Biblioteca Ambrosiana
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Entrance to the Ambrosian Library. |
The
Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Ambrosian Library) in
Milan, housed with the paintings gallery, the
Pinacoteca Ambrosiana is one of the great repositories of European culture. Named after
Ambrose, the patron saint of Milan, it was founded by Cardinal
Federico Borromeo (
1564-
1631), 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 illuminated
Iliad, the
Ilia Picta.
The idea of creating a library in Milan open to scholars that would be a bulwark of Catholic scholarship against the scholarship that was issuing from the Protestant presses had germinated during Cardinal Borromeo's sojourns in Rome, 1585–95 and 1597–1601. Construction on a building to house the cardinal's 15,000 manuscripts and twice that many printed books began in
1603, under the direction of Lelio Buzzi and Francesco Maria Ricchino. When its first reading room, the
Sala Fredericiana, opened to the public,
December 8,
1609, it was only the second public library in Europe, after the
Bodleian Library, Oxford. In an innovation its books were housed in cases ranged along the walls, rather than chained to reading tables, the earlier practice, which may be seen still today in the
Laurentian Library, 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 had intended an
academy and a collection of pictures, for which new building was initiated in 1611–18 to house the Cardinal's paintings and drawings, the nucleus of the Pinacoteca. The Academy opened in 1625.
Prize manuscripts, including the Leonardo codices, were requisitioned by the French during the Napoleonic occupation, and only partly returned after 1815.
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. There are now 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.
Among the manuscripts is the
Muratorian fragment, of
ca 170 A.D., the earliest example of a
Biblical canon.
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, the future Pope
Pius XI, and
Giovanni Mercati.
The building was damaged in World War II, with the loss of the archives of opera libretti of
La Scala, but was restored in 1952 and underwent major restorations in 1990–97.
*
Biblioteca Ambrosiana web-site (English)*
The Ambrosian Library @ the
Catholic Encyclopedia
