In the age of the Baroque, the archbishop of Milan Federico Borromeo (1564-1631) would send burly yet educated men to sea on a hunt for manuscripts.
Cardinal Federico was a younger cousin of the zealous prelate Carlo Borromeo, the eventual guardian saint against the plague who played an important role in the Counter-Reformation. They both belonged to the Borromeo family, a noble Milanese house that left a strong mark in Northern Italy.
But Federico was a “universal” bibliophile who sent out solo emissaries to chase manuscripts throughout the known world because of his great obsession: the Ambrosiana. In his mind it had to become one of the most important cultural institutions in Europe, a public library (the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana) an art gallery (the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana), an art school, and an ecclesiastic college. Federico planned its foundation and grand opening for 1609.
The Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana is the third-oldest public library in Europe after the Bodleian Library (1603) at Oxford and the Angelica Library (1604) in Rome.
Within a 5-minute-walk from the Milan Cathedral, it remains a mecca for scholars and students, providing a model of intercultural dialogue and education.
It sits timelessly in the heart of the city. Its spacious rooms are filled with 40,000 manuscripts of great artistic and codicological value, 2,500 incunabula, and 1 million books. These precious library materials allow the researchers’ minds to expand infinitely. Here, they can see the whole universe within themselves.
The Ambrosiana holds extraordinary pieces such as the Codex Atlanticus, the largest collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and writings (c. 1478–1518). It consists of 1,119 pages collected by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni at the end of the 16th century. The name “Atlanticus” derives from its very large format, 64.5 cm by 43.5 cm — a format known as the atlas used by cartographers. The Codex Atlanticus reveals Leonardo’s mirrored writing style, his sketches, and diagrams for his inventions such as war machines, parachutes, and hydraulic pumps. It also features architectural and anatomy studies carried out by the legendary Renaissance polymath.
The Ambrosiana has owned the Codex Atlanticus since 1637. But for a few decades, the Codex was kept in Paris, at La Bibliothèque Nationale de France. During the Italian campaign in 1796-1797, Napoleon had confiscated Italian art treasures included the Codex Atlanticus, which was returned to the Ambrosiana at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The Codex Atlanticus was divided into 12 leather-bound volumes during a restoration in the 1960s.
Borromeo’s private art collection still forms the core of the public gallery (la Pinacoteca Ambrosiana), Milan’s oldest museum. It features The Portrait of a Musician, an unfinished painting by Leonardo, and art masterpieces by Titian, Botticelli, Raphael, Brueghel, and many others. The dark genius of the Baroque painting Caravaggio lives on at the Ambrosiana through a still-life masterpiece, La Canestra di Frutta or Basket of Fruit.
But which are the most precious manuscripts housed at the Ambrosian Library?
Scholars are spoiled for choice, yet it is necessary to mention The Ilias Picta, a 5th-century illuminated manuscript on vellum, which depicts the entirety of Homer’s Iliad. It is the only existing set of ancient illustrations featuring scenes from the Iliad.
The Library holds the Muratorian Canon, which is by far the earliest known list of the books of the New Testament. It is a fragment from the 6th-century consisting of 85 lines. It was discovered in the Ambrosian Library by Father Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), the most influential historian of his generation.
Precious and beautiful is a codex of Virgil that belonged to one of our greatest poets, Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374). Senese artist Simone Martini (1284-1344), a major figure in the development of Trecento art, painted the frontispiece of the codex at the poet’s request. Martini and Petrarch were very good friends.
A work by Luca Pacioli titled De Divina Proportione discloses evidence of another story of friendship, between the author Pacioli, Franciscan friar and mathematician, and Leonardo da Vinci. De Divina Proportione is a treatise on geometric figures completed in 1497. Pacioli dedicated it to “the perspicacious and curious minds interested in philosophy, sculpting, architecture, music and other kinds of mathematics”, as he explains in the introduction. Leonardo contributed watercolors of 60 geometric solids.
The richly illuminated Libro d’Ore Borromeo stands out when compared to other Federico Borromeo’s books of devotion.
It was his favorite prayer book. It was also a treasured family heirloom displaying his family’s coats of arms and the portraits of the two ancestors who had commissioned it, Count Giovanni III Borromeo (1439-95) and his wife Cleofa Pio da Carpi. It boasts the signature of Cristoforo de Predis, an excellent Lombard miniaturist active at the Sforza Court. De Predis produced it in the years 1480-1485.
Cardinal Federico Borromeo collected everything he could lay his hands on. “He built a universal library for all the people who could read and write and welcomed all them in,” says Monsignor Dr. Federico Gallo, director of the Ambrosiana Library. He built a library that would circumnavigate the world of knowledge.
“Borromeo’s intent was universalistic,” he says. “The Ambrosiana has never been and will never be a theological and confessional library. This is a universal library.”
“Borromeo also established a college of Dottori or savants, a scholarly body that oversees the institution,” explains Monsignor Dr. Gallo.
