The Biblioteca Ambrosiana is a historic library in Milan, Italy, also housing the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, the Ambrosian art gallery. Named after Ambrose, the patron saint of Milan, it was founded in 1609 by Cardinal Federico Borromeo, whose agents scoured Western Europe and even Greece and Syria for books and manuscripts. Some major acquisitions of complete libraries were the manuscripts of the Benedictine monastery of Bobbio (1606) and the library of the Paduan Vincenzo Pinelli, whose more than 800 manuscripts filled 70 cases when they were sent to Milan and included the famous Iliad, the Ilias Picta.
During his sojourns in Rome, 1585–95 and 1597–1601, Cardinal Borromeo envisioned developing a library in Milan as one open to scholars and that would serve as a bulwark of Catholic scholarship in the service of the Counter-Reformation against the treatises issuing from Protestant presses.
The library's contents were assembled in the six preceding years by a team of purchasing agents, members of the Cardinal's establishment or ecclesiastical hommes de confiance. These emissaries, who travelled over much of the Mediterranean, were kept under strict financial control from Milan and worked to a master plan devised by the Cardinal. In this scheme Greek manuscripts, of which there were more than a thousand, held the position of honour that had become normal since the Renaissance, but Oriental languages were given greater prominence than in earlier public collections. There was only one large block purchase; attempts to buy the library of Cardinal Ascanio Colonna in Rome and those of Giacomo Barocci and Pietro Bembo in Venice were unsuccessful, though Lucrezia Borgia's love-letters presumably came from the last. Otherwise the books were acquired singly or in small groups.
An important source of supply was the churches and monasteries of northern Italy to whom the Cardinal-Archbishop was clearly well placed to appeal . The most valuable codex obtained in this way was perhaps the sixth-century papyrus Josephus from Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, and the greatest coup, the acquisition of part of Bobbio's ancient library in exchange for 'more useful' modern books. Bobbio had been founded in the early seventh century by a party of Irish monks under St Columban, and still owned the only substantial group of Italian pre-Caroline manuscripts outside Verona Cathedral.
Cardinal Federigo chose a suitable envoy, Gian Giacomo Valeri, of an old Milanese family, Canon of Santa Maria della Scala and an antiquarian collector on his own account. Negotiations were opened in 1605 and had immediate success. The following year about seventy-four manuscripts reached the Ambrosiana, among them at least two written in Ireland (one at Bangor in County Down), and several palimpsests, one of the submerged texts being of three lost orations of Cicero.
Antonio Olgiati, the Cardinal's librarian and first Prefect of the Ambrosiana, was sent on a buying mission to south Germany, the southern Netherlands and France. Francesco Bernardino Ferrari, later Olgiati's successor as Prefect, made a similar journey to Spain. An Ambrosian Doctor, Antonio Salmazia, spent a year from 1607-8 in Corfu hunting for Greek manuscripts. Harrassed by delays in the transfer of funds and by the Corfiotes' hostility, tantalised by travellers' tales from the mainland of 'a very numerous and good library which once belonged to an Emperor in Constantinople' or of a Gospels with the words of Christ written in gold and those of 'the Jewish hordes' in black, he nevertheless succeeded in buying 113 manuscripts by weight (one Corfiote pound weight of manuscript cost five Milanese lire). A group of Greek manuscripts was purchased in Venice from the titular archbishop of Philadelphia, and others were received in a consignment from Chios, and discovered in the monasteries of Abruzzo. Hebrew manuscripts and some rare printed books were obtained from the Jewish communities of Bologna and other Italian towns by Domenico Gerosolimitano, a converted rabbi in the Cardinal's service.
Works in Oriental languages have been a feature of the Ambrosiana's holdings since its foundation, but little is known of how or where the 340 Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts of the vecchio fondo were acquired. A Lebanese Christian was dispatched to the Levant from 1610 to 1617, but with what result, other than a gift of 'Chaldean books' from the Maronitepatriarch, is not recorded. Probably the advice of Diego de Urrea Conca, a Spanish Arabist living in Naples, was followed; he recommended asking the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller to instruct their ships to buy Arabic manuscripts in quantity when they visited Cairo and ‘those parts’. Even so the founder’s appetite for the exotic was not satisfied. He owned works in Glagolitic (the medieval alphabet of Croatia) and a JapaneseContemptus mundi printed in Amakusa in 1596, and begged Cardinal Ottavio Bandini’s secretary to find him hieroglyphic books.
