Palladio's sketchbooks

While staying in Manhattan, I walked over the Morgan Library and saw an exhibit on Palladio that included pages from his sketchbooks. In a review in the Wall Street Journal, Ada Louise Huxtable expressed her pleasure in these pages. I felt it, too. There is an immediacy to them that brings Palladio back to life. In Philadelphia a few days earlier, I found an amazing terracotta bust of a man, dating from the 1400s. It was so lifelike that the man could have sprung to life and it wouldn't have been so surprising. The sketches are like that - they seemed present in a way that the other artifacts did not. Later, having lunch at the cafe, I thought about how my opinion of Piano's reworking of the Morgan Library has grown on me. I remember writing to an acquaintance in New York that I didn't like it. I felt that Piano had undermined the sequence of the older buildings and taken away too much exhibit space in the process. With time, however, the new sequence now makes its own sense. I'm still not sure about the elevators, which are gorgeous and voyeuristic, but also extravagant, excessive even, and possibly eroding of the space for exhibits. Still, apologies to my correspondent for my early and now revised view. I'm like this with music, too.