Biblioteca Ambrosiana Research Articles

Zur Identifikation von Extravagante 26 des Liber Papiensis in der Hs. Mailand, Biblioteca Ambrosiana O. 55 sup

Summary The article discusses the identification of Extravagant 26 of the so-called Liber Papiensis, which is uniquely transmitted in an 11th century manuscript now known as Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana O. 55 sup. We argue that the chapter in question is a corrupted version of a chapter from the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, which was adapted to appear more like a capitulary.

Ptolemy’s treatise on the meteoroscope recovered

The eighth-century Latin manuscript Milan, Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, L 99 Sup. contains fifteen palimpsest leaves previously used for three Greek scientific texts: a text of unknown authorship on mathematical mechanics and catoptrics, known as the Fragmentum Mathematicum Bobiense (three leaves), Ptolemy's Analemma (six leaves), and an astronomical text that has hitherto remained unidentified and almost entirely unread (six leaves). We report here on the current state of our research on this last text, based on multispectral images. The text, incompletely preserved, is a treatise on the construction and uses of a nine-ringed armillary instrument, identifiable as the “meteoroscope” invented by Ptolemy and known to us from passages in Ptolemy's Geography and in writings of Pappus and Proclus. We further argue that the author of our text was Ptolemy himself.

History of Palimpsest Photography in the Vatican Library

Abstract This paper focuses on the nearly 200-year history of reproduction and imaging of the famous correspondence of Fronto, transmitted in a palimpsest from the Abbey of Bobbio the pages of which are now kept in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan) and in the Vatican Library. In addition to the general difficulty in accessing an undertext, these pages present different problems that compromise the reading of Fronto. The application of chemical reagents and gelatin has left organic and inorganic material on the parchment. Together with the effects of humidity and changes in temperature, these make photographic recovery a special challenge. The ways and means for creating and processing reproductions and images of this palimpsest text, from the time of Angelo Mai to modern photography and digital images, will be illustrated.

Neue Texte zum Computus byzantinischer Zeit im Codex Ambrosianus A 45 sup. Das originale Schreiben des Theophilos von Alexandria zum Ostertermin – Ein ägyptisches Paschalion 475–512 n. Chr. (adaptierte Ostertafel des Kyrill von Alexandria) – Die Trochoi zum Computus-Traktat des Presbyters Georgios

“New Texts about the Byzantine Computus in Codex Ambrosianus A45 sup. The Original Letter from Theophilus ofAlexandria on the Easter Date – An Egyptian paschalion 475–512 CE (adapted Easter Table by Cyril of Alexandria) – Thetrochoi of Presbyter George’s Treatise on the Computus”: This paper investigates the computus texts of the Greek 12th-centurymanuscript A 45 sup of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Due to its bad state of conservation the manuscript did not attractthe interest of researchers on Byzantine Easter calculations until now although it comprises a remarkable collection of the worksof various authors and preserves some texts as the sole witness. The most important findings are the original version of the letterby Theophilos of Alexandria to Emperor Theodosius I on the date of Easter, the solar and lunar wheels (trochoi) by the 6thcenturyauthor Georgios, presbyter of Constantinople (?), and a paschalion of Egyptian origin which reveals how the lost Eastertable by Cyril of Alexandria was composed.

Through the Eyes of a Mapmaker: Maritime Shrines on Cyprus during the Late Middle Ages

Cyprus acquired special importance, especially from the thirteenth century onwards, on the Eastern Mediterranean’s pilgrimage network. Described by contemporary pilgrims as “Terra christianorum ultima”, the island was considered to be the last Christian land in the south-eastern Mediterranean on the pilgrims’ itinerary on their journey to the Holy Land. This study is concentrated on two maps of Cyprus dated to the fourteenth century and preserved in Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, A95 sup. and Venice: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, gr. XI.21. It aims to explore the physical and spiritual mobility and interconnectivity in Cyprus during the late Middle Ages and to consider how these contribute to the development of pilgrimage sites directly related with maritime routes, seamen and travellers. These unique nautical maps captured the sea voyage which had Cyprus as a stopover, bringing to light new insights into fourteenth century Cyprus. The maritime shrines discussed in this article, which are usually “mixed” sacred sites, are directly related with sailors’ needs. They integrate into a wide network of communication, removing them partially from their local dimension.