In 1601 Cardinal Federigo’s correspondent and friend, Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, died in Padua. Two hundred volumes of transcripts of state papers were impounded by the Republic of Venice and more books were lost when Barbary pirates attacked the galleys carrying the consignment down the Adriatic to the collector's Neapolitan heirs. The remainder of the library was offered at auction in Naples in 1608 (the earliest recorded book auction sale in Italy) and bought for the Ambrosiana for 3,050 scudi. There were further delays - the printed books would not have paid the cost of shipping and had to be left behind, for safe transport it was necessary to wait for the Genoese fleet returning from escorting a new archbishop to Sicily. Eventually in the middle of 1609 five hundred and fifty manuscripts, nearly half of which were Greek, arrived in Milan.
Building
To house the cardinal's 15,000 manuscripts and twice that many printed books, construction began in 1603 under designs and direction of Lelio Buzzi and Francesco Maria Richini.
The library was shelved behind brass grilles round the walls of a single room with a high coved ceiling, designed by Richini and Buzzi and completed by 1609. Two friezes of authors' and artists' portraits, inspired by Paolo Giovio's famous series at Como, ran along the gallery and above the bookcases. The light entered by two enormous semicircular windows at each end of the room.[1] Rooms to hold collections of pictures and casts of antique statues, to which was later added accommodation for schools of painting and sculpture, occupied the remainder of a long narrow building adjoining the churches of San Sepolcro and Santa Maria della Rosa in the centre of Milan.
When its first reading room, the Sala Fredericiana, opened to the public on 8 December 1609 it was one of the earliest public libraries. One innovation was that its books were housed in cases ranged along the walls, rather than chained to reading tables, the latter a medieval practice seen still today in the Laurentian Library of Florence. A printing press was attached to the library, and a school for instruction in the classical languages.
Constant acquisitions, soon augmented by bequests, required enlargement of the space. Borromeo intended an academy (which opened in 1625) and a collection of pictures, for which a new building was initiated in 1611–18 to house the Cardinal's paintings and drawings, the nucleus of the Pinacoteca. Artwork at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana includes Leonardo da Vinci's Portrait of a Musician, Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit, Bramantino's Adoration of the Christ Child and Raphael's cartoon of "The School of Athens". The library now contains some 12,000 drawings by European artists, from the 14th through the 19th centuries, which have come from the collections of a wide range of patrons and artists, academicians, collectors, art dealers, and architects.
Collection
The Ambrosiana contains several important manuscript works from classical antiquity and the Renaissance. In 1637, six years after the cardinal's death, the library acquired twelve manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci, including the Codex Atlanticus, from the Marquis Galeazzo Arconati, who had refused a tempting offer from Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel.[2] The Codex Atlanticus is the largest single set of drawings by Leonardo. Formed by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, it incorporates three dismembered notebooks and many single sheets.
Among the 30,000 manuscripts, which range from Greek and Latin to Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic,[3] Ethiopian, Turkish and Persian, is the Muratorian fragment, of ca 170 A.D., the earliest example of a Biblical canon and an original copy of De divina proportione by Luca Pacioli. Gian Vincenzo Pinelli's library, purchased by Cardinal Borromeo in 1608, comprises five hundred and fifty manuscripts, including a fourth- or fifth-century illustrated Homer known as 'the Ambrosian Iliad', a tenth- or eleventh-century Horace, a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy written in Padua about 1355, Boccaccio's La Fiammetta annotated by Pietro Bembo, and many antiquarian, humanistic and topical miscellanies.[2] Among Christian and Islamic Arabic manuscripts are treatises on medicine, a unique 11th-century diwan of poets, and the oldest copy of the Kitab Sibawahaihi.
