Vatican Library

The Vatican Apostolic Library (, ), more commonly known as the Vatican Library or informally as the Vat, is the library of the Holy See, located in Vatican City, and is the city-state's national library. It was formally established by Pope Sixtus IV on June 15, 1475, by the papal bull Ad decorem militantis ecclesiae, although it is much older. It is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts. It has 75,000 codices from throughout history, as well as 1.1 million printed books, which include some 8,500 incunabula.

The Vatican Library is a research library for history, law, philosophy, science, and theology. The Vatican Library is open to anyone who can document their qualifications and research needs. Photocopies for private study of pages from books published between 1801 and 1990 can be requested in person or by mail.

Pope Nicholas V (1447–1455) envisioned a new Rome, with extensive public works to lure pilgrims and scholars to the city to begin its transformation. Nicolas wanted to create a "public library" for Rome that was meant to be seen as an institution for humanist scholarship. His death prevented him from carrying out his plan, but his successor Pope Sixtus IV (1471–1484) established what is now known as the Vatican Library.

In March 2014, the Vatican Library began an initial four-year project of digitising its collection of manuscripts, to be made available online.

The Vatican Apostolic Archive was separated from the library at the beginning of the 17th century; it contains another 150,000 items.

Historical periods

Scholars have traditionally divided the history of the library into five periods: Pre-Lateran, Lateran, Avignon, Pre-Vatican and Vatican.

Pre-Lateran

The Pre-Lateran period, comprising the initial days of the library, dating from the earliest days of the Church. Only a handful of volumes survive from this period, though some are very significant.

At the Lateran

The Lateran era began when the library moved to the Lateran Palace and lasted until the end of the 13th century and the reign of Pope Boniface VIII, who died in 1303, by which time he possessed one of the most notable collections of illuminated manuscripts in Europe. However, in that year, the Lateran Palace was burnt and the collection plundered by Philip IV of France.

At Avignon

The Avignon period was during the Avignon Papacy, when seven successive popes resided in Avignon, France. This period saw great growth in book collection and record-keeping by the popes in Avignon, between the death of Boniface and the 1370s when the papacy returned to Rome.

Prior to establishment at the Vatican

The Pre-Vatican period ranged from about 1370 to 1447. The library was scattered during this time, with parts in Rome, Avignon, and elsewhere. Pope Eugenius IV possessed 340 books by the time of his death.

At the Vatican

In 1451, bibliophile Pope Nicholas V sought to establish a public library at the Vatican, in part to re-establish Rome as a destination for scholarship. Nicholas combined some 350 Greek, Latin and Hebrew codices inherited from his predecessors with his own collection and extensive acquisitions, among them manuscripts from the imperial Library of Constantinople. Pope Nicholas also expanded his collection by employing Italian and Byzantine scholars to translate the Greek classics into Latin for his library.

Nicholas died in 1455. In 1475 his successor Pope Sixtus IV founded the Palatine Library. At the time it was the largest collection of books in the Western world. to unroll the first Herculaneum papyri, an operation which took him months.

In 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte arrested Pope Pius VII and had the contents of the library seized and removed to Paris. They were returned in 1817, three years after Napoleon's defeat and abdication. Foreign researchers, particularly Americans, noticed how inadequate the facilities were for such an important collection. Several American organizations, including the American Library Association and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, offered to assist in implementing a modern cataloguing system. Along with this, librarians from the Vatican Library were invited to visit several libraries in the United States to receive training on the functioning of a modern library. They visited the Library of Congress, and libraries in Princeton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburg, Chicago, Champaign, Toronto, and Ann Arbor. Once back in Rome, a reorganization plan was implemented. The main goals were to create a summary index by author of each manuscript, and likewise a catalogue for the incunabula. Once the project was completed, the Vatican Library was one of the most modern in all of Europe. This joint effort highlighted the importance of international relationships in the field of librarianship and led to the founding in 1929 of the International Federation of Library Associations, still at work. One of the stolen leaves contains an exquisite miniature of a farmer threshing grain. A fourth leaf from an unknown source was also discovered in his possession by U.S. Customs agents. Melnikas was trying to sell the pages to an art dealer, who then alerted the library director. When Pope Sixtus V (1585–1590) commissioned the expansion and the new building of the Vatican Library, he had a three-story wing built right across Bramante's Cortile del Belvedere, thus bisecting it and changing Bramante's work significantly.

In the first semi-basement there is a papyrus room and a storage area for manuscripts.

The library closed for renovations on 17 July 2007 and reopened on 20 September 2010. The three-year, 9 million euro renovation involved the complete shut down of the library to install climate controlled rooms.

Architecture and art

In the Sala di Consultazione or main reference room of the Vatican Library looms a statue of St Thomas Aquinas (), sculpted by Cesare Aureli. A second version of this statue () stands under the entrance portico of the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum.

