2015-03-16

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.]

2015-03-13

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.]

2015-03-10

Older than the Oldest

After my post Is this the World's Oldest Bound Book? appeared, Cillian O'Hogan, who is the curator of classical and Byzantine studies at the British Library, kindly tweeted some comments making out a case that papyrus books older than the Codex Vaticanus do exist, and met the objection from Roger Pearse, who is an eminent citizen-science blogger, that only a bundle with more than one quire to it counts as a "book". He then wrote:
All those Ps refer to papyrus finds, along with numbers given to them by Christian scholars seeking the earliest texts of the New Testament. Some of these things are not online at all, but acceptable images of the 75 leaves of P66 are at EarlyBible.com. This is the one that is probably contemporary with the Codex Vaticanus.

As for the item Cillian O'Hogan dates to 200 CE, the biggest bit (P67) is in the fourth-century Barcelona Papyrus, which I discussed some years ago on my website. Sadly, that papyrus has never been viewable online. However there is an image of P4 at EarlyBible.com and P64, the three small fragments making up MS Gr. 17 at the Magdalen College Library, Oxford, are accessible online as the following tweet points out:
In addition, I pointed out myself that the 102 battered pages at the BAV in Rome of Hanna Papyrus 1, also known as P75, are supposed to date from approximately the same period. It has not been digitized yet, but there are a couple of leaves visible at VatLib. For low-res images, see P75 at CSNTM.

Finally, it was pointed out that there is a very old leaf of a secular work, Homer's Odyssey, dated to the period 200-400 CE. Click on the link below to see it:
In addition, Cillian O'Hogan pointed to a very fine Medieval Fragments blog post by Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel), a medieval book historian at Leiden University, in December 2013 with a different tack on the topic, What is the Oldest Book in the World?

So where do we stand? A case could be made that one or all of these four items are books older than the Codex Vaticanus, but would they, in their incomplete and damaged state, be accepted by the average teenager as "books" in the common garden sense of that word? They have no covers and have been torn apart.

The Codex Vaticanus may not be in its original binding, and indeed it has had leaves inserted in it to replace its lost pages, but it exists as a bound codex that people (see the first post) have continued to open and shut (and handle without using tweezers) right up to the present day. I would compare this to the difference between a shipwreck and a ship. Every wreck was a ship, but is a ship no longer, unless it can be refloated and patched up and made to sail again. No one would dream of messing with the papyrii or "repairing" the indignities done to them by illegal diggers and dealers in Egypt, so I think that we would have to consider them, for now at least, to be the remains of former books.

2015-03-05

Nearly 100 new digitizations at the BAV


On March 4, 2015, the digital library of the BAV or Vatican Library placed online nearly 100 newly digitized manuscript codices and map folders.

As is usual, there was no public announcement of this. I have no contact with Rome, so I can only speculate as to the reasons for such a silence. It may be that the library's server has a limited capacity and could not cope with the acute surge of requests that would follow any publicity.

Or there may be no funding to conduct public relations for a project that is being mainly funded by corporate and private sponsorship. It is possible too that funding institutions such as the Polonsky Foundation, which has a key role in digitizing the Hebrew manuscripts, wish to make their own public presentations at a later date. Polonsky announced February 24 it had reached the 1-million page mark.

But perhaps there is simply a modest sense at the BAV that this is no big deal yet, given that the project started years ago and the intermediate goal of getting 3,000 manuscripts online may not be met until 2016 at this rate. To get the entire stock of 82,000 BAV manuscripts digitized may take four decades, and at the same time, the BAV has committed to separately digitizing thousands of incunables. (See the presentation of one of the world's oldest printed cookbooks.)

Nevertheless the release is quite remarkable.

Less than a year ago, the manuscripts site consisted only of clones of independent digitizations by the Heidelberg state library in Germany and a paltry 24 Roman manuscripts, as I noted at the time. Today the BAV site offers a total of 1,787 works and has surpassed the tally of digitized manuscripts offered online by the British Library (1,220 at the last tally) or by e-codices of Switzerland (1,233).

Of the 151 collections making up the Rome library (see the BAV’s own list), 50 are now represented in some way in this digital presence.

