January 2013 News and Events

From the Archives: The Kohana San Book

Lisa Wainwright — 2013-01-09T20:05:00Z

Before her marriage to Robert Woods Bliss in 1908, Mildred Barnes Bliss was a nascent collector of rare books and prints. This book, Kohana San (front and back cover shown below), is preserved in the Dumbarton Oaks Archives and has Mildred Barnes’s bookmark from her country house in Sharon, Connecticut. Twenty-two silk-tied pages with woodblock illustrations on double-folded, mulberry wood-based crepe paper (chirimen) tell in English verse the story of a Geisha of Kobe (Kohana San or “Little Flower”). This is the first edition of the book, published in 1892 by Takejiro Hasegawa, Tokyo. The binding is in the traditional Japanese style known as fukuro-toji (“pouch binding”) where sheets of paper are printed with woodblocks on only one side and then folded in half with the printed side out. The folded sheets are stacked together, and the unit is tied along the spine with two double-hole bindings of silk threads. A colophon in Japanese on the first page gives publication data and identifies the woodblock printer as Komiyo Sojiro. Hasegawa’s books were usually printed in editions of 500.

2013 Dumbarton Oaks Anniversaries

Lisa Wainwright — 2013-01-09T20:02:35Z

In 2013 Dumbarton Oaks will celebrate the fifty-year anniversaries of two important constructions: the Rare Book Reading Room, which houses our rare and unique books and manuscripts; and the Philip Johnson Pavilion, which displays our collection of Pre-Columbian works of art. The two wings, though both completed in 1963, could not be more distinct in style.

: Interior view of the Rare Book Reading Room

The Rare Book Reading Room, which stands at the southwest end of the main building, was designed by the architect Frederic Rhinelander King (1887–1972). King, cousin of the novelist Edith Wharton, belonged to the same social orbit as Robert Woods Bliss (1875–1962) and Mildred Barnes Bliss (1879–1969), who donated Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard University in 1940. King’s design, aimed to recall the grandeur of the French eighteenth century, is well suited to the historical nature of the rare books, drawings, and manuscripts it houses. The look speaks to a strong strain within American culture that seeks out inspiration in the Old World and Enlightenment.

: Exterior view of the Philip Johnson Pavilion

Projecting to the north of the main building, in the opposite direction from the Reading Room, are the eight domes, with a central fountain, that constitute the Philip Johnson Pavilion. Commissioned in 1959 to showcase the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art, it is remarkable for its interaction with the trees surrounding it. Thanks to their curves and glassiness, the octet of curving cells blends in with the nature around it, and the objects displayed within seem to float against the world outside. At the same time the architecture gestures to the Islamic world, particularly to Turkish structures of the Ottoman period. In sum, the Pavilion is anything but traditional European in either its design or its artworks (if the term artworks is not itself a Western imposition!).

Robert Bliss did not survive to witness the completion of the two edifices, since he died the year before, but his widow Mildred lived on through most of the decade. It is a tribute to the scope and flexibility they retained even as octogenarians that they should have envisioned a complex of buildings that could harmonize two additions as distinct in style and function as the Rare Book Reading Room and Philip Johnson Pavilion have been for the past half century.

To mark the anniversaries, we will celebrate not just the spaces themselves but also the uses for which they were established. The Blisses intended their buildings, grounds, and collections to serve both advanced scholars and the general public. Without interrupting experts who need library materials and without jeopardizing the proper protection of those materials, we are planning a series of small guided tours to the Rare Book Reading Room and the Philip Johnson Pavilion. Visits will be complemented by an ambitious calendar of talks, lectures, workshops, colloquia, and symposia. Through such activities we do our part to uphold the causes of the humanities and advanced research, while familiarizing the public with our complex missions—in historic preservation, innovative scholarship, and broad dissemination—and demonstrating their ultimate oneness.

