The Library

by Stuart Kells

  Today, the Vatican’s book collections, especially the fabled Secret Archive and prohibited books, present a hypnotically alluring prospect for booklovers. More than one bibliophile has fantasised about infiltrating the secluded holdings, which are pictured as an inaccessible wonder, stretching back to ancient Rome and the birth of the church, and containing all the best books, and all the worst ones. In several important respects, that picture is a false one.

  The Vatican Library is believed to have begun around 385 AD as the personal library of Pope Damasus I. He and other early popes collected scrolls and codices: ‘there was always need of liturgical books to conserve and transmit evidence of the Church’s spiritual life.’ Apart from liturgical works, those popes also collected histories, commentaries and biographies; works of the Greek apologists; and Greek and Roman classics.

  Early in the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III created the Regestes—the first thorough listing of papal documents. Less than a century later, under Boniface VIII, the papal collection of illuminated manuscripts had grown to become one of the most important in Europe. The next century, though, brought a series of calamities. In 1303 soldiers loyal to King Philip IV of France attacked Boniface VIII’s palace at Anagni, southeast of Rome, and plundered the papal library. The next pope (Clement V) moved 643 valuable codices to the sacristy of the monastery in Assisi. That town, too, was attacked and further losses ensued.

  In 1308, under Clement V (his run of ill luck continued), fire destroyed the principal temple of the Catholic world: the Cathedral of St John Laterano in Rome. The following year, the ‘Babylonian captivity’ began: the exiled pope resided at Avignon under French authority. Exile forced reorganisation of the papal library, but it also led to many additions. At Avignon, the growing collection was stored in the Angel’s Tower of the Papal Palace.

  After the Council of Constance and the mending of the Great Schism, the papal library was unambiguously Rome’s. Pope Nicholas V is credited as the true founder of the Vatican Library. He used as a model the Medici library at the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence. He employed copyists and illuminators from Bologna and Florence to create and embellish codices. He sent representatives to search East and West for valuable manuscripts. When Constantinople fell to the Turks, he tried in vain to save the famous imperial library. Unswayed by concerns that Renaissance humanism threatened the church and its teachings, he encouraged the study of classical authors—thereby continuing a longstanding papal tradition. He appointed Lorenzo Valla as the library’s Latin expert, and he commissioned the translation of Greek works into Latin. (Valla’s translation of Thucydides is one of the Vatican’s treasures.)

  Applying his linguistic expertise, Valla achieved major scholarly breakthroughs, especially in the field of sniffing out fakes, such as those bogus texts from Alexandria. He had already demonstrated, in 1440, that a document called the Donation of Constantine, allegedly composed by the emperor who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity, was in fact a clever forgery. In the donation, Constantine supposedly transferred power over the western provinces of the empire, including Italy, to the Church. The document’s exposure as a forgery was a calamitous blow to the Vatican’s prestige.

  In the jubilee year of 1450, however, pilgrims still flocked to Rome. Revenues from alms enabled rapid expansion of the library. Nicholas V funded the purchase, the copying and the illustration of manuscripts on a scale never before seen. He sent agents all over Europe to search for valuable books. His librarian, Tortelli, organised the rapidly expanding library. It contained about 1200 entries, of which more than 800 were Latin manuscripts and approximately 400 were Greek. Nicholas V’s successor, the Spanish canonist Calixtus III, was appalled. When shown the library, he exclaimed, ‘Just see what the property of God’s church has been wasted on!’

  Fortunately, Pope Sixtus IV had a different attitude to books. On 15 June 1475 he issued the bull Ad decorem militantis Ecclesiae, which formally established the library and endowed it with the space and funds it needed—including space for a chained library, accessible to the public, in a prized location: on the ground floor beside the Sistine Chapel (which Sixtus IV also brought into being). The stated priority of the library was ‘the convenience and honour of the learned and studious’. The humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, was appointed librarian. The collection had already grown to 2527 codices. Platina oversaw even more rapid expansion. His 1481 catalogue includes 3500 items, representing almost forty per cent growth in six years. The library had become nothing less than the largest collection of books in the Western world.

