Breaching the 15,000 barrier

Today, the tally of online manuscripts at the Vatican Library ticked past 15,000. It's a moment to savor, like the DAX stock index surpassing 13,000 this month, but with a difference. Investments can go down as well as up. Virtual libraries only go up.

How did we get here?

In early 2014, the years of dismal efforts at the Vatican to create an online manuscripts portal had nothing much to show. The DigiVatLib site at that time was a hand me down. It indexed a few hundred manuscripts which had in fact been scanned for Germany's Bibliotheca Palatina Project, mainly funded by the Manfred Lautenschläger Stiftung, and copied to Rome for free.

The site only offered 24 items from the Vatican Library's other collections. Bear in mind that this was the world's biggest manuscript library, with more than 82,000 handwritten books in the vaults.

On March 20, 2014, a news conference announced a new contractor for digitization, NTT Data, a Japanese software company. It was an historic decision, because this professionalized a project that had been dogged by incompetence, and made it more attractive to wealthy donors who expected to see results for their money. NTT Data Italia did even more. It put up seed money, tossing in a whopping 18 million euros of its own, nominally to digitize 3,000 named manuscripts up to 2019.

Experts could thus be hired and servers bought. The fact that the tally of digitizations on the site's front page is now 15,000 presumably means that other funding has been added to the mix, although the Vatican Library does not publish income data. We do know that the Polonsky Project came in with about 1 million euros to digitize Hebrew and Greek manuscripts at the Vatican, work that ended last month. Mellon pitched in 563,000 dollars this year, but for metadata, not digitization.

The pace has kept accelerating. In May 2015, the manuscripts portal managed to surpass 2,000 items, and on November 3, 2015, it breached the 3,000 barrier, making it the biggest digitization program in Italy, overtaking the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. During 2016, the portal doubled in size.

In January of this year, the program ballooned from 6,000 to 10,338 items overnight by an expedient. Much of the manuscript collection is backed up by old-fashioned black-and-white microfilm and some of these films had been scanned at client request, so these digital scans were placed online. These low-resolution images are a stopgap while high-resolution color scans of the same codices are being carried out.

The fact that we are now at the 15,000 mark indicates the project is not only in the finest of health, but also scores as probably the biggest manuscript portal in the world, though firm comparative data is hard to come by.

A search of the French national site Gallica for "manuscripts" with dates before 1600 produces 20,475 hits, but a significant number of these are single-page items. In Spain, the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica shows 15,971 manuscripts online, but the number sinks to 10,716 if you filter out post-1600 dates. Munich's Digitale Sammlungen shows about 5,300 digitized manuscripts earlier than 1600, whereas Manuscripta Mediaevalia, a portal which consolidates many of the German and Swiss repositories (including Munich, but not other centers), shows 13,340 digitized "manuscripts" online, but only 5,954 dating before 1600. Italy's Internet Culturale claims 19,426 online pre-1600 manuscripts at Italian libraries (not the Vatican), but this is full of duplicates. Of the total, 18,284 hits represent just 3,000 codices at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence.

To summarize, and this is only an informed hunch, the current size of the four biggest national virtual libraries, counting just codices (multipage books) from before 1600 only, may be:

Vatican:	12,000
France:	11,000
Spain:	11,000
Germany:	6,000

What remains to be improved? My first beef with the portal is its slowness to download. The biggest single collection, Vat.lat., now offers nearly 4,000 manuscripts with 4,000 fiddly little thumbnail pictures coming down the pipe at you in one unwieldy page. There is no URL leading to a text-only main-site index of Vat.lat. Please, DigiVatLib, break up the Vat.Lib. table of contents into several sub-collections: 1-999, 1000-1999, and so on.

A second desideratum is to digitize the hand-written catalogs from the Vatican Library's Sala Consultatione MSS. These hand lists are not only vital as finding aids to the collections. They would provide provisional descriptions for the many manuscripts that go online with no metadata whatever. And these hand-annotated  books are historic documents of world rank in their own right. As long as these are withheld from virtual users of the library, there can be no pretence that use of the portal is as good as going to Rome in person.

