Erica Cialella, 2020–2022 Belle da Costa Greene Fellow: Born in 1879, Belle da Costa Greene was named Belle Marion Greener at birth. She grew up in a predominantly African American community in Washington, DC. Her father, Richard T. Greener, was the first Black graduate of Harvard College and a prominent educator and racial justice activist. After Belle’s parents separated, her mother, Genevieve Ida Fleet Greener, changed her surname and that of the children to Greene. While Belle was still in her teens, Genevieve and the children added “da Costa” to their surname and passed as a white family of Portuguese descent.

Greene and Junius S. Morgan II, Morgan’s nephew and advisor on Library matters, met at the Princeton University Library, where Junius was a librarian and Greene likely was a cataloger. In 1905, Junius enlisted Greene to prepare Morgan’s books for transport to the Library. On Junius’s recommendation, Morgan hired Greene to manage his “bookman’s paradise.”

Greene served as a de facto site manager while construction was in its final stages. She went on to run the Library for the rest of her working life, ultimately serving as the first Director of what is now the Morgan Library & Museum and remaking a private treasury into a center for scholarly inquiry and public engagement.

Erica Cialella, 2020–2022 Belle da Costa Greene Fellow: Belle da Costa Greene began working for Morgan in the summer of 1905. Her early responsibilities involved cataloging the growing collection, then housed at the Lenox Library on Fifth Avenue, at the site of what is now the Frick Collection. Morgan stored his books and objects there temporarily while his own library—a Neo-Renaissance architectural masterpiece designed by the firm McKim, Mead, and White—was under construction at 36th and Madison. A letter from Junius Spencer Morgan to his wife Josephine in the summer of 1905 documents Greene’s early work on Morgan’s collection. As Junius writes, “Miss Greene telephoned me the other day about her work at the Lenox & said she was having the time of her life! She is putting in book plates dusting the books & packing them.”

After the McKim, Mead, and White building was constructed and the collections were moved to Madison Avenue, Belle Greene hired Ada Thurston, a librarian and Vassar College graduate, to assist her with the work of establishing the library. Over the next few years Greene quickly became an authority on Morgan’s collections and helped oversee their growth and stewardship.

During the final months before her retirement in 1948, Greene would occasionally use this room, sitting at Morgan’s desk to review recently acquired treasures.

Erica Cialella, 2020–2022 Belle da Costa Greene Fellow: Greene specialized in the study of medieval illuminated manuscripts and made one of her most significant acquisitions in this field in 1916. While the First World War raged in Europe, she traveled to England to acquire one of the Morgan’s most famous medieval objects, a thirteenth-century French manuscript with stunning miniatures illustrating the Old Testament. In a surviving letter, Belle Greene reported back to Jack Morgan about her trip: “I purchased … the finest example of French art of the period in private hands. If I had been able to stay here several weeks longer I know I could have bought every important manuscript in private hands in England.”

During Greene’s tenure, the west room vault was the primary home for medieval manuscripts and highly valuable collection items. Made from solid steel and glass shelves, the vault was not constructed with wood in order to protect from fire. Originally Greene and the other librarians would use a long ladder to access the higher shelves, but a stairwell and additional level were added later.

Kept in the safety of this room were some of Greene’s greatest medieval manuscript acquisitions, such as the tenth-century Commentary on the Apocalypse by the Spanish monk Beatus. It is one of the earliest surviving illuminated manuscripts in the Spanish tradition. Before the 2003 Renzo Piano addition to the Morgan’s campus, a velvet curtain covered the doorway so curators could retrieve material while the museum was open to the public.

Greene was a prominent figure in the world of medieval studies and left an indelible legacy. She was the second woman to be elected as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, which annually awards the Belle da Costa Greene prize to a medievalist of color to support their research in the field.

Erica Cialella, 2020–2022 Belle da Costa Greene Fellow: The Rotunda served as the point of entry for researchers and visitors hoping to access the library’s treasures. When the library was a private collection, prospective researchers and guests would make appointments in writing and after arrival slip a business card through the door to be approved for entry. If Morgan was out of town or traveling in Europe, the library was, in Greene’s words, “hermetically sealed.”

A visitor might wait here to be called into the West Room or North Room or be escorted into the east room to view collection materials. In 1928 the entrance to the building was shifted to the newly constructed Annex, designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris on the old site of J. P. Morgan’s brownstone home. The Annex was connected to the McKim, Mead, and White Library through a vaulted hallway called the cloister.