50 Years of Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oaks

Lisa Wainwright — 2013-01-09T20:05:00Z

Robert Woods Bliss collected with passion and exacting care. Between 1912 and his death in 1962, he acquired works of art from some thirty ancient American cultures, many of them previously unstudied. His predilection for fine workmanship, high quality materials, and interesting or unusual designs shaped the collection – and in no small part, the emerging field of Pre-Columbian studies.

Committed to the dissemination of knowledge about Pre-Columbian art, Bliss collaborated widely to publish and exhibit his pieces. The National Gallery of Art hosted an exhibition of Bliss objects from 1947 to 1962. In 1963, wishing to display his collection in perpetuity, Bliss donated it to Dumbarton Oaks for installation in the museum’s new Pre-Columbian wing, designed by Philip Johnson.

In 2013, Dumbarton Oaks celebrates 50 years of Pre-Columbian art in the Philip Johnson Pavilion. Select artworks on loan from international and American museums join the permanent collection: a gilded Mixtec atlatl, a painted Maya figurine, ancient glyphs, and delicate Andean mosaics all highlight recent research and create new connections and contrasts between objects and cultures. After five decades, the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art continues to incite scholarly inquiry, reveal ancient craftsmanship, and delight the eye of the viewer.

Tyler Fellows in Residence

Lisa Wainwright — 2013-01-09T20:02:36Z

In 2010, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection inaugurated a new pre-doctoral fellowship scheme, the William R. Tyler Fellowships. Eligible applicants are Harvard graduate students working on dissertations in art history, archaeology, history, or literature of the Pre-Columbian or Mediterranean/Byzantine worlds. The Fellowship funds a first year of research travel overseas and a second year in residence at Dumbarton Oaks to complete the dissertation and contribute to an institutional project that is related to the fellows’ research. We are pleased to introduce two members of the first cohort of Tyler Fellows in Byzantine Studies, who have been in residence at Dumbarton Oaks since the fall of 2012.

Konstantina Karterouli

Assimilation of Byzantine Art in the West of the Late Twelfth Century

I am a doctoral student at Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, writing my dissertation on the assimilation of Byzantine visual properties and objects into Western art during the late twelfth century. As a second-year Tyler Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, I also have the privilege of working with Museum Director Gudrun Bühl on an institutional project: the creation of an online exhibit that will accompany and supplement an on-site exhibition of four New Testament manuscripts in the Dumbarton Oaks Museum collection. The exhibition will open in April 2013, in conjunction with the Byzantine Studies Symposium “The New Testament in Byzantium.” All four manuscripts are being digitized for display on the Dumbarton Oaks website. Textual, iconographic, and comparative analyses of the manuscripts will accompany the online exhibit, to provide a contextual and historical perspective that will both enhance the museum experience and make these masterpieces available to distant viewers.

Jakub Kabala

Frontier Spaces: Imagining Eastern Europe, 800–1000

I am a graduate student in the Department of History at Harvard University, working on a dissertation on Slavic borderlands between the eighth and tenth centuries. Specifically, I analyze the imagination and representation of Byzantium’s Balkan frontier and the Carolingian/Ottonian eastern frontier, drawing on written sources as well as archeological finds.

As a second year Tyler Fellow, I have the opportunity to contribute to the Dumbarton Oaks online catalogue of Byzantine lead seals. Several thousand of the 17,000 lead seals in the Dumbarton Oaks collection carry geographical information indicating the location where they were struck. My task is to create an interactive digital map of these several thousand seals, to be added to the online catalogue. The map will enable not only the localization of individual seals, but also a visualization of searches across time, space, as well as title and office of the seal owner.

Athena Ruby Font

Lisa Wainwright — 2013-01-09T20:02:35Z

Many of the objects in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine collection—seals, coins, and silverware—have Greek and Latin inscriptions that exhibit unusual letters, ligatures, and decorations. Because the distinctive shapes of these glyphs are important for interpreting the material, the catalogues published across more than seven decades have been typographically adventurous. Now Dumbarton Oaks is making available a comprehensive OpenType font for the publication of scholarly editions of Byzantine inscriptions. Named after a predecessor font, Athena, and Dumbarton Oaks Publications Manager Glenn Ruby (d. 2004), Athena Ruby is designed to represent Byzantine inscriptions in Latin and Greek, and is suitable to both print and digital publications.

