovered ten companion volumes – that makes 11 in all – each bearing the same image of the Madonna dell’Arco with the Christ child holding the ball. Two books had always been kept in the convent in Naples. Eight had somehow ended up just up the coast from Boston, at the Hispanic Society of America in New York. They, perhaps realizing the books in their collection weren’t Spanish, sent them to be auctioned at Christie’s in 2009. The sale never happened, because the convent heard about it and asked for the books to be given back to them. The books were brought home to Naples for a triumphant exhibition held in April 2010. Local Italian newspaper clippings show that the exhibition was a hit.
Each of the 11 manuscripts is a choir-book containing Gregorian chants for the feast days of the church’s calendar. This particular volume runs from 30 November to 26 June, celebrating saints from St Andrew to the Holy Martyrs, John and Paul. The other books cover the rest of the liturgical year.
The books were created between 1601 and 1615 in Naples for the choir of Santa Maria dell’Arco monastery. They are enormous – the volume at the Gardner measures 70 by 44 by 17.5 centimetres – because, like the Gutenberg Bible in the Morgan Library (Gardner referred to Morgan and Frick as ‘squillionaires’, for they could spend more on their collections than she could on hers), they were designed for big groups to read, or in this case, sing from, at the same time. The monastery’s choir would have gathered around the appropriate book for the day, in the church, to sing their hearts out.
The musical notes are written in neumes, big square notes, unlike the chubbier, round notes we are more familiar with. The music and the Latin text were written by Fra Girolamo da Nola, a scribe-monk from the town of Nola. At certain points in the book, he wrote one word vertically at the bottom of the page. He wasn’t odd: the vertical words are called ‘catchwords’ and are like our page numbers: they told the binder in which order to gather the pages for the book. Girolamo signed each book at the end and handed it over to a workshop of artists run by the painter Giovan Battista Rosa, who created thick, vivid, gold, red and blue illuminated images of the saints.
How nine of the books left Naples and ended up on the East Coast of America is a mystery. Anne Marie thinks that George Gardner may well have bought this book in 1887 when staying in a monastery near Naples during a tour of Europe. He said it had been rescued from a shipwreck, and the water damage suggests this is possible – but where was the ship going? We don’t know yet. But we do know that the eight volumes in New York are now back in Italy and this book in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is the only one we know of that is away from its home in Santa Maria dell’ Arco.
So, if you ever visit Naples and see pilgrims travelling to the shrine of the Madonna dell’Arco, carrying poles with the sacred image on top, think of the huge book in Boston, decorated with the image of the Madonna, her child and the ball that changed everything. Or, if you visit Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, her homage to beauty, study her portrait, then look at the wooden chest below. On top of the chest, the book will sit, firmly shut – unless you’re lucky and visit a rare books evening at the Gardner, where, maybe, it might be open for an hour. Now you have glimpsed inside it and know its hidden story, and how one day it was opened with much ceremony and its songs burst forth in beauty.
[Hans Guggenheim’s well from Mali]
He keeps this in his living room, along with shelves full of African artefacts.
[The mysterious book]
It looks llke a book of spells.
[The Gothic Room]
The final exhibit in the dark Gothic Room
is the portrait by John Sargent of Isabella Stewart Gardener. It hangs like a goodbye from the museum’s creator. Below her portrait is a wooden chest, and on this chest sits an enormous book that takes three people to open.
[Inside the book]
Hidden for decades the songs, in spirit at least, leapt off the page and almost into sound.
I FIRST HEARD THE WORDS of the Diamond Sutra on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Frances Wood, curator of Chinese works at the British Library, was the guest and she chose, as her first disc, a recording of Buddhist monks and nuns singing it.
I had the radio on in the background, but when I heard the enchanting sound of clanging bells and soulful song I stopped to listen carefully.