Once the Pierpont Morgan Library was established as a publicly accessible research institution, readers needed special cards to access the collection. Greene received hundreds of letters a week requesting such access. Researchers would be mailed a card for a specific date and present it upon entering the library. This system allowed Greene and fellow Morgan librarians to keep track of appointments and prepare research material, similar to the system in use today.

Erica Cialella, 2020–2022 Belle da Costa Greene Fellow: The East Room has served many purposes over the course of its long history. When first built it was the primary home for J.P. Morgan’s collection of books and artwork. It was also the room where he and Belle Greene hosted visitors to see the growing collection. An ornately bound guestbook in the Morgan Archives records the names of many of these early visitors to the library, including Ellen Terry, Henry James, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Teddy and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Before the annex was built in 1928, this room served as a reading room and an exhibition space. Housing around 11,000 volumes, these shelves still hold many of the books Greene first cataloged back in 1905. Subjects range from Bibles and French poetry to gardening and children’s books.

Belle da Costa Greene helped develop the collection started by Pierpont Morgan and his son Jack. Building on the library’s already impressive collection of fifteenth-century books printed by William Caxton, the first English printer, Greene traveled to England in 1908 and secured the acquisition of additional Caxton books from the library of Lord Amherst. The story goes that she negotiated the purchase of the full set the night before they were to be sold at auction, undercutting British curators in the process. A few years later she won at auction the only surviving complete copy of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, printed by William Caxton, in the process outbidding a rival collector, Henry E. Huntington. This acquisition made front page news across the globe and marked Greene’s entry as a force in the rare book world. As Greene remarked that same year, “J.P. is so well trained now that he rarely ever buys a book or manuscript without consulting me by cable or letter first.”

Erica Cialella, 2020–2022 Belle da Costa Greene Fellow: The North Room served as Greene’s office when she worked at the Morgan. Within these walls she negotiated book deals, met with scholars, held staff meetings, and, according to Greene, answered thousands of letters a day. The office contained two large custom card catalogs, used by Greene and her staff to keep track of the growing collection. On the occasion of her retirement, a colleague described the dynamic card catalog system she developed as “more broadly conceived than the usual instrument of its kind.”

From her desk, which was often said to be a mess, she would answer correspondence and sign paychecks, all from a custom swivel chair she had requested to make her work more efficient. Her great responsibilities as library executive made Greene one of the highest paid women in the country. By the 1920s she was making around the equivalent of $286,000 a year in today’s dollars. A contemporary newspaper article paired an image of Greene with the eye-catching headline, “Women Who Earn Big Wages.” In 1924, when the Library became a public educational institution, Belle Greene was appointed the Pierpont Morgan Library’s inaugural director.

Erica Cialella, 2020–2022 Belle da Costa Greene Fellow: In a field dominated by men, Greene was one of only a few women who led a rare book and manuscript library in the early twentieth century. One of her greatest accomplishments as Director was mentoring women scholars and librarians. The ancient seals and tablets that are housed in the North Room were cataloged by one of Greene’s mentees, the art historian Edith Porada. Porada grew up in a Jewish family in Austria and was the first woman to earn a doctorate from the University of Vienna. She daringly escaped Nazi-occupied Europe in 1938 with her sister, eventually making it to New York. Belle Greene gave her the opportunity to work on the Morgan’s collection of cylinder seals, and that opportunity helped Edith launch her academic career in the United States, where she would become a professor at Columbia University. She would eventually be given the title of honorary curator at the Morgan.

The great tradition of hands-on teaching with these cylinder seals, which were stored in Greene’s office, has a long history. There’s a wonderful story about Greene hosting Jane Morgan Nichols and her children in this room. She described this memorable visit later in life: “After we had wandered about looking at different rooms Miss Greene got out the seals, a candle and great sticks of sealing wax. The children were allowed to spread the melted sealing wax on paper and run the different seals over it, producing fascinating impressions, which they were allowed to take home. It did not injure the seals in any way, and delighted Jane and George, who have never forgotten this delight.”

When Greene retired in 1948 she left an enduring legacy at the Morgan that can still be seen today. As she wrote in 1909, envisioning the future of the institution, “one aim is to make the Library preeminent … I hope to be able to say some day that there is neither rival nor equal.”