Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the essay “On Minlatures” by Lla Purpura (©2006 by Lla Purpura). Passage B is adapted from the article “When the Virtual Trumps Reality: The Prayer Book of Claude de France” by James Gardner (©2008 by TWO SL LLC).

Passage A by Lia Purpura

Why are miniature things so compelling?

The miniature is mysterious. We wonder how all those parts work when they’re so small. It’s why we linger over an infant’s fingers and toes, those astonishing replicas: we can’t quite believe they work. Chihuahuas work. Birds and bonsai trees work. Miniatures are improbable, unlikely. Causes to marvel. Surprises. Feats of engineering. Products of an obsessive detailer.

Miniatures offer changes of scale by which we measure ourselves anew. On one hand, miniatures posit an omniscient onlooker able to take in the whole at once. Consider yourself in relation to dollhouses, snowglobes, frog spawn, aquariums, souvenir key-chains you look through to see a picture of the very spot you’re visiting, stilled. You are large enough to hold such things fully in hand. On the other hand, miniatures issue invitations to their realm, and suggest we forget or disregard our size. In dollhouse land, you can walk through the kitchen, livingroom, bedroom with your three inch high friend and, face pressed to the window, feel the cushions of the thumbnail loveseat hold you. Fit inside the miniature, we experience certain states of being or belief: worlds in a grain of sand; eternities in wildflowers. Regions beyond our normal-sized perception. Whether we: are, in relation to them, omniscient or companionably small beings, miniatures invite us to leave our known selves and perspectives behind.

Miniatures encourage attention—in the way whispering requires a listener to quiet down and incline toward the speaker. Sometimes we need binoculars, microscopes, viewmasters to assist our looking, but mediated or not, miniatures suggest there is more there than meets the eye easily. They suggest there is much to miss if we don’t look hard at spaces, crevices, crannies.

The miniature, a working, functioning complete world unto itself, is not merely a “small” or “brief” thing or a “shortened” form of something larger. Miniatures transcend their size. Most strangely to me, miniatures are radically self-sufficient. The beings who inhabit fairylands, those elves and sprites, pixies and trolls, don’t usually strive to be our pals. They don’t need us. Their smallness is our problem, or intrigue, or desire.

Passage B by James Gardner

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.

In “The Work of Art in the Age of, Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin’s overrated essay of 1936, the author famously asserted that 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 bear physical witness to each pucker and weave of canvas, each splash of puddled ink in an Old Master drawing. Only then can you truly say that you have seen the work of art.

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 that, in this case, far surpasses any direct encounter. 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, 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 strokes of the artist's single-hair brush merge with the warped and mottled surface of the vellum.

The miniature in question was commissioned for Queen Claude of France. Nearly three generations after the invention of printing, there was no practical reason to commission this work. Rather, it was the delight in luxury itself, as well, perhaps, as the spirit of sacrifice that brought this work into existence.