When the Virtual Trumps Reality: ‘The Prayer Book of Claude de France’

Without meaning to do so, the Morgan Library has created a triumph of conceptual art: the smallest art exhibition in the world. “The Prayer Book of Claude de France,” as the exhibition is called, consists of nothing other than “The Prayer Book of Claude de France.” At 2 3/4 by 2 inches, the exhibition and the book are both so small that they can fit in the palm of your hand. That may not sound like much until you realize that this illuminated miniature contains 132 scenes from the lives of Christ, the Virgin, the apostles, and sundry saints. As such, it is a gallery unto itself, with roughly as many works, each with roughly as many details as the maximalist canvases of J.M.W. Turner that are now on view at the Met. To complete the conceptual tautology, this work, painted in Tour in 1517, is a masterpiece by the artist known only as the Master of Claude de France.In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin’s overrated essay of 1936, the author famously asserted that, because of the power of photography mechanically to record paintings, sculptures, and the like, it followed that the work of art, that object of almost cultic avidity for the Europeans of his day, would necessarily lose its “aura.” In other words, no one would feel the need to stand before the original when one could own a reproduction. The folly of this idea will be self-evident to anyone with the remotest sensitivity to visual art. No matter how good a reproduction, you have to stand in the presence of the real thing in order to know it face to face. You have to bear physical witness to each pucker and weave of canvas, each swerve of the burin, each splash of puddled ink in an Old Master drawing. Only then can you truly say that you have seen the work of art. To do otherwise is cheating, like watching the movie version of “Moby Dick” rather than reading the unabridged original.It was with such convictions that I rushed over to the Morgan to see the tiny commodity in question. What a waste of time! Not because the object is lacking in worthiness, but because the Morgan’s own Web site offers a means of examining the book — and thus the exhibition — that, in this case, far surpasses any direct encounter. The problem with the exhibition is that the object is behind glass, which means you cannot get too close, that the lighting is muted to protect the fragile paints and, above all else, that only one spread of two pages is open to inspection.But on the Web site, you are afforded yet one more testament, in case you needed it, to why the Internet is such a sublime conduit of knowledge. Every page of the manuscript is there in living color, and the zoom mechanism is so powerful and so precise that you can get in closer than if you were hunched over the real thing with a strong magnifying glass. Zoom in to one of the figures of Christ, scarcely the size of a fingernail, and you see the tiny head in perfect focus. Zooming in deeper, you see the beard on the head, then the hairs on the beard, then the point at which the whole thing dissolves into abstract art, as the decontextualized strokes of the artist’s single-hair brush merge with the warped and mottled surface of the vellum. Quite aside from the artistic value of the miniature, the thrill of the technology, by itself, justifies a visit to the Web site (themorgan.org/exhibitions/claude.asp).The miniature in question was commissioned for Queen Claude of France, who married Francois I in 1514, when she was 14, and bore him seven children before she died at the age of 24. This volume’s finely penned Latin prayers are a perfect instance of conspicuous consumption. Nearly three generations after the invention of printing, there was no practical reason for the queen’s mother, Anne de Bretagne, to commission this work for her daughter. Rather, it was the delight in luxury itself, as well, perhaps, as the spirit of sacrifice that brought this work into existence. It was created at the moment when, for the first time, the humanistic mood of the Florentine Renaissance was beginning to filter into France, and the book is a dazzling, if hesitant, expression of that nation’s gradual release from the still prevailing medieval spirit.For the sake of journalistic accuracy, I should point out that another illuminated manuscript, the “Prayer Book of Anne de Bretagne,” is displayed near the “Prayer Book of Claude de France.” Should you wish, you can therefore conclude that the exhibition is twice as large as I let on. But either way, it is still the smallest exhibition I have ever seen.Until September 28 (225 Madison Ave., between 36th and 37th streets, 212-685-0008).

When the Virtual Trumps Reality: ‘The Prayer Book of Claude de France’

When the Virtual Trumps Reality: ‘The Prayer Book of Claude de France’

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