A Scholarly Patina

Dumbarton Oaks Museum Reopens, With an Elevated Purpose

They threw open the doors of the Dumbarton Oaks Museum precisely at 2 p.m. on Tuesday and . . . the crowds trickled in. Quietly. Reverently. They crossed the dour threshold, trod over the ancient marble mosaics and remade the acquaintance of the rich, old dowager of Washington collections.

Dumbarton closed more than three years ago for renovations. It is now handicapped-accessible. There is a new fire suppression system deftly hidden in the painted ceiling of the music room. The collections have been reinstalled, new doorways into the main courtyard have been opened and fitted with transparent cases for art, and there's a now a gift shop.

It's good to have the old biddy back. Dumbarton, donated to Harvard in 1940 by the wealthy collectors Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, is one of the more eccentric places in the city. For eight bucks, you can revel in the splendor of Georgetown's finest garden. For free, you can walk through the small but sumptuous collection of pre-Columbian and Byzantine artifacts. For the cost of a PhD, or other exquisite credentials, you might get to spend serious time in its inner sanctum, where scholars study the museum's collections and use its library in quiet, leafy splendor.

The Blisses were collectors with a need for academic legitimacy. They didn't want just a house stuffed with beautiful old things, but a collection that had some scholarly gravitas. So they evolved into informed, targeted collectors, willing to take guidance from men like Royall Tyler, a blue-blooded Brahmin who held various jobs to which one can only be appointed, and who was also a serious historian of Byzantine art.

But there is a tension throughout the collection between the Blisses' not entirely suppressed urge to shop wantonly and their disciplined pursuit of Byzantine and pre-Columbian pieces. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a short hallway that allows access to the music room. There, in a lonely case, are the fruits of their impulse buying, including a small Degas.

And an Egyptian figurine.

"However, some of their finds, such as an ancient Egyptian wooden statuette, met with Royall Tyler's strong disapproval as they lay outside the Byzantine focus," reads the caption, explaining the odd jumble of priceless objects sequestered from the rest of the collection. The poor Egyptian statue is missing what appears to be a shock of hair on its right side, almost as if it's been shorn, like a slave or a servant, excluded from the sacred precincts of Tyler's favor.

Fortunately, Tyler was capable of enthusiasms as rapturous as his disapproval was withering.

"The thought of your having it intoxicates me," he is quoted saying, in the newly published catalogue, when the Blisses decided to purchase an exquisite silver paten, or platter used for holding the host during the Eucharist.

It's not clear that the thought of the Blisses having a sacred silver plate once used for the holiest of Christian rites in 6th-century Syria or Constantinople would intoxicate its original Byzantine owners. But the Byzantines no longer speak for themselves. That privilege is now maintained by scholars such as the ones who gather in the little hive -- a campus including a library by renowned architect Robert Venturi, and "refectory" for communal dining -- that the Blisses started to assemble decades ago. Say what you will about the rest of the collection, about the vulgar assemblage of Italian arches (probably from Ravenna) and a French, 16th-century fireplace jumbled together in the Rape-the-Old-World music room, the Blisses' Dumbarton has emerged as a major academic center for Byzantine studies.

Not that most people will know that, just passing through the public spaces. The curious thing about collections such as the one at Dumbarton -- though it's by no means a problem exclusive to Dumbarton -- is how much it emphasizes the almost unbridgeable gap between scholarly-looking and amateur-looking.

To most people, the collection of observations that can be made about Byzantine art doesn't range far from the horizons of the obvious: That the detail on a bracelet is very fine, that the expression on the face of a saint is poignant, that a 7th-century necklace depicting a sexy Aphrodite seems a little risque for a society that often seems enigmatically pious on first exposure. Getting visitors from there to the next level of understanding is the great desiderata of good museums, and it rarely happens.