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Biblioteca Ambrosiana

Coordinates: 45°27′47″N 9°11′07″E / 45.4631°N 9.1854°E / 45.4631; 9.1854
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Pinacoteca Ambrosiana
Entrance to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana
Map
Established1609
LocationPiazza Pio XI 2, 20123, Milan, Italy
Coordinates45°27′47″N 9°11′07″E / 45.4631°N 9.1854°E / 45.4631; 9.1854
DirectorAlberto Rocca
Websitewww.ambrosiana.it

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.

History

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Leonardo da Vinci Crossbow sketch, Codex Atlanticus

During Cardinal Borromeo's sojourns in Rome, 1585–95 and 1597–1601, he envisioned developing this 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. 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.

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.

Cardinal Borromeo gave his collection of paintings and drawings to the library, too. Shortly after the cardinal's death, his 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 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. Prized manuscripts, including the Leonardo codices, were requisitioned by the French during the Napoleonic occupation, and only partly returned after 1815. In particular, Leonardo's aerial screw was taken and is still in the Institut de France in Paris.

Leonardo's Portrait of a Musician

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"[3][4]) and claimed to have managed to steal a lock of her hair ("the prettiest and fairest imaginable."[4]) held on display.[5][6][7]

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.[8]

Among the 30,000 manuscripts, which range from Greek and Latin to Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic,[9] 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.

The library has a college of Doctors, similar to the scriptors of the Vatican Library. Among prominent figures have been Giuseppe Ripamonti, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Giuseppe Antonio Sassi, Cardinal Angelo Mai and, at the beginning of the 20th century, Antonio Maria Ceriani, Achille Ratti (on 8 November 1888),[10][11] the future Pope Pius XI, and Giovanni Mercati. Ratti wrote a new edition of the Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis ("Acts of the Church of Milan"), Latin work firstly published by the cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1582.[11][10]

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.[12] The building was restored in 1952 and underwent major restorations in 1990–97.

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".

Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit

Some manuscripts

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References

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  1. ^ Herbermann 1913.
  2. ^ a b Hobson 1970, p. 192.
  3. ^ Ian Thompson, review, The Spectator, 25 June 2005, of Viragos on the march by Gaia Servadio. I. B. Tauris, ISBN 1-85043-421-2.
  4. ^ a b Quattrocchi, Ed (October 2005). "Pietro Bembo: A Renaissance Courtier Who Had His Cake and Ate It Too" (PDF). Caxtonian: Journal of the Caxton Club of Chicago. XIII (10). Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 October 2006.
  5. ^ The Byron Chronology: 1816–1819 – Separation and Exile on the Continent Archived 23 February 2019 at the Wayback Machine.
  6. ^ Byron by John Nichol.
  7. ^ Letter to Augusta Leigh, Milan, 15 October 1816. Lord Byron's Letters and Journals, Chapter 5: Separation and Exile Archived 9 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine.
  8. ^ Shelley, Mary (1996). Travel Writing. London: Pickering. p. 132. ISBN 1-85196-084-8.
  9. ^ Oscar Löfgren and Renato Traini, Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, vol. I (1975), ii (1981) onwards.
  10. ^ a b 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
  11. ^ a b 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.
  12. ^ Hobson 1970, p. 194.

Bibliography

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