The IIIF-based Digital Library of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana

This paper aims to present the freely-accessible, IIIF-based digital library of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan: the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana joined the international IIIF community for providing high-quality digital content on the Internet. Each of us knows how important is to spread knowledge: today we can improve upon methods of the past decades, thanks to new Web-based technologies. Thanks to IIIF, to the image viewer Mirador and to the image server Cantaloupe, the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana makes its precious manuscript collections freely available online to users from all over the world. From the first years of the 17th century, this prestigious conservation library has managed and curated a special and unique collection of precious manuscripts, and – now as it was then – makes those masterpieces freely available for users from all over the world, both within its reading room and – today – through its new digital initiative.

Unziale und Halbunziale in Bobbio

Of the approximately 700 codices that Bobbio owned in the IX. Century, only a small fraction of barely 200 units has survived. Most of them are distributed today amongst the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and the University Library of Turin. Of the uncial and semi-uncial manuscripts that were once part of the Bobbio library, around 50 codices or fragments have survived. How many of them were written in Bobbio cannot be said with certainty.

L’infrastruttura di digitalizzazione della Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana

At the core of the digital library of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana exists the essential infrastructure of the digitalization laboratory: even before the development of the digital library itself, it was necessary to prepare an adequate supply chain that takes into account both the logistical aspects and the technical problems relating to the management of workloads. All this is based on a solid partnership with the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan and the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA) which, since the end of 2018, has provided the means to the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana to equip itself with the necessary technologies in order to prepare the technical steps necessary for the development of the complex digitization project dedicated to the precious manuscripts. Recently, the digitization laboratory has received a substantial update of its production capacities with the installation of a second Zeutschel OS 14000 A1 scanner.

Per una revisione della cronologia dei disegni francesi di Nicolò dell’Abate: «L'Amore sulla mezzaluna» della Biblioteca Ambrosiana e il «Bacco» del Louvre

The article examines two drawings by Nicolo dell’Abate (Modena, 1509? – Paris, 1571), representing Cupid on the crescent and Bacchus, preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan and in the Louvre Museum, executed during the artist’s period of activity in France (1552-1571). Their iconographic and stylistic analysis, coupled with the discovery of new archival documents, led to a review of the chronology of the master's French drawings. The two sheets were dated on stylistic basis to the last decade of Nicolo’s career (1560-1570): however, the presence of the croissant de lune, emblem of Henry II, in the Ambrosiana’s drawing, signals the need to backdate it before 10th July 1559, at the time of the death of the sovereign, while the analysis of the style expressed in the two drawings leads to a reassessment of the development of the artist’s modus operandi at the French court, supported by the recent discovery of two notarial documents in the State Archives of Bologna.

Islamic Theology in Thirty Topics: a Yemeni Zaydī Tradition Preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana

Abstract For five centuries, Yemeni Zaydī scholars composed theological works that adhered to a thirty-topic framework. This article identifies the origins of this framework in a treatise by Qāḍī Jaʿfar al-Buhlūlī (d. 573/1177-1178) and shows that four Zaydī scholars who lived in the decades following him adopted it in at least some of their writings. I then trace the development of commentaries and versifications on the two core texts of the thirty topics tradition, Aḥmad al-Raṣṣāṣ’s (d. 621/1224) Miṣbāḥ al-ʿulūm and his al-Khulāṣa al-nāfiʿa. Altogether, I identify eighteen Zaydī writings that follow the thirty-topic framework, seventeen of which are held in manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The article concludes with critical editions of excerpts from three commentaries on Miṣbāḥ al-ʿulūm on the topic of the Prophet Muḥammad’s intercession on Judgement Day.

Die Solymis des Giovanni Maria Cattaneo (gest. 1529/1530). Ein neu aufgefundenes Fragment aus dem ältesten Kreuzzugsepos der Renaissance

According to contemporary sources, the famous humanist scholar Giovanni Maria Cattaneo (died 1529/1530) wrote a Latin epic about Geoffrey of Bouillon (ca. 1060–1100) and the First Crusade. This apparently unfinished Solymis was considered lost for a long time. The following article presents a newly found fragment of 356 verses, which is preserved in the manuscript Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Manoscritti, I 149 inf. It is an important excerpt from the oldest crusade epic of the Renaissance.

