Enlightened Librarian: An inventory of libraries 1

An inventory of libraries 1 · Dec 22, 10:28 PM

My friend Madhava sends me this weekend op-ed from The Times by Ben Macintyre, who waxes with some eloquence on the enduring place of libraries. He rightly points to the durability of libraries as “citadels of memory,” and he also mentions the uncanny static electricity their dusty surroundings tend to exert:

Libraries are not places of dry scholarship but living sensuality. In Love Story Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal get together with the library as backdrop; in Dr Zhivago, Uri and Lara find one another in a library. I have a friend, now a well-known journalist, who became overcome by lust in the British Library and was discovered by a librarian making love behind the stacks in the empty quarter of Humanities with a woman he had met in the tearoom. The librarian was apparently most understanding, and said it happened quite a lot.

I have no library encounters to compete with that, but it does seem timely to reexamine the role of libraries as physical buildings where people gather and do things. This is especially true, as Macintyre notes, in light of Google’s announcement last week to render some of the world’s great library books into just another search result. To me, the enduring value of libraries is not just that they are repositories for things to read—or places to hook up—but that they are places outside of churches or temples where individuals literally and formally encounter light. I think of libraries as secular temples whose god is merely, and entirely, light itself. Readers, and by turns libraries, cannot exist without light, and to me the mark of a library’s greatness is its architect’s recognition of that essential dance. Libraries exist in a delicate relationship with daylight; they may invite it wholeheartedly with skylights, coax it reservedly with the mediating influences of dark woods, or introduce it conditionally through the intercessions of archways and colonnades. Libraries work with light and turn it to civic, secular purposes. The enlightenment follows from that. And the role of libraries as clean, well-lighted spaces its also their greatest, and increasingly most profound, service to society.

And thus, in no particular order, I shall gradually accumulate an inventory of exceptional libraries I have seen, and the light I have witnessed there.

A few years ago I spent a day and a half in Florence, which followed most of a week spent in Bologna, hammered by jetlag, talking to children’s book publishers here, and nervously representing my employer. Florence, by then, was an exotic retreat from marketing tip sheets and cover art, although just as overstimulating in its press of bodies and constant, impinging shards of history. I wandered like an idiot. And, completely by accident, I discovered two of the city’s most famous libraries.

1. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, San Lorenzo

Giulio de’ Medici, Pope Clement VII, commissioned Michelangelo to design a library to house the Medicis’ manuscript collection in 1524, although it wasn’t opened until 1571—more than three decades after Michelangelo had left Florence for Rome—and remained unfinished even then. Michelangelo’s plan called for a multi-storey vestibule with a grand stairway leading to an long, narrow reading room flanked by windows on both sides. Entering the library, one is very much aware that the two spaces work in concert, and are intended to produce an epiphany.

If it’s a bright day—and in Tuscany the odds of that are good—one enters the dimly lit vestibule in sudden darkness, disoriented until the eyes adjust. And once you can see, the chamber itself is disrupting. The room is all classical severity—rectangular niches, columns and square angles—except for the central of three parallel flights of stairs. Those stairs seem to spill from the room above like successive waves, divided into three groups, each with a different geometrical curve. The effect is startling and, in its way, more than a little sexy. The room wants you to lose your bearings. It says: climb these stairs and you will float away from everything you know.

And what you enter is a box of light. At the time I couldn’t help thinking how much the library resembles a brightly lit schoolbus. On either side of the aisle are rows of benches and lecturns, where everybody in the room faces the same direction, travelling together. I couldn’t help thinking, too, how that room must have held, like a schoolbus, an immensely raucous energy in all that silent reading. All those frontiers being breached and travelled through….

The original plan for the library apparently called for a single row of desks in the middle of the room, flanked by intricate geometrical patterns on the floor. Floor panels that had been hidded by the desks were discovered in 1774, and their precise geometry has prompted an extended analysis by a British architect and a mathematical exploration by two British academics. The latter paper is amusing and worth a look. Michelangelo seems to have created an extended play on the notion of creating a form, then filling it almost to bursting with complementary and opposing forms, in the way that the library itself fills with light that pours down the slippery stairs into the vestibule below.

2. Convent of San Marco

A Dominican monastery from its construction in 1436, the Convent of San Marco is best known as the place where Fra Angelico painted frescos in the cells of his fellow monks. Thus, if you were in the right line of work, you might have woken to the Matins bell and a crepuscular vision of this or this.

It is thought that Fra Angelico got his start as an illuminator of missals and manuscripts, and wandering the hallway among the 20 cells on the convent’s upper floor, it was clear to me that each monk would have slept and prayed in a particularly intimate relationship with one illustration. This was a way of living inside a book that never closed, whose single image grew to fill one’s entire life. I’ve read elsewhere¹ about speculations that the visual intensity of illuminated books promoted great skill at interpreting visual metaphors and unpacking the significance of iconography. It would make sense, especially if you’ve read The Name of the Rose, that the friars would have been intimately attached to books and the parade of imagery therein—books were not only the source of their faith, but contained the virtual reality of their time. In their cells at San Marco, the monks would have been connected to the life of books even when apart from them, each sleeping and praying next to an outsized gateway into the life of images and text. That portal filled the wall opposite the material doorway, which led merely into the hall.

And the visual and imaginative density of the convent is what makes the library—and the spare grace of its light—so profound. The architect Michelozzo designed it to be 180 metres long and 36 wide, with three parallel aisles; as one enters the eye is drawn down two rows of columns flanking the central aisle, then upward to the vaulted ceiling. Emerging from the cramped cells², one’s sense, first of all, is of immense space—a place that frees the mind. Thinking of it now, it occurs to me that the library’s side aisles seem constructed to resemble the convent’s cloister. If that’s the case, Michelozzo created an ingenious metaphor. The fresco in each cell encourages travel into interior worlds—one steps through the picture on the wall and into the imagination. Entering the library, though, one walks symbolically outside into the real world—filled with the weight and freight of ideas.

To me, though, the most moving aspect of the library is the weightless quality of its light. I walked from cell to cell dizzied by images, but when I entered the library the images lost their saturated brightness and dissolved. In a convent of such dense imaginings, the library’s walls are white plaster, and the library’s light—entering at eye level from the windows along each wall—is the light of blank parchment. Here was a place meant to embody the infinite potential of the unwritten page. This library says: all the pictures and words in the world only tell part of the story. I think of this library also as a place where the friars could create their own momentary frescoes on the walls, simply by looking up from the books they were studying to let the images sink in.

¹Michael Camille. Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England. London: Reakton Books, 1998.
²All but one is about two and a half metres square; the exception is the double-sized quarters reserved for visits of the convent’s patron, Cosimo de’ Medici.

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