Fresh Life for Roman Map

The most famous map in the world is the Tabula Peutingeriana, a Roman chart of roads and seas. In 2007, UNESCO placed it on its Memory of the World Register, a global list of 301 documents (as of 2013) which are irreplaceable to comprehend our recent and distant past.

The 12th-century sole copy of the chart is locked in a library vault in Vienna, Austria. So the only decent access you'll get is either to look up a high-resolution photograph (see Richard Talbert's Map Viewer) or check out the the first fully digital edition. The latter, which is my work, arrived online today, and it's #free.

With the digital edition, your browser can:

• search for any of the 3,000+ names (press Ctrl + F)
• use live links (signaled by a hand cursor) to get more info
• zoom in (press Ctrl and mouse wheel) without loss of quality
• reveal manuscript errors (hover cursor over yellow boxes)

Back in March I foreshadowed this edition, which has been the work of several months and is based on the phenomenal earlier work of Talbert and Tom Elliott (@paregorios). The credits line says:

• Richard Talbert and Tom Elliott (transcription, projection, colors, original typology); 
• Jean-Baptiste Piggin (replot, object modelling, interpretational overlayers, revised typology).

The live links lead to the interpretative database which Richard Talbert very generously placed online as a free resource several years ago. The colors of the lettering and roads are not medieval or ancient, but my own choice to make the document more accessible. Other alterations to give it fresh life include reducing spaced-out lettering to make it easily legible. For the sake of a compact file and fast loading I am not reproducing the little vignettes that show towns, temples and spas.

Here is the link to the Piggin Peutinger Diagram and here is the table of contents for my site. Download your own copy to preserve this astonishing artifact of the fourth-century Roman Empire.

Other online Tabula Peutingeriana resources you can consult are:

• Konrad Miller's 1887 lithograph plot of the Tabula, Castori Romanorum cosmographi tabula quae dicitur Peutingeriana / Die Weltkarte des Castorius genannt die Peutingersche Tafel (Ravensburg: Otto Maier) which can be seen in the original sections at http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/90222 or stitched into a panorama at http://archive.org/details/Tabula_Peutingeriana_complete
• René Voorburg's 2011 Omnes Viae: a mapping of the TP onto a GIS map (Google Maps) of the world: http://omnesviae.org/

After We Die

One of the key features of humanities in the age of print was preservation of both creative works and scholarship about them by royal and university libraries and later by national libraries. The point is of course that we will all be swept away by death and only the greatest repositories maintained by the sole durable institution we know, government, can be relied on to preserve whatever scholarly progress we achieve.

In the age of digital humanities this all becomes more complicated, because the key productions are often owned by universities or commercial organizations. Who is acting to preserve those databases, or even the small local data collections in which so much scholarship is presented? It's not looking good.

Because I am a New Zealand citizen, some years ago I asked the National Library of New Zealand to preserve my scholarly website, Piggin.Net, and I have just been to see what they did about it. The web archiving unit crawled the website every 12 months until May 2015, and then seems to have stopped. I have made many changes to the site since then and this it not reassuring. Will they resume crawling?

At the same time I asked the British Library to preserve another website in which I publish English family and local history, Piggin.Org. Alarmingly, the BL crawls ceased in 2013, although I go into that site from time to time to update information, correct links and fix spellings.

[Update: the BL unit, the UK Web Archive, has promptly replied on Twitter: "We have continued archiving sites after 2013 but they are not currently visible on the website. We are working to rectify this."]

It occurred to me that the country where I pay taxes, Germany, ought to be providing this service too. There is a web archiving unit at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, but its performance is a disgrace for a great nation. One would assume that a Made in Germany site which does not use the top-level domain DE would need to be added to the DNB archive by hand. However if you read the basic facts page, you discover that (a) it is impossible at the present time to nominate a page for spidering, and (b) a saved page would in any case only be visible in the reading room. This absurdity is (c) justified as a legal matter. But if one wished as copyright owner to opt in and offer the DNB the express consent to put the web-archive copy online, one couldn't. See (a). A catch 22.