  During the years 1471 to 1484, under Sixtus IV, the library was generously endowed. To be given permission to study and work there was a great honour; and an even higher goal for scholars was to be named Vatican Librarian. A fresco dating from around 1478 shows Sixtus IV and Platina standing in front of rows of lecterns paved with about fifty codices, all of them looking most fine in their leather covers adorned with clasps, studs, hinges, bosses and blind tooling. During his six years of office, Platina was entitled to a monthly salary of ten ducats, plus wood, candles, oil, brooms and food for himself, three assistants and a horse. The assistants worked as copyists and general labourers. In all, the library occupied four large new rooms that were elaborately painted by Melozzo da Forlì, Antoniazzo Romano, Domenico and Davide Ghirlandaio. A fifth room accommodated Platina, his assistants and a bookbinder. The library’s marquetry cupboards, the work of the Florentine architect Giovannino de’Dolci, were later fixed to the anteroom walls of the Sistine Chapel. The cupboard inlays depict doors that are partly ajar and reveal books lying down inside.

  Over the next century, growth in the collection led Pope Julius II to assign more rooms. The library continued to prosper under Leo X. And then, in May 1527, disaster struck. Under Emperor Charles V of the Habsburg dynasty, the mutinous imperial army sacked Rome. For the most part, Charles’s army consisted of bandits, deserters and unpaid Lutheran infantrymen. A contemporary letter describes a scene of devastation in the Vatican Library, with manuscripts’ covers and clasps wrenched off, and books ‘mutilated, torn, cut in pieces and thrown among the rubbish’. Pope Clement VII took refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo.

  In 1587 or thereabouts, Sixtus V commissioned Domenico Fontana to design a new building for the library, between the Cortile del Belvedere and the Cortile della Pigna. A capacious top-floor room, measuring sixty by fifteen metres, housed the library’s books and manuscripts. Showcasing precious codices, the room is lavishly decorated with painted ceilings, frescoes and other ornamentation. Sixtus V also moved the papal printing works to the new building.

  In the 1590s the collections of Cardinal Antonio Carafa and Fulvio Orsini were incorporated in the library. In 1618, under Paul V, twenty-eight early manuscripts were transferred from Bobbio. In 1623 the marvellous Heidelberg Library, a ‘prize of war’ offered by Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria and leader of the Catholic League, to Pope Gregory XV, arrived in Rome. Known as the mother of all German libraries, the Heidelberg collection was added to the Vatican Library, although it retained a separate identity therein as the Biblioteca Palatina. From that time on, whenever the Vatican acquired an important collection, the acquisition was designated as a ‘fondo’ (bequest) and maintained its individuality as such. (The collection in existence at the library until 1622 is referred to as the Fondo Vaticano.)

  From the Renaissance until today, the story of the Vatican’s collections is a story of irrepressible growth: a marvellous cascade from donors intent on saving their books, and their souls. The stream of acquisitions created enchantment and envy everywhere. Acquired gradually from 1654 to 1759, for instance: the Fondo Reginense, the library of Queen Christina of Sweden, which contained 2120 Latin manuscripts and 190 Greek ones, not counting the queen’s fifty-five manuscripts from the library of Pius II—the ‘fun-loving’ pope who wrote the erotic novel The Tale of Two Lovers (Historia de duobus amantibus). (Published by Ulrich Zell
in Cologne between 1467 and 1470, that book became a fifteenth-century bestseller.)

  And acquired in 1658: the Fondo Urbinate, rich in Renaissance manuscripts, from Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. In 1746: the Fondo Capponiano, 288 codices collected by a Roman bibliophile. In 1748: the Fondo Ottoboniano, the manuscript collection of Cardinal Marcello Cervini of Montepulciano, purchased by Benedictus XIV from the heirs of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni the Younger and comprising 3394 Latin and 473 Greek manuscripts, some from the University of Avignon, some from the Greek monasteries on Mount Athos. Acquired in 1902: the Fondo Borgiano, an exceptionally international collection of 768 Latin, 276 Arabic, 178 Syrian, 136 Coptic, eighty-eight Armenian, eight-one Turkish, forty-one Tonkinese, thirty-seven Ethiopic, thirty-seven Indian, twenty-seven Greek, twenty-four Persian, twenty-two Illyrian, nineteen Hebrew, fifteen Georgian, two Siamese and two Irish manuscripts, as well as one each in Icelandic and Precolumbian Mexican, and 543 Chinese texts, most of them printed. In 1885: the vast collection of Count Leopoldo Cicognara of Ferrara, a great traveller and connoisseur (who had already given the Vatican 4300 volumes). Also in 1885: a further 1445 valuable volumes collected by Cardinal Angelo Mai, a Jesuit scholar, formerly scriptor of the Ambrosian and prefect of the Vatican Library, and a specialist in the study and decipherment of palimpsests. Acquired under Leo XIII: the Fondo dei Neofiti, the Fondo della Cappella Sistina and the Fondo Borghese, which includes manuscripts from the library of the Avignon popes. And the greatest coup under Leo XIII: the Fondo Barberiniano, a wonderful collection of books assembled in the Palazzo Barberini by the spendthrift prince, Cardinal Francesco Barberini.