Using comparison software, I have identified the following 97 newcomers this week. I have added notes on content, which are in some cases guesses more than anything else.
  1. Barb.gr.6, Maximus Confessor, 580-662, Opere spurie e dubbie
  2. Barb.gr.372, Psalter
  3. Barb.lat.2724, Chronicon Vulturnense: Miniatures, most of them showing the handing over of donation charters to St. Vincent, like Bishop John's
    .
    This extraordinary compilation was made about 1130 and tells the history of the monastery at Volturno, Italy (Wikipedia). A monk of the monastery, Iohannes, composed the Chronicle.
  4. Barb.lat.4076, is an autograph of Francesco da Barberino's Renaissance poem, Documenti d'Amore. Here is a cartoon-style blurred action image showing some impressive rapid-fire archery in all directions:
  5. Barb.lat.4077, More Francesco da Barberino
  6. Barb.lat.4391.pt.B, maps of Roman fortifications in 1540
  7. Barb.lat.4408, working drawings for mural restorations in 1637
  8. Borg.gr.6
  9. Borg.isl.1
  10. Borg.lat.420, Coronation of Clement VII
  11. Borg.lat.561, Life of Roderico Borgia
  12. Borgh.2, texts of Leontius and of Ephraem the Syrian
  13. Borgh.4, Gregory the Great: Moralia in Job
  14. Borgh.6, collected sermons
  15. Borgh.7, Pope Boniface, Decretales
  16. Borgh.9, Porphyry of Tyre and Boethius
  17. Borgh.10, Letters of Seneca
  18. Borgh.11, Order of Consecration
  19. Borgh.12, Works of Godefridus Tranensis
  20. Borgh.13, Works of Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakarīyā Rāzī, 865?-925?
  21. Borgh.17, Henry of Ghent’s Summa
  22. Borgh.18, Boethius
  23. Borgh.19
  24. Borgh.20
  25. Borgh.23, Italian sermons
  26. Borgh.24
  27. Borgh.25, Vulgate bible
  28. Borgh.26, 13th-century legal text, Apparatus Decretorum
  29. Borgh.27, Gerardus de Bononiensi
  30. Borgh.29, Wyclif?
  31. Borgh.30
  32. Borgh.131, Boethius, Variorum
  33. Borgh.174, 14th century sermons
  34. Borgh.372, Glossa on Justinian. Here's a miscreant in blue hauled into court on 147r
  35. Borgh.374: A 13th-century text of the Emperor Justinian's legal codifications including the Institutions, annotated by medieval lawyers. Justinian was emperor at Constantinople 527-565. Here's a widow under the heavy burden of a no-incest provision in Borgh 374 at 4r:
  36. Borg.Carte.naut.III. This is Diogo Ribeiro's 1529 map "in which is contained all that has been discovered in the world until now." Less than four decades after Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic, it shows the Americas in detail, but not New Zealand, which the Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman was not to document until l642 and which James Cook was not to circumnavigate and map until 240 years after this map was drawn. Jerry Brotton's History of the World in Twelve Maps features it.

    Unfortunately the resolution of this digitization, welcome as it is, falls short of what one would hope for. The section above is the Gulf of Mexico, and it is impossible to zoom in far enough to read the place-names. I would presume the map has been scanned at much higher resolution, and I hope @DigitaVaticana can upload this so that the fourth and closest zoom level provides legible text.
  37. Chig.B.VII.110
  38. Chig.C.VII.213
  39. Chig.C.VIII.228
  40. Chig.P.VII.10.pt.A
  41. Ferr.30, letters of Giuliano Ettorre
  42. Ott.gr.314
  43. Ott.lat.1050.pt.1
  44. Ott.lat.1050.pt.2
  45. Ott.lat.1447
  46. Ott.lat.1448
  47. Ott.lat.1458, Ovid’s Metamorphoses
  48. Ott.lat.1519
  49. Pal.gr.55
  50. Pal.gr.135
  51. Reg.gr.80
  52. Reg.lat.88, French chronicle
  53. Reg.lat.695, Life of St. Denis
  54. Reg.lat.720
  55. Reg.lat.721
  56. Reg.lat.1480, Ovid in French, illuminated. Here's one of the fine pictures (folio 156r). I think it is Diana about to sock it to Actaeon, who will be trying desperately to explain that he is not a stag. With those feeble arms, she really ought to spend less time at home curled up on the couch and more time at the gym:
  57. Ross.61
  58. Ross.70
  59. Ross.74
  60. Ross.181, Missal from St Peter's Monastery, Erfurt, Germany, datable to about 1200: see the post on this by Klaus Graf (reproduced below as comment) with a search that points to comparable missals in German archives and the influence of Conrad of Hirsau, a Benedictine author, on the German scriptoria.
  61. Ross.186, Gilbert of Hoyland
  62. Ross.198
  63. Ross.206, Psalter
  64. Ross.292
  65. Ross.553, Hebrew Ms.
  66. Ross.554, illuminated Hebrew Bible
  67. Ross.556, Hebrew Psalter
  68. Ross.733
  69. Ross.817, Gilles Bellemère
  70. Urb.ebr.2, Kennicott-Rossi 225 according to @RickBrannan
  71. Urb.ebr.4
  72. Urb.ebr.5
  73. Urb.ebr.6
  74. Urb.ebr.7
  75. Urb.ebr.8
  76. Urb.ebr.10
  77. Urb.ebr.11
  78. Urb.ebr.12
  79. Urb.ebr.14
  80. Urb.ebr.15
  81. Urb.ebr.17
  82. Urb.ebr.18
  83. Urb.ebr.19
  84. Urb.ebr.21
  85. Urb.ebr.22
  86. Urb.ebr.23
  87. Urb.ebr.24
  88. Urb.ebr.26
  89. Urb.ebr.28
  90. Urb.ebr.29
  91. Urb.ebr.30
  92. Urb.ebr.31
  93. Urb.ebr.37
  94. Urb.ebr.38
  95. Urb.ebr.39
  96. Urb.ebr.40
  97.  Vat.ebr.71, Ḳimḥi, David ben Yosef, c.1160-c.1235, Commentary on Latter Prophets
There is so much here that it will take some time to trawl through all the digitizations. If any codex which I have listed is of especial interest to you, why not use the comment box below this post to briefly introduce it and explain its importance to other readers.

Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for more news of these digitizations. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 4.]

2015-02-28

Hungary's Week in Rome

This was a special week for Renaissance studies in Hungary. An extraordinary book of art, the Hungarian Angevin Legendary, Vat. lat. 8541, arrived on the web, as I pointed out in an earlier post. With it were two important illuminated missals associated with the lost Bibliotheca Corviniana, the library of Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490). One, Urb. lat. 110, was made for the king in 1488 and is known as the Missal of Matthias Corvinus. The other, Ross. 1164, was pointed out by and is known as the Franciscan Missal. Below is an image from Urb. lat. 110 of a silver-skinned Christ at the resurrection.
has written a blog post introducing the two missals and I am grateful to him for the information about this group.

Two fine French Renaissance manuscripts were also brought online, both of them French translations of Latin works. One is Reg. lat. 538, a translation of the Speculum Historiale, a medieval history of the world, by Vincent of Beauvais, and there is a wonderful image in it where the artist imagines Vincent calmly writing while research assistants or socciii struggle to keep up with his demands for more books. There's a bit more about it here. There is a similar codex at the British Library.
Also newly digitised is Reg. lat. 719, a translation by Pierre Bersuire from the Latin of Livy's History of Rome. The Bersuire book has a wonderful imaginary landscape of ancient Rome (below) as a medieval artist might imagine it with a river through a paradise of green that looks most un-Roman. Both these codices are principally of interest for their illuminations rather than their text.
Finally, I took note of a couple of more modern documents from Italy. A book of caricatures by Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674-1755), Ott. lat. 3113, marks out Ghezzi's extraordinary talent as a cartoonist. Look at the fleshy marchese at left in this image and you see his whole life of over-indulgence.
Also in my pick is a curious compilation, Reg. lat. 1468, of Italian family coats of arms (a thing which happens, by the way, to be called a "stemma" in Italian, which is not very logical, but that is the way it is). Here is an escutcheon which has three men's heads looking left on a mustard field. The different chin shapes are doubtless just a fancy of the artist.
In all, 64 new codices were digitized and published online on Digita Vaticana this week. Something else I sighted in this rush was a pair of large sheets from Vat. lat. 9848. It is no more than a wild guess, but these folios seems to be either sketches or tracings of monumental art, possibly from a Rome church. All that's online are these two sheets, recto and verso. Also new, but merely noted, is Ott. lat. 2919, a book of hours. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 3.]

Portolan Charts of Pietro Vesconte

Among the finest things to be made available online this week from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) digitization programme in Rome is a codex, Vat. lat. 2972, which contains portolan charts which though unsigned can be reliably attributed to the remarkable mapmaker Pietro Vesconte and dated to about 1320.

Portolan charts are, for all intents and purposes, the first true western maps. Everything that precedes them, ought, in my view, to be classed as geographical diagrams.