To add insult to injury, the link to the web archive collection, such as it is, is dead.

Some of my articles are preserved at Academia.edu and at ResearchGate.Net, but the preservation of my website in its final state after I die is only being assured by one organization, Archive.Org of the United States, with its Wayback Machine. Archive.Org operates on an opt-out basis, meaning it saves everything (including from Germany) unless you expressly ask them not to.

I am very pleased with their work, particularly the fact that they harvest my version changes every few months. (In fact I sometimes go to them to recover versions I have myself lost.) But it is alarming to know that in 2016, archival preservation of the internet is still being left to a single San Francisco foundation funded by donations. They have just announced that they will create an extraterritorial backup copy of their collections in Canada. They are asking for donations. I think it's a very worthy cause.

But I still regard it as uncertain that any university or foundation or publishing company can survive for the next 500 years. This work ought to be funded by our governments,of which most will, in the nature of things, survive the course.

Memories of Old St Peter's

The 4th-century Old Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome and nearby buildings were gradually demolished in the 16th century to make way for the grand St. Peter's which opened in 1626 and which we know today. What had been there previously was far less grand: here is St. Peter's Square and the entrance to the old forecourt:

The Vatican archivist, Giacomo Grimaldi, was charged with recording what had been destroyed. Among the losses was a huge wall mosaic by the Renaissance artist Giotto, the Navicella (literally "little ship"), which showed Christ walking on water. Grimaldi sketched it at it was then, rather different from the restoration that now exists:

Much of his documentation, together with drawings, is to be found in a codex at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 2733, which dates from 1620. You can now leaf through it online. The St Peter's exterior is shown at folio 152v (although I screen-shotted above an enhanced composite from the Met guide to the Vatican) and the Navicella is at folio 147r.

This compendium is among the most interesting items to be digitized and uploaded on May 21. Here is the full list:

1. Barb.lat.2154.pt.B, the important manuscript R1 of the celebrated Chronograph of 354, an illustrated late antique calendar or almanac (image below). This is one of the greatest treasures in book history: a copy of a lost copy of the lost book that is the earliest western title known to have had full-page illustrations. See Roger Pearse's online edition of the Chronograph, where the pages of R1 are transcribed. Jeremy Norman has written a brief  note on its place in book history. For more detail, read Richard W. Burgess's survey of the manuscripts, where he writes: R1 [was] made in 1620 for de Peiresc and sent to Rome to Girolamo Aleandro.
2. Barb.lat.2733.pt.1, description with sketches of Old St Peter's in Rome, completed by Grimaldi in 1620
3. Barb.lat.4434, Città e castella (1626): hand-coloured engravings of Italian walled towns
4. Barb.or.157.pt.B
5. Borgh.60
6. Borgh.61
7. Borgh.182, Ricceri, Muzio, Carmen de sacello Exquilino
8. Borgh.191, Opera quaedam de pauperitate et ordine Franciscano
9. Borgh.303, Henricus Gandavensis (1217-1293), Godefridi de Fontibus et anonymi: Scripta de re philosophica et theologica
10. Borgh.342
11. Chig.M.IV.l
12. Ott.lat.3116.pt.bis, single engraving, scene with money-counter
13. Reg.lat.189, papal register
14. Urb.lat.1057, bound book of papal records
15. Vat.ar.1507
16. Vat.lat.1612, Renaissance text of the first-century Latin elegiac poet Propertius
17. Vat.lat.10295  
18. Vat.lat.14208, portolan chart on the verge of legibility (when will they learn to scan these at higher resolution?)
19. Vat.turc.169
20. Vat.turc.275
21. Vat.turc.395
22. Vat.turc.434

Above is October from the Chronograph of 354 (Barb.lat.2154 above).

Also released earlier in the week:

• Ott.gr.469.pt.B, a 1492 letter from Sultan Bayezid II to King Viadislaus of Bohemia and Hungary, according to Erwin Koschmieder

As always, if you know more about any of these items, please add a note in the comment box below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 12.]