File:The Sistine Hall of the Vatican Library (2994335291).jpg|The Sistine Hall of the Vatican Library

File:Golden rose Biblioteca apostolica.jpg|Golden Rose stored in the Vatican Library

File:Plafond_Sale_Sistine_-_Salle_des_Archives_pontificales_(2).jpg|Ceiling fresco of the Sistine Hall (photograph by Jean-Pol Grandmont)

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Library organization

Catalogue

The collection was originally organized through notebooks used to index the manuscripts. As the collection grew to more than a few thousand, shelf lists were used. In the 1760s, a bill issued by Clement XIII heavily restricted access to the library's holdings. and it sees 4,000 to 5,000 scholars a year, mostly academics doing post-graduate research.

The collection also includes 330,000 Greek, Roman, and papal coins and medals. This is not to be confused with the Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library, which was established in 1953 at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri.

The library has a large collection of texts related to Hinduism, with the oldest editions dating to 1819.

During the library's restoration between 2007 and 2010, all of the 70,000 volumes in the library were tagged with electronic chips to prevent theft.

Vatican Croatian Prayer Book
Three fragments of the Old Saxon Genesis and one fragment of Heliand comprise the Palatinus Latinus 1447
Libri Carolini

Classic Greek and Latin texts

Vergilius Vaticanus
Vergilius Romanus
Vergilius Augusteus, four leaves are at the Vatican Library with three leaves at Berlin State Library
Codex Vaticanus Ottobonianus Latinus 1829, an important 14th-century manuscript of Catullus' poems
Codex Vaticanus Latinus 3868, a 9th-century facsimile of Terence's comedies
Parts of Euclid's Elements, most notable Book I, Proposition 47, one of the oldest Greek texts on the Pythagorean theorem
Vaticanus Graecus 1001, the original manuscript of the Secret History
De arte venandi cum avibus, a Latin treatise on falconry in the format of a two-column parchment codex of 111 folios written in the 1240s

Others

Codex Borgia, an extensive Mesoamerican manuscript that depicts mythology and foundational rituals in the hieroglyphic texts and iconography made of animal skins
Codex Vat. Arabo 368, the sole manuscript of the Hadith Bayad wa Riyad, an Arabic love story
Codex Vaticanus 3738, the Codex Ríos, an accordion folded Italian translation of a Spanish colonial-era manuscript, with copies of the Aztec paintings from the original Codex Telleriano-Remensis, believed to be written by the Dominican friar Ríos in 1566
Borgiani Siriaci 175, a manuscript scroll of the Diwan Abatur, a Mandaean text

Qurans

The library contains over 100 Quran manuscripts from various collections, cataloged by the Italian Jewish linguist Giorgio Levi Della Vida: Vaticani arabi 73; Borgiani arabi 25; Barberiniani orientali 11; Rossiani 2. The largest manuscript in the library, Vat. Ar. 1484, measures 540x420mm. The smallest, Vat. Ar. 924, is a circle of 45mm diameter preserved in an octagonal case.

Digitization projects

In 2012, plans were announced to digitize, in collaboration with the Bodleian Library, a million pages of material from the Vatican Library.

On 20 March 2014, the Holy See announced that NTT Data Corporation and the library had concluded an agreement to digitize approximately 3,000 of the library's manuscripts within four years. NTT is donating the equipment and technicians, estimated to be worth 18 million euros. It noted that there is the possibility of subsequently digitizing another 79,000 of the library's holdings. These will be high-definition images available on the library's Internet site. Storage for the holdings will be on a three petabyte server provided by EMC. It is expected that the initial phase will take four years.

DigiVatLib is the name of the Vatican Library's digital library service. It provides free access to the Vatican Library's digitized collections of manuscripts and incunabula.

The scanning of documents is impacted by the material used to produce the texts. Books using gold and silver in the illuminations require special scanning equipment. and many other documents which the church has accumulated over the centuries. In the 17th century, under the orders of Pope Paul V, the Archives were separated from the Vatican Library, where scholars had some very limited access to them, and remained absolutely closed to outsiders until 1881, when Pope Leo XIII opened them to researchers, more than a thousand of whom now examine its documents each year.

Vatican Film Library

The Vatican Film Library in St. Louis, Missouri is the only collection, outside the Vatican itself, of microfilms of more than 37,000 works from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Vatican Library in Europe. It is located in the Pius XII Library on the campus of Saint Louis University. The library was created by Lowrie J. Daly (1914–2000), with funding from the Knights of Columbus. The goal was to make Vatican and other documents more available to researchers in North America.

Microfilming of Vatican manuscripts began in 1951, and according to the library's website, was the largest microfilming project that had been undertaken up to that date. The library opened in 1953, and moved to the St. Louis University campus, in the Pius XII Memorial Library, in 1959. The first librarian was Charles J. Ermatinger, who served until 2000. , the library has microfilmed versions of over 37,000 manuscripts, with material in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and Ethiopic, as well as several more common Western European languages. There are reproductions of many works from the Biblioteca Palatina and Biblioteca Cicognara at the Vatican, as well as Papal letter registers from the Archivio Segreto Vaticano (Vatican Secret Archives) from the 9th to 16th centuries, in the series Registra Vaticana and Registra Supplicationium.