  Bernini and Borromini built Prince Francesco’s palace, in part using stones from the Colosseum and tiles from the Pantheon, an expedient that prompted the mocking epigram, ‘Quod non fecerunt Barbari, fecere Barberini’ (‘What the Barbarians did not do, the Barberini do’). The prince acquired 36,049 printed volumes, 10,041 Latin manuscripts, 595 Greek manuscripts and 160 oriental manuscripts. Totti’s 1638 Roman guidebook observed that the Barberini library could be visited and that, ‘because it can be of use to the public, there are custodians’. The prince’s approach to acquiring books attracted the same criticism as his pillaging of ancient stones. ‘The Cardinal also did not hesitate to acquire some of his manuscripts in like manner. He confiscated what he wanted at the Abbey Grottaferrata which, for centuries, had been a centre of Greek–Byzantine studies.’

  Into the first decades of the twentieth century, the creation of new Fondi continued with gusto. Acquired in 1921: the Fondo Rossiano, the library of Roman nobleman Giovan Francesco de Rossi, comprising 196 manuscripts, 6000 rare prints and 2500 ‘incunabula’ (printed books from the fifteenth century). Acquired in 1923: the Fondo Chigiano, the last great collection of a noble Roman family, comprising 3916 manuscripts in total, including fifty-four early Greek manuscripts, an eleventh-century Horace, the Summa Dictaminum of Pier delle Vigne, the Chronicle of Giovanni Villani (with 225 fourteenth-century miniatures) and the famous Codice delle sei Messe. As well as important works by Cicero, Virgil, Sallust, Juvenal, Pliny, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the Fondo Chigiano includes original drawings by Bernini, seventeenth-century music, and books on war, hunting and dance. Acquired in 1926: the Fondo Ferrajoli comprises 885 manuscripts and 100,000 autographs. Under John XXIII and Paul VI the Fondo Cerulli Persiani and Fondo Cerulli Etiopici were acquired, swelling the library’s holdings of Persian drama and Ethiopic manuscripts.

  All these Fondos added up to 80,000 late-antique, Byzantine, mediaeval and Renaissance manuscripts in dozens of languages, from Aramaic to Old Church Slavonic. Many of the world’s greatest documentary treasures. Codex B, a fourth-century manuscript of the Bible in Greek. One of the earliest versions of Virgil’s Aeneid. The oldest Hebrew book in existence. One of the oldest copies of the Pythagorean theorem. An autograph of Thomas Aquinas. Eight thousand incunabula. A hundred thousand maps, prints, engravings and drawings. Nearly 2 million printed books. Seventy-five thousand reference volumes. All housed in the building commissioned by Sixtus V, next to the Cortile del Belvedere—a small city of halls, offices, laboratories, reading rooms and strongrooms.

  Established by Paul V in 1612, and now part of the Vatican Library, the Archivio Segreto Vaticano—the ‘Secret Archive’—runs to 35,000 volumes and comprises the Vatican’s collection of the Papacy’s own papers, including those from Avignon. One of the papers is a threatening note from Genghis Khan’s grandson demanding that Pope Innocent IV ‘pay service and homage’ to the Mongols. There are also accounts of the trial of the Knights Templar held at Chinon in August 1308; the 1493 papal bull that split the New World between Spain and Portugal; Leo X’s 1521 decree excommunicating Martin Luther; and letters from Elizabeth I, Voltaire, Abraham Lincoln, and, written on fragile birch bark, a group of Christian Ojibwe Indians. (Addressed to Pope Leo, or ‘the Great Master of Prayer, he who holds the place of Jesus’, that letter is postmarked, ‘where there is much grass, in the month of the flowers’.) Mostly bound in cream vellum, the Secret Archive volumes, some more than a foot thick, are housed in the Tower of Winds, whose rooms are lined with more than eighty kilometres of dark wooden shelves.

