Online photograph prompts return of artifact

By Elizabeth Fontana

It's one of those rare events that archivists and librarians dream about -- the return of a missing treasure to their collection. The dream was realized at Cornell University Library recently when a 13th century architectural relic rematerialized after more than nine decades in obscurity.

This 13th-century relic has been returned to Cornell. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections/Kroch Library

A project engineer in the university's Planning, Design and Construction department came to the Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections to research campus architecture. In talking with a collections assistant, he learned about the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of a stone corbel from Troyes Cathedral (France) that Andrew Dickson White, the university's first president, acquired in 1886. A corbel is an architectural device that projects from a vertical surface to provide horizontal support.

Nineteenth-century photographs of the corbel had been uncovered in the process of digitizing the A.D. White Architectural Photographs Collection, along with notes in White's papers about the purchase of the corbel and its installation in the architecture department's museum. Susette Newberry, project manager for the collection, discovered the pictures in the collection and, intrigued by them, had been trying to find out what happened to the corbel, but she could only document its existence to 1910, when the campus architecture museum closed. (The museum was in place from 1874 until about 1910, when overcrowding in the College of Architecture forced the faculty to use the room for other purposes.)

His interest piqued, the engineer took a look at the digital photograph of the Troyes corbel on the web site, http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/adw/Troyes.html. He thought for sure he'd seen it in a colleague's garden. He called his friend, who also looked at the photograph online, and the long lost corbel was found. Apparently, it had been in another Cornell employee's office for about 30 years, and when he retired in 1990, he gave it to his successor.

The corbel itself was completely unmarked, but as soon as he realized what he had in his garden, the enlightened employee immediately returned the corbel to Cornell Library. It is now on display in Kroch Library in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections but eventually will be transferred to a new permanent home in the sculpture collection at Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

Visitors to the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, on Level 2B of the Carl A. Kroch Library, can see the corbel Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (and Saturdays during the academic year, 1 to 5 p.m.). For more information call 255-3530 or e-mail sn18@cornell.edu.