Innovative glyphs from the age of hot metal printing gave way to digital counterparts when Nicolas Oikonomidès, Dumbarton Oaks advisor in sigillography, oversaw the development of Sealshort, the world’s first font for Byzantine inscriptions. His Collection of Dated Byzantine Lead Seals, published in 1986, was intended, in part, to begin a scholarly conversation about using letterforms to date and classify seals. Through the 1990s, Glenn Ruby, Publications Manager from 1980 until 2004, helped develop other specialized Byzantine inscription fonts, most notably Athena (Sealshort’s successor), which has been used by many publishers around the world.

The multiplication of specialized fonts, their confused keyboard layouts, their uneven design, and their incompatibility with Unicode standards motivated Joel Kalvesmaki, Byzantine managing editor at Dumbarton Oaks, to begin work on Athena Ruby in 2010. Designed by Tiro Typeworks as idealized representations of inscriptions found in the geographical area of the Byzantine empire, from approximately 325 to 1453, the more-than seven hundred glyphs provide in a single ensemble all the major letters and variants, ligatures, and decoration. Unicode-compliant and built upon advanced OpenType features, Athena Ruby is suited to a broad range of print and digital publications, from simple, single-author projects to complex ones involving multiple authors and computer platforms.

The principle characteristics of the design are a subtle flaring of stems and a slight contrast between the weight of vertical and horizontal strokes. In curved forms, this contrast translates into a slightly angled nib movement. Where curved strokes meet straight strokes, the curves are tapered to avoid ink gain or the perception of greater weight in the join. Corners are softened by rounding, and terminals are either concave or slightly swelled. These features give warmth to the design, and are also suggestive of the character of many of the seals and coins which either through the process of their manufacture or through wearing are quite “soft.”

Dumbarton Oaks is making the font available to the public for free under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The formal, public unveiling of the font is reserved for this spring, after the stylesheets for the Dumbarton Oaks website are customized to exemplify the advanced features of the font. But anyone can join beta testers and install a pre-publication version of the font. Simply join the Google group for Athena Ruby and follow the instructions.

Cantus performs at Dumbarton Oaks

Lisa Wainwright — 2013-01-09T20:05:00Z

The Friends of Music's annual holiday concert offered a little something for everyone. The nine voice, all-male a cappella ensemble Cantus presented a program called "On the Shoulders of Giants," a celebration of significant, but mostly lesser-known, choral works that spanned centuries, styles, and cultures. The nine singers' voices moved effortlessly from Medieval organum (Perotin's Sederunt) to a twentieth-century setting of Alleluia by Randall Thompson, with a number of intriguing stops along the way. These stops included such disparate pieces as a Sufi chant, an Estonian epic ballad, Russian Orthodox and traditional Georgian chants, and a traditional Muskogee Indian song — all sung with style in the original languages. In addition to the music by Randall Thompson, other offerings of American music included a beautiful arrangement of MLK by U2,Wanting Memories by Sweet Honey in the Rock's Ysaye M. Barnwell, and an African-American spiritual. Cantus closed the program with their signature work, Franz Biebl's Ave Maria. The encore was a moving meditation on peace, set to the celebrated melody of Sibelius' Finlandia. The concert was a soothing and often joyful way to end a tumultuous year and a great way to welcome 2013. Washington, DC's local public radio station WETA-FM recorded the concert for future broadcast.

Good Ink

Lisa Wainwright — 2013-01-09T20:02:36Z

Dumbarton Oaks’ gardens were the subject of conversation on a recent edition of the Kojo Nnamdi radio show, “Shaping the City: Washington's Landscapes.” Kojo and guests, Architect and University of Maryland professor Roger Lewis and Landscape Architect Michael Vergason, discussed how landscapes shape the identity of Washington, DC. Listen to the discussion on Kojo’s website.