Mark Lansburgh '49: A modern crusader for medieval culture

"Collector" is a term often applied to Mark Lansburgh, but "crusader" might be a better word to describe the devotion of his life-long quest for medieval artifacts. And making "crusader" an especially appropriate appellation for the medieval scholar is the fact that relics of the original Crusaders to the Holy Land are among the treasures he has roamed the globe seeking.

Lansburgh's quest was sparked by undergraduate graphic arts studies and fueled by a career in advertising and the graphic arts. As collecting and studying medieval artifacts became increasingly important to him, he began traveling throughout Europe in pursuit of illuminated manuscripts, early books, and other literary and artistic treasures. And as his expertise became increasingly recognized, he was allowed to photograph many of the Old World's most precious cultural antiquities. In the process, he built a fine personal collection of artifacts and assembled an unrivaled collection of some 20,000 photographs of Western cultural treasures. Those prints are now housed in two of America's distinguished cultural repositories -the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the J. Paul Getty Museum in California.

Lansburgh's pilgrimages to collect those photographs have seemingly been as blessed as the objects he was seeking. At Spain's El Escorial, for instance, he was the first person ever granted unrestricted access to photograph the Gothic treasures stored in the 16th-century monastery. At Utrecht, in the Netherlands, where he desperately needed just 45 sunny minutes to photograph an especially important ninth-century manuscript, the sun suddenly appeared out of a sky that had been darkened by rain for nearly three weeks.

His most unusual tale of good fortune came from a visit to the magnificent Cathedral of Cologne. His first attempt to gain access to Cologne's manuscripts was unsuccessful. He was told that "the man with the keys" the only one who could admit him to the treasures was away. Six months later, Lansburgh returned to Cologne to find the man with the keys in residence. But the gentleman was just now rather busy. The ancient box containing Cologne's venerated relics bones brought from the Holy Land by Crusaders and said to be those of the Magi was undergoing repair and nobody seemed to know how to fix the silver corner hinges. Lansburgh, harking back to his undergraduate years and studies with Norwich silversmith Alden Wood, offered a suggestion for repairing the relic box. The grateful man with the keys showed his appreciation by asking, "Could you be here at two tomorrow with your camera?" When Lansburgh returned at the appointed time, he became the first person ever allowed to film Cologne's medieval manuscripts. He even gained permission, when the dim church interior proved too dark for correct exposures, to remove the priceless documents to a porch of the cathedral. There, ironically, an overturned "Photographien Verboten" sign made a convenient photographic stand.

The pilgrimages to El Escorial, Utrecht, and Cologne had their genesis back in the Hanover in the forties, when Lansburgh studied graphic arts under the late Ray Nash. Nash encouraged his student to produce from beginning to end - a book of poetry. Lansburgh wrote the verse, did woodcut illustrations, printed the pages on a hand press, and bound the volumes for Leaves by the Wayside. During his undergraduate years, Lansburgh also operated his own advertising agency and designed a Winter Carnival poster.

After graduation in 1949, he worked in advertising and graphic arts in New York City and Los Angeles, en opened his own agency in Santa Barbara Calif. Of his developing appreciation for things visual Lansbiirgh recalls that he "wanted to know what was behind fine printing. Behind it, I discovered, were beauiiful manuscripts That led to an examination of the lives of the people who created medieval manuscripts. He built a library of 7,000 books dealing with the religious life and illuminated manuscripts. In the sixties, he began to travel extensively to Europe. He achieved recognition for his expertise and received numerous invitations to lecture. He was awarded grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and from the Ford Foundation to finance his photographic project. His own collection, which once included a bible made for Thomas a Becket, became one of the largest of its kind in private ownership.

Then he began to give away his treasures. Ten years ago, he gave Baker Library a 1,000-year-old fragment of a musical manuscript one of the earliest, if not the earliest, surviving pieces of musical notation. Known now as the "Dartmouth Fragment," the single page of parchment has been highlighted on NBC TV News, on PBS, and on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." And just last September, with the opening of the Hood Museum of Art, Lansburgh donated four more pieces of medieval music to the College.

Dartmouth is also the beneficiary of Lansburgh's scholarship as well as of donations from his collection. Over the next few years, he will be making regular visits to Hanover to work on a major exhibition for the Hood Museum. He is organizing a show, to open in the fall of 1987, to demonstrate the Islamic influence on Western medieval art.

"The joy is in giving," Lansburgh explains, "in giving something back to a place that gave me so much. This college... opened worlds to me." The noted collector, historian, and lecturer says that "the seeds of my creative vision and artistic impulse were nourished here. That's why I know that this new Hood Museum will add a new dimension to the humanities here. To the Egyptians, the temple was the museum. Now Dartmouth has such a temple."

Lansburgh says he has today reached a point in his life when he is less and less concerned with worldly goods. As a result, he is disposing of his extensive collections. His goal is, within two years, to live in a simple adobe home in a New Mexican desert valley. The only items he intends to retain from his remarkable collections are some large black Pueblo Indian pots and a French wrought iron cross, circa 1300, that will hang on a white adobe wall. "It symbolizes the rebirth, the resurrection," he says.

Walking one day a few months ago across the Dartmouth Green, from Baker Library to the Hood Museum, Lansburgh paused to say, "There is, I've found, a circular nature to life. Everything has its time and its place. Now is my time to enjoy the harvest of it all. But to do so I must sit quietly in the sun. I want nothing around me but my recollections of beauty and a quiet dialogue. I will still participate, but at a different level."

Howard Coffin is associate director of the College's News Service.