Bath Time at Pozzuoli

Among the 21 manuscripts uploaded May 4 to the Digita Vaticana library portal is a codex, Ross. 379, with images of group visits to the various thermal baths at Pozzuoli in southern Italy.

These illustrate a didactic poem, De Balneis Puteolanis by Peter of Eboli. This was a widely read guidebook in Latin verse to medicinal bathing written in about 1220. The information about the alleged health benefits of the various waters in the volcanic zone is probably Late Antique and the poem continues to be of interest to historians of medicine.

The pictures supposedly describe the experience of visiting a spa in the High Middle Ages (replete with ribald scenes of men who have somehow managed to gatecrash ladies' pools). I have no prior knowledge of this, but presume De Balneis was often purchased by the wealthy on account of its explicit images of nude people rather than for its scientific knowledge.

A rapid web search informs me that Ross. 379 is one of ten or more extant illuminated manuscripts of this poem. Gallica has a Parisian manuscript, BNF Lat. 8161, of the same, while e-Codices has the Bodmer's. Raymond J. Clark's 1989 article in Traditio on the poem is unfortunately behind a firewall. Of interest to mystery fans: there has been a claim that bathing images in the Voynich Manuscript, a strange fantasy book which no one has ever managed to decode, resemble those in De Balneis.

Here is the full list of releases:

1. Borg.pers.12
2. Borg.turc.34
3. Ross.379, De Balneis Puteolanis, on medieval thermal baths
4. Urb.lat.1, a magnificently illuminated Renaissance Old Testament of the Bible
5. Urb.lat.2, another outstanding 15th-century Bible
6. Vat.ar.351
7. Vat.lat.841, De Regimine Principum, a guide book for princes, by Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus)
8. Vat.lat.869, philosophical miscellany, with various works by Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308), plus a few folios of Peter Abelard
9. Vat.pers.27
10. Vat.pers.32
11. Vat.pers.85
12. Vat.slav.4
13. Vat.slav.5
14. Vat.slav.9
15. Vat.slav.10
16. Vat.slav.13
17. Vat.slav.49
18. Vat.slav.63
19. Vat.turc.4
20. Vat.turc.428
21. Vat.turc.431

From Urb.lat.2, a fine Florentine painting of Solomon pretending to have a baby chopped in half as a way to determine a dispute between two mothers:

The BAV site now has 1,980 manuscripts online. There are often no descriptions at all. As always, if you can contribute information about any of these manuscripts, use the comments pane below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 10.]

Pliny's Natural History

Among the new arrivals online at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana on April 29 is a fine Renaissance copy of Pliny's Natural History, Borgh. 369. This fifteenth-century copy is not one of the ancient manuscripts used to establish the critical editions of Pliny (see a list by Roger Pearse), but it is evidence of the humanist enthusiasm to rediscover the great classical Latin authors.

Here is how the artist fancied Pliny in expository mode:

Also new is Vatican Vat. lat. 3375, a late sixth-century Neapolitan codex excerpting the works of Augustine of Hippo. It is acopy in half-uncial of an anthology that had been composed just a generation earlier by Eugippius of Naples and is an important link to Christian culture at the end of late antiquity.

We also have what looks like a couple of chaps with paunches, receding hippie hairlines, and glass steins in the hand. But I am guessing they are actually sirens. They appear in Barb.lat.409, which is a liturgical office for the feast day of King Louis of France (1214-1270), after he had been made a saint.

A further portolan chart, Borg. Carte. naut. V, is in this batch, but sadly the resolution is so low that it is impossible to read the text. Reader Jens Finke points out that a just-about-readable black-and-white image of this appeared in Heinrich Winter, "The Fra Mauro Portolan chart in the Vatican" (Imago Mundi, 16 (1962), pp. 17-28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1150299.)