Before long, the show’s presenter, Kirsty Young, piped up: ‘That was a recording of Buddhist monks and nuns of the Fo Guang Shan temple in Taiwan singing the Diamond Sutra … You said, Frances Wood, that we accrued merit just by playing this?’ Frances confirmed, ‘We did indeed.’
Frances went on to talk about the British Library’s copy of the Diamond Sutra. It has the date it was printed marked on the last page: AD 868. This date makes it a world treasure, because it is the earliest dated printed book in the world.
The Diamond Sutra is a teaching given by the Buddha to his disciple Subhuti. ‘Sutra’ is the Sanskrit word for teaching, and the Buddha asked Subhuti to name the lesson ‘The Diamond of Transcendent Wisdom’. He said the words of the sutra would cut like a diamond blade through worldly illusion to teach those who read or chanted it what is real and everlasting. In the teaching, the Buddha explains that chanting the sutra creates merit, or good fortune.
Perhaps listeners to Radio 4 that morning felt better for hearing it. I know I did, which is why I wrote ‘The Diamond Sutra’ down on a piece of paper and gave Frances Wood a call. She kindly agreed to let me see the beautiful work of art at the British Library.
Usually it is kept in a vault in the library but, as luck would have it, Frances was planning to get it out to show to a group of Asian art students from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She invited me to join them, and the following week there we all were, gathered around seven beautiful printed pages.
The Diamond Sutra is not a book in the way we normally encounter them: it’s a scroll nearly 5 metres long. The first page, or frontispiece, is a wonderful and intricate drawing of the Buddha in a garden, giving the Diamond Sutra teaching to Subhuti. Watching over them are two lions and a group of Buddhist beings, including two angelic creatures on clouds. It is a very gentle, intricate scene, one of the loveliest images I have ever seen.
The six pages that follow are the teachings the Buddha gave to Subhuti in the garden, laid out in beautiful, delicate Chinese characters on yellow, mulberry paper. The characters, like the frontispiece, were created with woodblocks – they were carved into wood and then printed on to paper. Some of the SOAS students were Chinese, and they remarked on how beautifully shaped the characters are. They were really happy to see the Diamond Sutra and posed for photographs to show to their families.
The Buddha gave the teaching in India, in a language called Pali. His lessons were passed on first of all by word of mouth, then gradually some of his teachings were written down, first in Pali and then in Sanskrit. This version of the Diamond Sutra was translated from the Sanskrit into Chinese by one of the best Buddhist scholars and translators in China at the time, Kumārajīva. He wasn’t really a fan of translated works, even though this was his skill. He said that reading texts in translation ‘was like eating rice someone else had already chewed’.
In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha is thought to be trying to help Subhuti let go of his limited notions of reality and enlightenment. In four lines near the end, the Buddha talks about impermanence:
All conditioned phenomena
Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, or shadows;
Like drops of dew, or flashes of lightning;
Thusly should they be contemplated.
It’s best to listen to the sutra or, if you can, chant it, as otherwise it’s like reading a musical score without playing the music. You need to hear it aloud or sing it yourself to really feel the effect it has on your consciousness. One of the SOAS students had an app called ‘iDharma’ on his iPhone, so we listened to the Diamond Sutra being chanted as we looked at it. It was a magical moment.
In China, when a cat purrs, the Chinese phrase is ‘the cat is reciting the sutras’ and, just as a purring cat is a lovely sound to hear, so too is the Diamond Sutra. Why not have a listen?
Buddhists all over the world chant the Diamond Sutra today, in the same way it has been chanted for over a millennium. They do this to create merit.
Within the text of the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha says, ‘If a good son or good daughter dedicates lifetimes as many as the sands in the River Ganges to charitable acts, and there were another person who memorized as much as one four-line verse of this scripture and taught it to others, the merit of the latter would be by far greater.’
This is also the reason why this particular version of the text was made. On the back page, there is a dedication, which reads:
Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 15th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong [11 May 868].
Wang Jie – we do not know who he was – created this version, and probably many others just like it, which have not survived, to create good fortune for his parents.
