An accompanying catalog sold out rapidly and was the recipient of Burlington Magazine’s Eric Mitchell Prize for best exhibition catalog in the English language and the International Eugène Baie Award, given every five years by the province of Antwerp for the best publication on Flemish art. It was also the first Getty publication to become a finalist for the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship. At nearly 600 pages, the book has since become an indispensable and oft-cited resource for research on Flemish art.
By the time it closed, Illuminating the Renaissance had attracted almost 150,000 visitors, highlighted the Museum’s strength and expertise in manuscripts, and positioned the department as a significant contributor to global scholarship.
The Department of Manuscripts had been founded 20 years earlier with the purchase of more than 100 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from Peter and Irene Ludwig of Aachen, Germany, who at that time had the finest private collection of western European manuscripts in the world. The group included books from various cultures and was particularly strong in Flemish work. When the Getty Center opened, a gallery in the North Pavilion was dedicated to the presentation of these light-sensitive objects in a series of rotating exhibitions.
Although the market for high-quality manuscript illumination is small and unpredictable—as Kren once noted, “Patience rules”—the department has nearly doubled the collection from its original acquisition and aims to tell a more diverse, and therefore complete, story of the Middle Ages. Recent acquisitions include manuscripts reflecting Jewish and Islamic faiths, and exhibitions are often organized around themes relevant to contemporary audiences—such as Power, Justice, and Tyranny in the Middle Ages in 2021—or that tell stories across multiple geographies, religions, and cultures—like Art of Three Faiths: A Torah, a Bible, and a Qur’an in 2018.
Elizabeth Morrison, Getty's senior curator of manuscripts, has witnessed the department’s evolution; she had been with the Museum for seven years when Illuminating the Renaissance opened. “This groundbreaking project was the first major loan exhibition I had ever worked on, and it continues to influence my thinking as a scholar and a curator almost two decades later, as is doubtless true for professionals the world over,” she says. “I still remember visitors telling me that this was their first exposure to illuminated manuscripts, and the sumptuous books on display were the most spectacular artworks they had ever seen.”