Here is the full list:

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.A.32
2. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.C.98
3. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.157
4. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.169
5. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.193
6. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.E.33
7. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.F.27
8. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.3
9. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.54
10. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.H.52
11. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.K.1
12. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.K.2
13. Barb.lat.409, liturgical office for feast of Louis IX of France, image above
14. Barb.lat.679, a compilation of canon law, with a folio about the Council of Carthage of 390 CE  (summary)
15. Borg.Carte.naut.V, illegibly digitized portolan chart, see above
16. Borgh.22
17. Borgh.43
18. Borgh.53
19. Borgh.91
20. Borgh.93
21. Borgh.99
22. Borgh.104, 14th century codex of Petrus de Ilperinis, Tractatus de praedestinatione
23. Borgh.113
24. Borgh.127
25. Borgh.143.pt.1
26. Borgh.145
27. Borgh.155
28. Borgh.168
29. Borgh.176
30. Borgh.180
31. Borgh.201
32. Borgh.207
33. Borgh.215
34. Borgh.238
35. Borgh.251
36. Borgh.257
37. Borgh.281
38. Borgh.301
39. Borgh.305
40. Borgh.310
41. Borgh.313
42. Borgh.334
43. Borgh.369, Pliny's Natural History
44. Borgh.384
45. Borgh.387, anonymous compilation of rules and figures of geometry (ff. 1-27)
46. Cappon.1
47. Cappon.2
48. Cappon.3
49. Cappon.8
50. Cappon.10
51. Cappon.11
52. Cappon.16
53. Cappon.19
54. Cappon.20
55. Cappon.21
56. Cappon.22
57. Cappon.23
58. Cappon.25
59. Cappon.36
60. Cappon.37
61. Cappon.38
62. Cappon.40
63. Cappon.49
64. Ott.lat.356
65. Reg.lat.1484
66. Vat.ebr.119
67. Vat.ebr.130
68. Vat.ebr.143
69. Vat.estr.or.4, Latin-Chinese dictionary
70. Vat.estr.or.8,
71. Vat.estr.or.40, panorama painting of qinqming festival
72. Vat.estr.or.64.pt.2,waterfall drawing
73. Vat.estr.or.83,
74. Vat.estr.or.85, Sinhalese
75. Vat.estr.or.86,
76. Vat.estr.or.97,
77. Vat.estr.or.99,
78. Vat.estr.or.101,
79. Vat.estr.or.114,
80. Vat.estr.or.117,"Cahier siamois", only the container!
81. Vat.estr.or.118, ditto
82. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.1.2,
83. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.6,
84. Vat.estr.or.156, folder of ink sketches, whereby Twitter user @MareNostrum2 points out that Digita Vaticana has (inadvertently) digitized a page from a 1909 Japanese newspaper with it: was this used as wrapping material to send the item to Rome?
85. Vat.estr.or.159, 19th century (?) Japanese drawings
86. Vat.gr.180
87. Vat.lat.3375, excerpts from Augustine (see above)
88. Vat.turc.50

Here is a detail, sadly darkened, from the qingming festival scroll above. It might reveal more with some photoshopping:

That makes 88 in all. Please add any contributions by way of the comments pane below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 9.]

Ladder to Heaven at the BAV

Among the more remarkable items to be admire in the 13 codices placed online March 23 by Digita Vaticana is Ross.251 containing the Ladder of Divine Ascent by the 7th-century Greek-speaking monk John Climacus.

I am told this is Lenten reading among Greek-speaking Christians. There are some vivid illuminations in this Greek manuscript giving you a good idea of how medieval readers imagined the long steady climb through 30 steps of the ladder, assisted by angels if you were doing it right:

This crop of releases takes the tally of Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) digitizations so far to 1,865. After this Lenten issue, I wonder if they are planning any Easter presents for us?