Bust of Ludovico Antonio Muratori by Giovanni Antonio Cybei
The most original feature of the library's constitutions was to separate responsibility for administration from that for the scholarly use of the collections. The former was entrusted to seven conservatori, to include the senior member of the Borromeo family. For the latter purpose a College of Doctors was instituted. They were encouraged to specialise in different subjects and released from all routine duties, but required to publish a learned work within three years of appointment. The librarian was given onerous responsibilities, among them the purchase of new books and advice to the Doctors on subjects for research.
A handful of clauses in the constitutions reflect the Ambrosiana's ecclesiastical origin: at least four of the Doctors should profess theology, communication with foreigners 'of depraved religion' was forbidden, each Doctor within ten years of his appointment must publish a work on the Virgin Mary to whom the college and library were dedicated.
In 1943 the building was damaged by an Allied air-raid. Manuscripts and incunables had been removed and escaped intact, and the damage to the fabric was made good after the war (the paintings are now particularly well displayed), but several volumes perished, including the archives of opera libretti of La Scala.[6] The building was restored in 1952 and underwent major restorations in 1990–97.
In popular culture
The Ambrosiana library was from the beginning open to the public (for four hours a day - now increased to five). The great seventeenth century scholar Gabriel Naudé judged that there were at his time only three libraries in all Europe open to the public, namely the Bodleian, the Ambrosiana and the Angelica.[7] This unique feature was well known to early modern travellers. 'The Bibliotheca Ambrosiana is one of the best Libraries in Italy, because it is not so coy as the others, which scarce let themselves be seen; whereas this opens its dores publikly to all comers and goers, and suffers Them to read what book they please' (Richard Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, 1670).
On 15 October 1816 the Romantic poet Lord Byron visited the library. He was delighted by the letters between Lucrezia Borgia and Pietro Bembo ("The prettiest love letters in the world"[8][9]) and claimed to have managed to steal a lock of her hair ("the prettiest and fairest imaginable."[9]) held on display.[10][11][12]
The novelist Mary Shelley visited the library on 14 September 1840 but was disappointed by the tight security occasioned by the recent attempted theft of "some of the relics of Petrarch" housed there.[13]
Some manuscripts
Uncial 0135 – fragments of the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke
The Ambrosian Rite is a Latin liturgical rite of the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. The rite is named after Saint Ambrose, a bishop of Milan in the fourth century. It is used by around five million Catholics in the greater part of the Archdiocese of Milan, in some parishes of the Diocese of Como, Bergamo, Novara, Lodi, in the Diocese of Lugano, Canton of Ticino, Switzerland, less prominently in some Western Rite orthodox parishes and on special occasions of other jurisdictions.
The Bobbio Orosius is an early 7th century Insular manuscript of the Chronicon of Paulus Orosius. The manuscript has 48 folios and measures 210 by 150 mm. It is thought to have been produced at the scriptorium of Bobbio Abbey, which was founded by Saint Columbanus in 612. It appears in an inventory of the monastic library done in 1461. The monks gave the manuscript to the Ambrosian Library when it was founded in 1606 by Cardinal Federico Borromeo.
The Vergilius Vaticanus, also known as Vatican Virgil, is a Late Antique illuminated manuscript containing fragments of Virgil's Aeneid and Georgics. It was made in Rome in around 400 CE, and is one of the oldest surviving sources for the text of the Aeneid. It is the oldest and one of only three ancient illustrated manuscripts of classical literature.
Pellegrino Tibaldi, also known as Pellegrino di Tibaldo de Pellegrini, was an Italian mannerist architect, sculptor, and mural painter.
The Portrait of a Musician is an unfinished painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, dated to c. 1483–1487. Produced while Leonardo was in Milan, the work is painted in oils, and perhaps tempera, on a small panel of walnut wood. It is his only known male portrait painting, and the identity of its sitter has been closely debated among scholars.