A portolan chart was something novel and unprecedented, showing the world deskewed and to scale. Geographical diagrams like the BL's Psalter Map of 1265 (see this flash version) showed the human world as mentally represented. By contrast, portolan charts, with compass lines superimposed, show the physical world as one navigates it, with the entire coastline of a sea fully labelled without regard for the social standing of the places on the coast. When a vessel is trapped by a landward wind, any of the places here offers a potential haven on a lee shore. The Vat. lat. 2972 codex contains an atlas of five sheets and is part of Marino Sanudo's Liber secretorum, a book devoted to a mad plot to destroy the Muslim world. Here is the atlas version of the English Channel (folio 110v):
In the middle you see Dumqerqo (Dunkirk), Gravallinga (Gravelines), Calles (Calais) and Bellogna (Boulogne), and at right Parissius (Paris) and Cam (Caen).

Tony Campbell, former map librarian of the British Library, wrote a fine descriptive summary about portolan charts earlier in February on the Pelagios blog while presenting the portolan component of the Pelagios project. He tells us at least one portolan chart from the very end of the 13th century survives. The BAV's, from just two decades later in 1320, will likely become a prime reference on the internet. Yale has a later chart from 1403 online.

Curiously, Genoa-born Vesconte also did mappaemundi similar to that in the Psalter Map. He was on the cusp of the transition from old to new. Here are the British Isles in his Vat. lat. 2972 mappamundi. Since this map (112v) has east at its top, Ireland (Ybernia) is at the bottom of this grouping:

Update

I have tried to tag all the places on the continental coast in the portolan chart above, but some defeat me. Here is what I have resolved, after consulting Campbell's general toponymic listing:
#Bruges
? (Cavo Sta Catalina identified as Pointe de Zand by Campbell. Not clear what St Catherine's; the source document would have been Portuguese.)
#Oostende
#Nieuwpoort
#Dunkerque
#Gravelines
#Calais
#Wissant
#Boulogne
#Étaples
? (vapa identified by Campbell as Port St. Quentin or Eu.)
#Dieppe
#Fécamp
? (no port marked; Campbell proposes Chef de Caux)
? (no port marked, so "loira" may be an inland place)
#Quillebeuf
#Harfleur (on wrong side of Seine!)
#Honfleur
#Touques
#Caen
#Ouistreham

Some of these ports no longer exist, the rivers having later silted up and become unnavigable, leaving coastal areas that today are mainly a zone of holiday beaches.

Tony Campbell published a major new article on March 2, 2015 on the Carte Pisane, which is traditionally regarded as the oldest portolan chart, but is now the focus of controversy. He sets out arguments as to why it should be dated to the very end of the 13th century.

2015-02-25

Bumper book of medieval adventure in 549 full-colour frames

One of the treasures that popped out among the 64 items digitized so far this week by the BAV, the historic research library at the Vatican in Rome, is the Hungarian Angevin Legendary. It's an astonishing, comic-book style compilation of lives of saints full of gold and silver and technicolor gore. According to fellow blogger Zsombor Jékely, there are 549 known frames.

Here's my namesake John the Baptist being frogmarched by Herod's goons into the palace to have his head chopped off (folio 5r). Each of these pictures rewards many minutes of rapt attention. The Legendary was full of compelling visual storytelling techniques. Add a few speech bubbles and you would have a modern graphic novel. With some Ken Burns effects, many of the pages could easily be turned into some very impressive video.

The old story goes that this amazing book was commissioned to delight a spoiled 3-year-old Hungarian prince in about 1340, but that is probably a misconception. In all likelihood this was a strictly adult book, probably commissioned by or for the daddy king himself.

Like too many of the best codices, this one has been criminally dismembered. The BAV has the bulk of it, in the form of Vat. Lat. 8541, which you can now admire online (click the link at left). Quite a bit more is at the Morgan Library in New York (click the link and check out 22r which shows a headless body being dumped down a well). JĂ©kely says there are also bits at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, MS 1994.516 (1 leaf),  Berkeley's Bancroft Library, BANC MS UCB 130:f1300:37 (1 leaf) and further leaves at the Hermitage and at the Louvre.

This is just one of the many good things to explore on the BAV website. Here is my tally of what is new: Arch. Cap. S. Pietro: 19; Barb. gr.: 2; Borgh.: 10; Chig.: 1; Ott. lat.: 2; Reg. lat.: 3; Sire.: 1; Urb. lat.: 1; Vat. ebr.: 10, Vat. estr. or.: 10; Vat. gr. 1; Vat. lat.: 3; Vat. turc.: 1. The total of manuscripts digitized now stands at 1,690. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 2.]