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.H.56, possibly from the collection of Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi (c.1270–1343).
2. Ott.lat.3119, engravings of Roman personalities of the 18th century.
3. Reg.lat.321: a fine old 10th-century manuscript of the poems of the Latin author Prudentius (348-405).
4. Ross.251, with the ladder to heaven (above). Pinakes tells you which folios to consult for the Scala Paradisi of Iohannes Climacus.
5. Ross.555, a beautiful Hebrew codex with four fine Italian miniatures. From Evelyn Cohen I read that this is Jacob ben Asher's legal treatise, the Arba'ah Turim, and that the images depict a synagogue scene, animals being slaughtered according to Jewish ritual, a wedding and a courtroom scene. Here is the synagogue, where men and women seem to be mixed:
   
6. Urb.gr.2, the Urbino Gospels in Greek with gold-leaf illuminations. Here is a most unusual Nativity composition and washing of the newborn, both at folio 20v:
   
   
7. Urb.gr.162
8. Urb.lat.346, Commentary on the Aeneid, 15th-century copy, attributed to Tiberius Claudius Donatus, but believed in fact to be the work of Suetonius.
9. Urb.lat.508, poetry from Duke Federico's collection. This item figured in the Rome Reborn exhibition at the US Library of Congress and St Louis University, where the catalogue identified it as the Camaldulensian Disputations by Cristoforo Landino and Anthony Grafton noted of the image below: "This portrait on the inside cover shows Federigo, duke of Urbino, standing behind a parapet holding a book, gazing intently at his companion, who is probably to be identified with Cristoforo Landino."
   
   Federico always appeared thus: check another image at his old home.
10. Vat.gr.344
11. Vat.gr.699, the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, one of the believers in a flat earth in the face of majority educated opinion in even his own day. This is a 9th-century illuminated copy with copious imagery.
12. Vat.gr.746.pt.1
13. Vat.lat.14933, Carlo Labruzzi vedute, possibly a volume inadvertently missed last week.

 If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 7.]

The Romance of Ruins

The 13 digitization jobs uploaded March 16 at Digita Vaticana include four volumes of vedute or landscape drawings by the 18th-century artist Carlo Labruzzi (1765-1818), mainly of ruins along the Via Appia outside Rome.

There is also a volume of views by the English artist and antiquary Richard Colt Hoare of buildings and towns on the road south to Naples.

The romance of ruins drew a steady stream in the 18th century of English visitors eager to spend plenty of money to take such pictures home with them and hang them on parlour walls. They are not great art, but certainly better composed than most of the smartphone snaps we tourists take today. It must have been a fascinating time to explore Italy's ruins, before urbanization spread over so much of the area.

The BAV digitization programme also now extends to a second Coptic codex and offers its first codex in the Bulgarian language. Here is my unofficial list:

1. Vat.ar.695
2. Vat.copt.59, one of a series of significant 9th-10th-century Coptic Bohairic manuscripts from Wadi el-Natrun
3. Vat.gr.901, miscellany; (Pinakes)
4. Vat.gr.1418, contains Dionysius Halicarnassensis's Roman Antiquities: (Pinakes)
5. Vat.gr.1422, (Pinakes)
6. Vat.gr.2118, (Pinakes)
7. Vat.lat.14929, 18th-century drawings of the Via Appia by Labruzzi, bound in London and formerly owned by Thomas Ashby, vol 1
8. Vat.lat.14930, ditto, vol 2
9. Vat.lat.14931, ditto, vol 3
10. Vat.lat.14932, ditto, vol 4
11. Vat.lat.14934, views 1790-91 by the English artist Richard Colt Hoare of ruins and towns on the road between Rome and Naples, with his annotations (in English of course); the BAV online catalogue lists this as a Labruzzi, but that seems to be a mistake.
12. Vat.sir.599
13. Vat.slav.27, Bulgarian codex

The new total: 1,852 items. As always, enter corrections or advice about the significance of these items in the comment box below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 6.]

Treasures of Urbino

Here's a list of the latest rush of newly digitized manuscripts at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. This release of 52 items was uploaded late on March 12 and brings the total number of Vatican Library works available on the internet to 1,839.

The oldest treasures this time are from the chapter library (Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.) which has only been part of the BAV since 1940.

Nearly half the items this week come from the great Renaissance library created by Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, who died in 1482 after a rambunctious life as a brutal mercenary general (he never fought for free) and refined man of culture (he had his own team of scribes at Urbino and a library considered the greatest in Italy after the pope's).

