THE London art dealer Colnaghi’s has a showroom in St James’s. It boasts a subterranean book-lined sanctum. On all four sides, a gallery looks down into this perfect cube, a basement room with a black-and-white checked floor reached by a white spiral staircase.
Here, for the most recent exhibition of three millennia of terracotta masterpieces, stood the bust of St Lawrence, the acknowledged work of Donatello (1440), crafted originally for the lunette over the west porch of his church in Borgo San Lorenzo, in the Province of Florence.
This setting could have been any one of the private spaces that princes and merchants built for themselves in the Renaissance as retreats from the world, and their families, and the starting point for the journeys of the mind which Dr Hui surveys.
Begun as a reflection in lockdown of the restrictions that befell so many, Hui’s book is written from Singapore, far from the European libraries that haunt his mind.
His autobiographical observations are divided into two sections, Bibliophilia and Bibliomania, and demonstrate a development in the West once monks allowed themselves to study books as part of their prayerful life, as valid as that of manual work: laborare est orare. Ciceronian scholarship need not be anti-divine.
The world of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose would be known to Hui’s Asian students even if they have not seen the libraries of the monks at St Gall or those of Michel de Montaigne at Château D’Yquem or of the Montefeltro in Urbino. Higher-quality images would help. The author’s own photographs of D’Yquem are weak, and the early-ninth-century ground plan of the monastery of Sankt Gallen (MS. 1092) is plainly indecipherable (Figure 1.3). A clearer image (at iiif.biblissima.fr) certainly does not show the book room at the heart of the monastery, as Hui asserts.
Exploring images of sanctity and bookishness allows the author to comment on images of St Jerome, St Augustine, and the Virgin Annunciate, although he over-furnishes her room in the 1486 Crivelli Annunciation of Ascoli Piceno (National Gallery), which has no chairs and only one rug. Dr Faustus and Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan in The Tempest, are all too much taken up with their books.
Shot through with delightful insights, many from the Chinese and some a little too clever by half (I am not sure whether Jerome was aporetic, but I do know that St Ambrose was not a third-century writer), the author leaves us with a conundrum: is the world made so that it all ends up in one book, as Mallarmé held, or is Nietzsche right to warn us that the sole purpose of books is to lead us from all books?
Canon Nicholas Cranfield is the Vicar of All Saints’, Blackheath, in south London.
The Study: The inner life of Renaissance libraries
Andrew Hui
Princeton £25
(978-0-691-24332-0)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50