Le Osservazioni sull’architettura in Lombardia di Gaetano Cattaneo (1824): tra Jean-Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt, Carlo Bianconi e Giuseppe Bossi

Gaetano Cattaneo (1771-1841), founder of the Numismatic Cabinet of Brera, inherited in 1815 from Giuseppe Bossi the historiographical materials that the secretary of the Brera Academy had collected with the aim to create a work dedicated to the history of Lombard art. Cattaneo also devoted himself to the project of a History of the arts and artists of the Lombard school, which never came to light, although its preparation is largely documented by his correspondence with Italian and foreign scholars, such as Cicognara, De Lazara and Passavant. A trace of Cattaneo’s work survives in an unpublished manuscript, kept in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. In a schematic form, the document reconstructs the history of architecture in Lombardy from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, though it was supposed to be continued until the early nineteenth century. The information provided by Cattaneo about the origins of the different “epoche”, in which he divides the developments of Lombard architecture, as to the distinctive structural and stylistic characteristics or as to the masters and their main works offer a very interesting insight into the Milanese historiographical consciousness in the time between French domination and Restoration. The essay considers in particular the judgment on the different phases of the Middle Ages, with particular regard to the profile of Longobard architecture and the origins of the Milan Cathedral. In this case both local debates and the work of Seroux D’Agincourt are fundamental for Cattaneo. Another significant theme is the judgment on the architecture of the sixteenth century in Lombardy, which re-evaluates Leonardo, resizes Bramante and, above all, censors the protagonists of the Borromean age, from Galeazzo Alessi to Francesco Maria Richino. In this respect, the internal debate at the Brera school of architecture and the historiographical positions of Carlo Bianconi and Giuseppe Bossi played an important role, other significant latest sources such as Francesco Antonio Albuzzi and Venanzio De Pagave. The essay reports the complete edition of Cattaneo’s text according to the Ambrosian copy, which was probably made by his collaborator Carlo Zardetti.

Music, patronage and reform in 16th-century Italy: new light on Cardinal Carlo Borromeo

Abstract Music historians are certainly familiar with the figure of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo. Important research has illuminated his association with the composer Vincenzo Ruffo, his reform of female convents, and, more generally, his influence over the musical life of Milan, including local churches and confraternities; more recently, Borromeo’s relationship with the musician Tomás Luis de Victoria has been closely examined. However, our knowledge of his role as a promoter of the so-called ‘Counter-Reformation’ in music is fragmentary. In particular, a comprehensive investigation of Borromeo’s private correspondence is lacking. In order to fill this lacuna, this article uses newly discovered letters (housed in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan) to illuminate several interrelated aspects of Borromeo’s activity as a patron and reformer in the aftermath of the Council of Trent: firstly, his support for musicians and the much discussed issue of textual intelligibility, and secondly, the prohibition of musical instruments in church and his directives against public musical entertainments.

English and Scottish Scholars at the Library of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1565–1601)

Throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, the scholar and collector Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601) welcomed poets, mathematicians, antiquarians, and astronomers from every corner of Europe to his vast private library in Padua. These scholars left their mark on Pinelli’s collection, annotating his manuscripts, trading texts, and even making contributions of their very own to his library. This article considers the English and Scottish scholars who visited Pinelli’s collection and the works they gifted to Pinelli. These manuscripts, now preserved at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, include an impressive breadth of material, ranging from treatises on England’s schism with Rome to verse commemorating the deaths of fellow scholar–poets. Pinelli, it emerges, was not only hosting scholars from England and Scotland, but also gathering reports, discourses, and what was in many cases highly sensitive intelligence on both nations. These manuscripts thus bear witness to the importance of the Italian private library to the transmission of both ideas and physical texts across the Continent, shining new light on a literary culture that was able to cross and transcend national boundaries.

English and Scottish Scholars at the Library of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1565–1601)

Throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, the scholar and collector Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601) welcomed poets, mathematicians, antiquarians, and astronomers from every corner of Europe to his vast private library in Padua. These scholars left their mark on Pinelli’s collection, annotating his manuscripts, trading texts, and even making contributions of their very own to his library. This article considers the English and Scottish scholars who visited Pinelli’s collection and the works they gifted to Pinelli. These manuscripts, now preserved at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, include an impressive breadth of material, ranging from treatises on England’s schism with Rome to verse commemorating the deaths of fellow scholar–poets. Pinelli, it emerges, was not only hosting scholars from England and Scotland, but also gathering reports, discourses, and what was in many cases highly sensitive intelligence on both nations. These manuscripts thus bear witness to the importance of the Italian private library to the transmission of both ideas and physical texts across the Continent, shining new light on a literary culture that was able to cross and transcend national boundaries.

Read Yourself!

