A nonbeliever, curating religious art at the Morgan

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/6/22/a-nonbeliever-curatingreligiousartatthemorgan.html

In his 20s, Roger S. Wieck lost his religion, but not his appreciation for religious art

June 22, 2014 5:00AM ET
by Judith H. Dobrzynski

NEW YORK — Roger S. Wieck is glowing like a doting father, though the cause is a tiny painting that sits in a glass vitrine in the center of a gallery at the Morgan Library & Museum. Occupying the left-hand page of a 2.75-by-2-inch prayer book made for Queen Claude of France (1499–1524), the painting portrays the Holy Trinity. God the Father and God the Son have identical faces, he points out, signifying that they are one being. “Christ is pre-Incarnate; he doesn’t have wounds,” Wieck says. “God the Father is asking Christ to swear that he will fulfill the Father’s pledge to send Christ as a sacrifice for our sins.” The Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, hovers above. With increasing zeal, Wieck expounds on other aspects of “Trinity Adored by the Choirs of Angels”— how it’s surrounded by a cordeliere whose knots reference those on belts worn by the Franciscan orders, for example.

His fervor is understandable. The 500-year-old prayer book is the centerpiece of Wieck’s new exhibition, “Miracles in Miniature: The Art of the Master of Claude de France.” The show displays 26 works by the largely unknown royal-court artist. Eleven are owned by the Morgan, and all are devotional in nature.

At a time when society is increasingly secularized, when adherence to religion, at least in an organized form, is waning, it’s Wieck’s job, as the Morgan’s curator of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, to wax enthusiastic about religious art. So it comes as a surprise, perhaps, to discover that Wieck himself does not believe in God. Though raised Catholic, he says he “became a nonbeliever gradually when I was in my 20s.”

Roger Wieck, the Morgan's curator of medieval and Russian manuscripts
Roger S. Wieck, the Morgan's curator of medieval and Russian manuscripts The Morgan Library & Museum
Just about the same time, though, Wieck was discovering the manuscripts — illuminated with colorful, often gilded, tableaux and decorative borders — that became his career, no matter that they usually have a devotional thrust. He had graduated from the University of Cincinnati, earned a master’s degree in art history there and, in the late 1970s, came east to study at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. Then he took an internship at the Morgan. “I was supposed to stay two months,” he says. “I stayed two years.”

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