The Ambrosian Iliad or Ilias Picta is a 5th-century illuminated manuscript on vellum, which depicts the entirety of Homer's Iliad, including battle scenes and noble scenes. It is considered unique due to being the only set of ancient illustrations that depict scenes from the Iliad. The Ambrosian Iliad consists of 52 miniatures, each labeled numerically. It is thought to have been created in Alexandria, given the flattened and angular Hellenistic figures, which are considered typical of Alexandrian art in late antiquity, in approximately 500 AD, possibly by multiple artists. The author(s) first drew the figures nude and then painted the clothes on, much like in Greek vase painting. In the 11th century, the miniatures were cut out of the original manuscript and pasted into a Siculo-Calabrian codex of Homeric texts.
Liber diurnus Romanorum pontificum is the name given to a miscellaneous collection of ecclesiastical formulae used in the Papal chancery until about the 11th century. It fell into disuse through the changed circumstances of the times and was soon forgotten and lost.
Federico Borromeo was an Italian cardinal and Archbishop of Milan, a prominent figure of Counter-Reformation in Italy. His acts of charity, particularly during the famine of 1627-8, and his devoted heroism in the plague of 1630 are well known from the account in Alessandro Manzoni's novel The Betrothed. He was a great patron of the arts and founded the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, one of the first free public libraries in Europe. In 1618 he added a picture gallery, donating his own considerable collection of paintings. His published works, mainly in Latin, number over 100. They show his interest in ecclesiastical archaeology, sacred painting, and collecting.
The Antiphonary of Bangor is an ancient Latin manuscript, supposed to have been originally written at Bangor Abbey in modern-day Northern Ireland.
Antonio Maria Ceriani was an Italian prelate, Syriacist, and scholar.
Gian Vincenzo Pinelli was an Italian humanist, born in Naples and known as a savant and a mentor of Galileo. His literary correspondence put him at the center of a European network of virtuosi. He was also a noted botanist, bibliophile and collector of scientific instruments.
Simplician was Bishop of Milan from 397 to 400 or 401 AD. He is honoured as a Saint in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches and his feast day is August 14.
The Codex Atlanticus is a 12-volume, bound set of drawings and writings by Leonardo da Vinci, the largest single set. Its name indicates the large paper used to preserve original Leonardo notebook pages, which was used for atlases. It comprises 1,119 leaves dating from 1478 to 1519, the contents covering a great variety of subjects, from flight to weaponry to musical instruments and from mathematics to botany. This codex was gathered in the late 16th century by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who dismembered some of Leonardo's notebooks in its formation. It is now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.
The Biblioteca Angelica is a public library located in Rome, Italy. In front of the Piazza Sant'Agostino square, adjacent to the church of Sant'Agostino, not far from Piazza Navona.
Giuseppe Ripamonti was an Italian Catholic priest and historian. Ripamonti was a prolific writer, to the extent that he can be considered as the most important Milanese writer of the first half of the seventeenth century, alongside Federico Borromeo.
Carlo Vecce is Professor of Italian Literature in the University of Naples "L'Orientale", he taught also in the University of Pavia, the D'Annunzio University of Chieti–Pescara and the University of Macerata. Abroad he was visiting professor at Paris 3 (2001) and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) (2009).
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Milan:
Francesco Bernardino Ferrari was an Italian archaeologist, one of the first and most distinguished scholars of the Collegio Ambrosiano founded by Cardinal Federico Borromeo.
The Codex Ambrosianus C. 313 Inf. is a Syro-Hexaplar manuscript in parchment form the late eight or early ninth-century.
Giuseppe Antonio Sassi, Latin: Saxius, was an Italian librarian and literary scholar.
↑ Oscar Löfgren and Renato Traini, Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, vol. I (1975), ii (1981) onwards.
1 2 don Vincenzo Maraschi (Ambrosiane Doctor) (1938). Le Particolarità Del Rito Ambrosiano (in Italian). Milan. p.1, 7, 174. Retrieved 10 April 2022.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link), with imprimatur of Milan Curia (in person of friar Castiglioni) on 9 August 1938, and of cardinal Schuster
1 2 Carlo Marcora (1996). "Achille Ratti and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana". Publications de l'École Française de Rome (in Italian and French). 223 (1): 56. Archived from the original on 12 December 2018. Retrieved 27 December 2018.
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