  In 1714 Humfrey Wanley recommended that a new library should have ‘sines that may keep off loiterers, peepers, and talkative persons’. At the Bodleian, which was well endowed with such signs, any ‘gentleman stranger’ from abroad could apply for permission to study in the library. The first ‘Extraneus’, admitted on 15 February 1603, was a Frenchman. Students from Protestant Europe came in substantial numbers. Other readers before 1620 included Spaniards, Italians and one Ethiopian.

  The Ambrosian Library was referred to as the ‘Catholic counterpart of Bodley’s creation’. When Richard Lassels visited the Ambrosian in the seventeenth century, he concluded it was 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’. He was able to handle amazing treasures, including the album of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci that was formed by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni and was known as the Codice Atlantico for its large size. And a copy of Il Saggiatore, which Galileo presented, along with a covering letter, to Cardinal Borromeo, ‘not because I think it worthy to be read by you, but for my own esteem and to procure life and reputation for the work, in itself low and frail, in your most Illustrious and Reverend Lordship’s heroic and immortal library’. The Ambrosian also included manuscript treasures from the monastery of Bobbio.

  In 1726 Charles VI declared Vienna’s Hofbibliothek open to all except ‘idiots, servants, idlers, chatterboxes and casual strollers’. At Trinity College, Dublin, arrangements were in place should students abuse their access privileges. If, for example, a volume was missed, ‘a stringent search should be made’ of the dorms and studies—such as when, in 1793, an undergraduate was caught selling library books on the quays. At the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, the borrowing of books was forbidden; ‘the single recorded exception was disastrous: a volume of costume plates lent to the Duc de Luxembourg and “miserably torn” by his children.’

  Prior to 1692 the French national library was closed to the public; ‘even a scholar of the eminence of Isaac Vossius could only gain admittance through influence at court.’ This all changed when a curious appointment was made. For a significant part of the reign of Louis XIV, François Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois was Secretary of State for War. In the last decades of his life he was the most powerful of the king’s ministers. In 1684 Louvois purchased the office of Royal Librarian for his fourth son, as a ninth birthday present. The incumbent librarians and their agents were unceremoniously fired. The new librarian, Abbé de Louvois, turned out to be a precocious savant and an erudite and able librarian. In 1692, he began opening the library to the public for two days a week, and he invited scholars to dine and converse with him on t
hose days.

  At the Vatican Library, the idea of allowing scholars to consult the collections was first broached in the middle of the fifteenth century, during the brief but energetic pontificate of polymath and bibliophile Nicholas V. He intended the library’s treasures to be used ‘for the common convenience of the learned’. Nicholas died before this vision could be implemented, but, in June 1475, the new pope crystallised the idea with a bull that opened the library to people outside the Vatican. ‘Serious students’ were allowed to access books and even to borrow from the library, just as they could from the Medici collections in Florence.

  After this apogee of liberality, though, access became more and more difficult. In the seventeenth century, John Evelyn complained that the Vatican’s books were ‘all shut up in Presses… and not expos’d on shelves to the naked ayre’. Clement XIII was the notoriously prudish pope who put fig leaves over the rude bits of the Vatican’s nudes. In 1765 he issued a bull limiting access to the manuscripts, locking many of them away ‘under double keys’. At the end of the eighteenth century, things were so bad that a Spanish priest, Juan Andres, denounced the library as not so much a biblioteca as a bibliotaphio, a tomb for books. The regulation of access to the Secret Archive was especially strict. Absolutely no browsing allowed. In the nineteenth century, during the long librarianship of Cardinal Mai, the main collections were still largely off limits. Readers could consult neither indexes nor catalogues, and were given only a small, ill-lit room in which to work. There were other restrictions, too. As late as the 1970s, the shoulders of visiting female scholars had to be completely covered.