Staff

The nominal head of the library has often over the centuries been made a cardinal and hence given the title Cardinal Librarian.

The library currently has some 80 staff who work in five departments: manuscripts and archival collections, printed books/drawings, acquisitions/cataloguing, coin collections/museums and restoration/photography.

{| class="wikitable sortable"

! style="width:200px;"| Name

! style="width:100px;"| Lifetime

! style="width:200px;"| Title

! style="width:100px;"| Duration as librarian

|Marcello Cervini

|1501–1555

|Bibliothecarius I

|–

|Roberto de' Nobili

|1541–1559

|Bibliothecarius II

|1555–

|Alfonso Carafa

|1540–1565

|Bibliothecarius III

|1559–

|Marcantonio da Mula

|1506–1572

|Bibliothecarius IV

|1565–

|Guglielmo Sirleto

|1514–1585

|Bibliothecarius V

|–

|Antonio Carafa

|1538–1591

|Bibliothecarius VI

|–

<!--Actually Prefect, separate table|-

|William Allen

|1532–1594

|1590–-->

|Marco Antonio Colonna

|1523 ca.–1597

|Bibliothecarius VII

|1591–

|Cesare Baronio

|1538–1607

|Bibliothecarius VIII

|–

|Ludovico de Torres

|1552–1609

|Bibliothecarius IX

|–

|Scipione Borghese Caffarelli

|1576–1633

|Bibliothecarius X

|–

|Scipione Cobelluzzi

|1564–1626

|Bibliothecarius XI

|–

|Francesco Barberini

|1597–1679

|Bibliothecarius XII

|–

|Antonio Barberini

|1569–1646

|Bibliothecarius XIII

|–

|Orazio Giustiniani

|1580–1649

|Bibliothecarius XIV

|–

|Luigi Capponi

|1583–1659

|Bibliothecarius XV

|–

|Flavio Chigi

|1631–1693

|Bibliothecarius XVI

|–

|Lorenzo Brancati

|1612–1693

|Bibliothecarius XVII

|–

|Girolamo Casanate

|1620–1700

|Bibliothecarius XVIII

|–

|Enrico Noris

|1631–1704

|Bibliothecarius XIX

|–

|Benedetto Pamphili

|1653–1730

|Bibliothecarius XX

|–

|Angelo Maria Querini

|1680–1755

|Bibliothecarius XXI

|–

|Domenico Passionei

|1682–1761

|Bibliothecarius XXII

|–(P)<br />–

|Alessandro Albani

|1692–1779

|Bibliothecarius XXIII

|–

|Francesco Saverio de Zelada

|1717–1801

|Bibliothecarius XXIV

|–

|Luigi Valenti Gonzaga

|1725–1808

|Bibliothecarius XXV

|–

|Giulio Maria della Somaglia

|1744–1830

|Bibliothecarius XXVI

|–

|Giuseppe Albani

|1750–1834

|Bibliothecarius XXVII

|–

|Luigi Lambruschini

|1776–1854

|Bibliothecarius XXVIII

|–

|Angelo Mai

|1782–1854

|Bibliothecarius XXIX

|–

|Antonio Tosti

|1776–1866

|Bibliothecarius XXX

|–

|Jean Baptiste François Pitra

|1812–1889

|Bibliothecarius XXXI

|–

|Placido Maria Schiaffino

|1829–1889

|Bibliothecarius XXXII

|–

|Alfonso Capecelatro

|1824–1912

|Bibliothecarius XXXIII

|–

|Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro

|1843–1913

|Bibliothecarius XXXIV

|–

|Francesco di Paola Cassetta

|1841–1919

|Bibliothecarius XXXV

|–

|[[Francis Aidan Gasquet|Aidan <nowiki>[</nowiki>Francis Neil<nowiki>]</nowiki> Gasquet]]

|1845–1929

|Bibliothecarius XXXVI

|–

|Franz Ehrle

|1845–1934

|Bibliothecarius XXXVII

|–

|Giovanni Mercati

|1866–1957

|Bibliothecarius XXXVIII

|–

|Eugène Tisserant

|1884–1972

|Bibliothecarius XXXIX

|–

|Antonio Samoré

|1905–1983

|Bibliothecarius XL

|–

|Alfons Maria Stickler

|1910–2007

|Bibliothecarius XLI

|–(P)<br />–

|Antonio María Javierre Ortas

|1921–2007

|Bibliothecarius XLII

|–

|Luigi Poggi

|1917–2010

|Bibliothecarius XLIII

|–(P)<br />–

|Jorge María Mejía

|1923–2014

|Bibliothecarius XLIV

|–

|Jean-Louis Tauran

|1943–2018

|Bibliothecarius XLV

|–

|Raffaele Farina

|1933–

|Bibliothecarius XLVI

|–

|Jean-Louis Bruguès

|1943–

|Bibliothecarius XLVII

|–

|José Tolentino de Mendonça

|1965–

|Bibliothecarius XLVIII

|–

|Angelo Vincenzo Zani

|1950–

|Bibliothecarius XLIX

|–

|Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi