Poetry Through the Ages

As he developed designs for the three lunettes (the semicircular paintings over the principal doors) in the Rotunda, Mowbray consulted a volume that reproduced Pinturicchio’s fifteenth-century decoration of the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican. Taking the Italian painter’s work as a point of departure, Mowbray populated the Morgan lunettes with familiar figures from ancient, medieval, and Renaissance poetry. In the mural over the Library’s front doors, the central altar is flanked by King Arthur (at left, with his lance and the Holy Grail) and Beatrice (Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s beloved, at right). The trompe-l’oeil archway above provides the illusion of depth.