AbstractCentered on the opening scene of reading staged by Giorgio Agamben in his study of reading machines, The Open: Man and Animal, this article considers how Agamben’s own messianic reading of an illuminated page from a medieval Ashkenazi Bible (Biblioteca Ambrosiana MSS B 30–32) erases the entangled biopolitical histories of medieval Ashkenazi Jews and their Christian sovereigns. What happens if we read the distinctive animal-headed Jews peopling medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts of Bibles and Haggadot dated to the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, not in a messianic mode but in the temporal mode of biopolitical bare life? What is the temporal structure of precarious life? Furthermore, how does this Ashkenazi figural tradition of animal-headed Jews point to forms of resistance to the biopolitics of medieval Christendom? How is messianic theory now unconsciously entangled in modes of temporality of precarious life, then?

The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition: Virtual Repatriation of Cultural Heritage

The manuscript tradition of the Zaydi branch of Shiʿism, which since the 9th century has been preserved primarily in Yemen, is nowadays dispersed over countless libraries in Yemen and the Middle East, Turkey, Europe, and the United States, of which only a fraction has been digitized and is available for open access. Its treasures came to the attention of scholars outside Yemen at a relatively late stage. Whereas the bulk of Arabic manuscripts nowadays housed in the libraries of Europe were acquired between the 17th and 19th centuries in centrally located cities and regions such as the Ottoman capital Istanbul, Syria and Palestine, and Egypt—all strongholds of Sunnism—the collections of Zaydi/Yemeni manuscripts were established only at the end of the 19th and first decades of the 20th century. Among the European explorers and merchants who collected manuscripts in South Arabia and later sold them to libraries in Europe was Eduard Glaser, who visited Yemen on four occasions between 1882 and 1894. After Glaser sold the manuscripts purchased during his first and second journey to the Königliche Bibliothek zu Berlin in 1884 and 1887, Wilhelm Ahlwardt made them the last acquisition to be included in his Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts, published between 1887 and 1899. The third Glaser collection was purchased in 1889 by the British Museum in London—with the exception of the Lane collection that was purchased in 1891 and 1893, it was the last acquisition to be included in Charles Rieu's Supplement to the Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts published in 1894. The fourth Glaser collection was sold in 1894 to the Kaiserlich-Königliche Hofbibliothek in Vienna, constituting the most important acquisition of Arabic manuscripts by the library at the time—unlike the Berlin and London Glaser collections, the Vienna Glaser manuscripts were never described in a published catalogue. An even larger collection of Zaydi/Yemeni manuscripts was brought together by the Italian merchant Giuseppe Caprotti during his sojourn in South Arabia from 1885 to 1919. Portions of the Caprotti collection now belong to the Bavarian State Library in Munich and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, while the majority of the collection is owned by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. European libraries and increasingly US libraries have continuously purchased manuscripts of Yemeni provenance during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Henry Savile's Tacitus in Italy

AbstractThis article examines the Italian afterlife of Henry Savile's Tacitus. Approximately four years before his execution, Henry Cuffe (1562/3–1601), classical scholar and secretary to the Earl of Essex, produced a series of translations into Italian and Latin of Savile's commentary on Tacitus. Cuffe completed these at Padua in the company of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601), owner of one of the largest private libraries of the Renaissance. Pinelli subsequently produced a discourse responding to Savile's commentary, challenging Savile's reading of the Agricola. These works, preserved at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, reveal a fascinating exchange of ideas across languages and across cultures in the final years of the Cinquecento.

I perduti ff. 115-116 del palinsesto L 120 sup. della Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano

On the basis of the clues inferable from the current bibliography and some archival documents so far unnoticed, this is an attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of the loss of ff. 115-116 of the palimpsest manuscript Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, L 120 sup., concisely reported by J.-M. Sauget («MAL» 29/5, 1987).

A Map of Cyprus in Two Fourteenth-Century Byzantine Manuscripts

ABSTRACTA schematic map of Cyprus, unique in the Byzantine world, is found in two Greek manuscripts of the mid-fourteenth century (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS A 95 sup.) and its copy (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS gr. XI.21 (coll. 453)). The article examines the context of its creation, possibly by the physician who collected the medical texts copied in the manuscripts. The map testifies to the perception of a man who is able to sketch the shape of the littoral freehand. He exaggerates the bays and headlands, and notes almost exclusively localities on the coast; inland, only Nicosia, the capital of the island, is shown. In particular, two religious monuments, considered the oldest and most visited on the island (the Basilica of St Epiphanius in Salamis and the Monastery of the Holy Cross–Stavrovouni) are marked, indicating that the author also wanted to celebrate the Christian antiquity of Cyprus and its relics.