The Ambrosiana’s Doctors are philologists. They study literary texts and are capable of critically editing a manuscript. They face technical issues such as bringing out draft sections of a text when the corrected version is present. They interpret the codices and publish essays about them. Each Dottore has his area of expertise.
In the twenty-second chapter of The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi), Italy’s national literary classic published in 1827, historical novelist Alessandro Manzoni describes the personality of Borromeo and the birth of the Ambrosiana preceded by a febrile activity of manuscript hunting. The historical novel renowned for its vivid descriptions of the plague that gutted Milan in the 1600s also offers an insight into Federico’s mind.
Manzoni writes that the Ambrosiana Library “will ever be a monument of Federico Borromeo’s liberality and magnificence.”
“To furnish it with books and manuscripts, besides those which he had already collected, he sent eight of the most skillful and learned men to make purchases of them in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Flanders, Greece, Lebanon, and Jerusalem,” Manzoni writes.
The Ambrosiana is also a chest of hidden treasures in terms of ancient Arabic manuscripts. Borromeo wanted all oriental languages to be represented in the Library’s collections.
To buy Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Syrian and Turkish manuscripts, Borromeo also sent emissaries to Jerusalem, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Istanbul.
Director Gallo says that “Borromeo had access to a widespread web of contacts through missionaries and laymen who were willing to help him build up the Oriental treasures of the Library.”
Michele “the Maronite” was given the responsibility for collecting texts from the Near East and the Middle East. He paid large sums to obtain manuscripts from Cairo. Another time he reached Tripolis, Syria, and Qanubin. He died when he was on a mission in Aleppo in 1613.
Other Federico Borromeo’s orientalists were the Scot David Colville and Giacomo Filippo Buzzi. The latter was an Ambrosiana Dottore in the Arabic language.
“The first Orientalist at the Ambrosiana was Antonio Giggi, who composed the first large-scale Arabic-Latin dictionary, published in 1632,” explains Monsignor Dr. Gallo.
Some 2,150 Arabic manuscripts are part of the Ancient Fund that includes Islamic sciences and Christian codices such as the Pentaglottus, “a magnificent manuscript written in five oriental languages: Arabic, Armenian, the Syriac, the Coptic, and the Ethiopian,” says Director Gallo.
An extremely captivating Arabic manuscript is the Kitāb al-Ḥayawān known as The Book of the Animals. It is a pioneering, encyclopedic work on zoology that anticipates aspects of the modern evolutionary theory. It also combines theological reflections, the first constituent elements of sociology and psychology. The author is AbūʿUthman ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Kinānī al-Baṣrī, an Arab scholar of African descent who lived in the 8th and 9th centuries in modern-day Iraq. He was commonly known by his nickname Al-Jahiz, which translates as ‘goggle-eyed.” He was a consultant for the Caliph of Baghdad.
“Our manuscript containing the Al-Jahiz work dates back to the 15th century,” says Monsignor Dr. Gallo. “It is a splendidly illuminated manuscript whose illustrations reveal animals plus delicate scenes from a harem.”
Among the scientific manuscripts in Arabic is a Miscellanea Medica by Ibn Butlan, a medical doctor from Baghdad who lived in the eleventh century. Islamic medical treatises with some additional practical texts, these illuminated manuscripts are objects of beauty and masterpieces in Islamic book arts.
In 1909, the Ambrosiana acquired another rich collection, the Caprotti Fund, consisting of 2,000 Yemeni manuscripts. They represent the largest collection in this field in Europe. Mr. Caprotti was a Lombard merchant based in Yemen. “The Yemen codices are marvelous,” comments Gallo. “Cardinal Achille Ratti, the future Pope Pius XI, propitiated their acquisition.”
In terms of printed books in Oriental languages, “Cardinal Borromeo had opened his own printing house to publish in Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldee, Persian, and Armenian,” says Gallo.
The first book printed from movable Arabic type is the Kitāb ṣalāt al-sawāʻi also known as Septem Horae Canonicae or Horologion. It is an illuminated Book of Hours, a book of prayers, printed in 1514 by Venetian typographer Gregorio de Gregorii. The text is in black ink but the rubrics and punctuation marks in red. Its border decorations feature aquatic and aerial birds. “It was commissioned and published at the expenses of Pope Julius II and intended for distribution among Christians of the Middle East,” wrote Mirolav Krek, a late scholar in Arab studies at Brandeis University, Massachusetts. This is an extremely rare book. Only eight copies are known to exist. One is at the Ambrosiana.
In honor of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, the Ambrosiana is holding an exhibition (until mid-September) on the Sommo Poeta’s most precious works. Among those featured is a remarkable illuminated manuscript of the Divine Comedy known as Chiose Ambrosiane. Confiscated by Napoleon during his Italian campaign in 1796, it returned to Milan after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Visitors and medievalists can also admire the Comentum Super Poema Comedie Dante, a commentary in the Italian vernacular on the Comedy. The author is Pietro Alighieri, the eldest son of the Father of the Italian language.
The Ambrosiana has begun the process of digitizing its library materials so that can be available to anyone through the web, while original copies can be preserved and protected.
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