A couple of centuries after his death, that envied library was integrated into the Papal Library at the Vatican in 1657. We are now all privileged to be able to read Federico's exquisite books online. Here is a fine illuminated capital "S" from one of them, Urb. lat. 348, in a passage explaining the word stemmata.

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.A.13, Augustine of Hippo, sermons
2. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.B.63, Bolognese missal, 14th century, with lustrous miniatures that are now attributed to a painter known as Pseudo-Niccolò. See his Risen Christ and an image described as defence of the book. See listing Ebner.
   
   
3. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.C.103
4. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.173, Augustine of Hippo?
5. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.200, Nicholas of Lyra’s Quaestio de Adventu Christi and Contra Judaeos
6. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.E.15
7. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.F.16, liturgical (Salerno Pontificale) with wonderful initials, including the sun and moon:
   
8. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.39
9. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.42
10. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.G.43, possibly the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis, 12th century
11. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.H.26, Chinese?
12. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.I.17, autograph? Gregory XVI (1837)
13. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.I.18.
14. Borgh.14, liturgical
15. Borgh.95, 14th century, legal, Arnoldus de Augusta
16. Borgh.109, Thomas Aquinas, Summa
17. Borgh.110, Thomas Aquinas, Summa
18. Borgh.120, Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones
19. Borgh.154, Tancredus, 1185-1236, Opera, 13th-14th century
20. Borgh.194, Tuscan translation of the poem De rerum natura by Lucretius (97-55 BC); check out the 2014 book by Ada Palmer on its influence in Renaissance Italy.
21. Borgh.195, 18th-century European politics
22. Borgh.230, Iohannes de Lignano, 1320-1383 Lectura super decretales
23. Borgh.326
24. Borgh.343
25. Borgh.367, Il Governatore Politico e Christiano by Mezentius Carbonari
26. Borgh.377, Scripturales
27. Pal.gr.192, Hippocratic text
28. Reg.lat.525, hagiography
29. Reg.lat.554, universal chronicle, description of Holy Land, copy of BN lat. 4892?
30. Urb.ebr.3
31. Urb.ebr.13
32. Urb.ebr.32
33. Urb.ebr.35
34. Urb.ebr.36
35. Urb.ebr.41
36. Urb.ebr.42
37. Urb.ebr.43
38. Urb.ebr.44
39. Urb.ebr.45
40. Urb.ebr.48
41. Urb.ebr.49
42. Urb.ebr.50
43. Urb.ebr.52
44. Urb.ebr.53
45. Urb.ebr.54
46. Urb.ebr.55
47. Urb.ebr.56
48. Urb.lat.19, Psalter
49. Urb.lat.260, Columella's Roman-era treatise on agriculture (frontispiece below).
    
    This is one of about 40 copies deriving from Poggio Bracciolini's rediscovery of the work in Fulda, Germany, while he was in the north for the Council of Constance exactly 600 years ago. Poggio probably stole it, as it ended up in Milan in the early fifteenth century, where is it now Biblioteca Ambrosiana L.85 su; summary. At the end of the BAV copy is a fragment of Augustine, Retractationes.
50. Urb.lat.348, Renaissance: poems, commentary on Horace: initial at the top of this post.
51. Urb.lat.349, Homer in Latin
52. Vat.lat.3836, Sermons of Augustine of Hippo, Leo the Great and others.

As always, if you see an unmarked gem here, or can explain to us the significance of one of these items to scholarship, or can point out an error, please add a comment in the box below. Most of these items have been discussed in scholarly literature that is not mentioned in the BAV's own very sketchy online bibliographies, but often with variant shelfmarks. Scholarly publications use a great variety of abbreviations to denote such manuscripts. For Arch.Cap.S.Pietro. above, try alternate searches using forms such as "cod. ..." or "cod. cap. ..." or "arch. cap. s. petri ..." or ACP.

If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to Digita Vaticana. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 5.]