If there were once lots of copies of this exact version of the Diamond Sutra made in AD 868, why is this the only one that survives? This is what I find really interesting. This world treasure only exists today because it was considered to be in too poor a condition to be used in a temple.
It was found in a cave near Dunhuang, a town on the old Silk Road in north-west China. The cave was part of a network of caves called the ‘Caves of a Thousand Buddhas’, filled with thousands of other Buddhist texts, sculptures and paintings.
No one knows for sure why the creations were put into the caves, but one likely explanation is that these Buddhist works of art were no longer of good enough quality to be used in the local temples but, as they were religious items, they could not be thrown away. Instead, they were hidden, walled up and forgotten about for centuries. We don’t know this for sure, but it is what Frances Wood believes to have happened.
As time passed, the contents of the cave, once not fit for use, became rare and precious treasures, and are now conserved in libraries and museums. The Diamond Sutra, because of its date, is the most important object from the caves.
It made its way from China to England because of an archaeologist called Sir Marc Aurel Stein. He heard about an Aladdin’s cave of Buddhist treasures on the grapevine and managed to find it in 1900. He bought the scroll and a hoard of other delights from a monk guarding the caves, and carried them across land by camel and yak, to London. His contemporaries described what he did as ‘the most daring and adventurous raid upon the ancient world that any archaeologist has attempted’.
Initially, the Diamond Sutra was kept in the Natural History Museum, but it was moved to the British Museum, where many of Stein’s treasures are still stored, in the vaults – silk paintings, carved tablets, pots and figures and then to the British Library.
For the first hundred years after its arrival in London, the sutra was in poor condition. Then, about 20 years ago, the British Library decided to restore it. Mark Bernard, the conservator, used a brilliant technique. He took tiny strips of paper, laid them out on his desk – Frances said they looked like millipedes – and used them to protect the back of the thin paper exactly where it needed it, rather than simply backing up the entire scroll with fresh paper.
Before he would allow himself to touch the Diamond Sutra, he practised for years on manuscripts of less importance from the same Chinese cave: he wanted to understand perfectly the fibres of the paper.
Then he spent a thousand painstaking hou
rs working on the Diamond Sutra, mostly at weekends so he wouldn’t be disturbed. He removed glue and watermarks, and repaired tiny holes in the paper so that now it is in almost as good a condition as it would have been when it was first used in a temple in China in the 800s. As Frances told Kirsty and the Radio 4 listeners – and pointed out to us in the British Library: ‘You can even see a trace of an indent of the wooden block that had been pressed down when it was first created.’
You can see a copy of it online, and virtually turn the pages. It might go on display occasionally, but it’s not likely to stay out for long. Paper is a delicate material and doesn’t react well to light, so it is best if it’s kept inside its wooden box in a special vault – where gas rather than water is sprayed in the event of a fire – kept company by the other most precious books in the British Library.
It is strange to think this exquisite Diamond Sutra, the oldest dated printed book in the world, only survived for 1,145 years because, back in the late 800s, it was considered too worn-out for everyday use. Its adventure is somewhat similar to that of the cuneiform tablets from King Ashurbanipal’s library, now in the British Museum stores – they only survive today because they were set on fire by the Babylonians millenia ago.
The tales of the ancient library and the Diamond Sutra remind me of a story my meditation teacher tells called ‘Good Luck, Bad Luck, Who Knows?’
When a farmer’s horse runs away, all his fellow villagers exclaim ‘What bad luck!’ Much to the villagers’ confusion, the farmer replies, ‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ A week later, his horse returns with a whole herd of horses it has recruited while wandering in the hills. The villagers exclaim in wonder, ‘Oh, Farmer! What good luck!’ The farmer just shrugs and simply says, ‘Good luck, bad luck – who knows?’The story continues like this, with a series of things happening to the farmer and his son. The moral of the tale is that what might seem awful could be good fortune in disguise and we should take things as they come, without judgement.
The Secret Museum Page 19