They Don't Make Hats Like This Any More

All 40 of the additions made on June 16 to Digita Vaticana come from the collection of Marquess Alessandro Gregorio Capponi (1683-1746), which became part of the Vatican Library at his death. Capponi did not collect classical books at all, but left many manuscript documents with a bearing on eighteenth-century Roman life, drawings from the period and archaeological notes.

There is a very old catalogue (Christies sale) and the 1897 catalogue by Cozzo on archive.org, but very little information is attached to the manuscripts online at the BAV, making it hard to browse them. Here is a 17th-century heraldic blazon with a fanciful hat, from Cappon. 51, described in the catalog as a stemma di tipo flammingo: Look closely for the head.

Digita Vaticana seems to be bringing manuscripts online by a series of campaigns on individual collections: the Archcapitular Library of St Peters was first up, and now the Capponi collection is in focus. If you are hanging around for material in the Vat.lat. series, it may be a long wait. Here is the full June 16 list:

1. Cappon.17
2. Cappon.24
3. Cappon.27.pt.1
4. Cappon.28.pt.2
5. Cappon.28.pt.3
6. Cappon.29
7. Cappon.32
8. Cappon.41
9. Cappon.43
10. Cappon.51, Cicero in Italian with above blazon
11. Cappon.52, Libellus super ludum scaccorum or the Book of Chess, here in an Italian translation. See my more comprehensive notes with Barb.lat.366, a manuscript in the original Latin. Digita Vaticana is using this one as a fund-raiser (see below).
12. Cappon.53
13. Cappon.54
14. Cappon.55
15. Cappon.56, with 16th century illustration including map below, poem by Lorenzo Bonincontri (catalog)
16. Cappon.57
17. Cappon.58
18. Cappon.59
19. Cappon.60
20. Cappon.61
21. Cappon.64
22. Cappon.65
23. Cappon.66
24. Cappon.68
25. Cappon.69
26. Cappon.70
27. Cappon.73
28. Cappon.77, handwritten copy of typographer Ludovico Vincentino's book on italic design, more on Digita Vaticana fundraiser site
29. Cappon.78.pt.1, description of churches of Naples, Assisi, Ancona and Osimo
30. Cappon.78.pt.2,
31. Cappon.79
32. Cappon.81
33. Cappon.83
34. Cappon.84, La Gazeria del Cavalier Marino
35. Cappon.85
36. Cappon.89
37. Cappon.90
38. Cappon.91, description of the museum
39. Cappon.92
40. Cappon.93

Above is a fine little borderless map (Cappon. 56) of the Near East with Damascus, Jerusalem and the Red Sea, which is satisfyingly .... red.

Still to come is one of the most interesting Capponiani items: autograph writings of Machiavelli in Cappon.107, comprising parts of his drafts of his History of Florence and his Letter to Vettori, according to Silvia Ruffo-Fiore. Cappon.52 has been chosen as a fund-raiser item, so consider donating for it:

Cappon.52. The book of #chess (14th cent.) http://t.co/oAiIiwgALR pic.twitter.com/aSLIwoAifm

— Digita Vaticana (@DigitaVaticana) July 30, 2015

As always, if you can tell us more about any of these items, use the comments box below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 16.]

Byzantine Saints

The Digita Vaticana program to digitize manuscripts at the Vatican has just placed one of most noted and colourful Byzantine illuminated manucripts online. Known as the Menologion of Basil II and dating from about 1000 CE, codex Vat. gr. 1613 shows half a year of saints' feasts and depicts a great deal of blood, torture and martyrdom.

The image here shows Fausta (a 13-year-old girl), the sage Evilasius and the eparch Maximus being boiled alive in a cauldron for their faith:

Here is the full list of this most interesting batch of 83 new items uploaded on June 15. The posted total has now reached 2,160:

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.H.33, contains De Re Militari of Flavius Vegetius Renatus, the only ancient manual of Roman military institutions, unilluminated
2. Barb.lat.358, a pocket prayerbook?
3. Barb.lat.2132
4. Barb.lat.3995
5. Barb.lat.4052, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata or Jerusalem Delivered
6. Barb.lat.8615
7. Borgh.198.pt.2
8. Borgh.208, Olivetani Panegyrica et carmina in cardinalis Scipionis Caffarelli Burghesii ordinis Olivetani protectoris
9. Borgh.210, Boethius, De institutione arithmetica, a 12th or 13th century copy not very well used, suggesting it may have belonged to a lazy student. Here's a table of angles:
   
   
10. Cappon.13
11. Cappon.15
12. Cappon.94
13. Cappon.95
14. Cappon.96, Ovid, Letters
15. Cappon.97
16. Cappon.98-100
17. Cappon.101, Relation of the Death of Troilo Savello, decapitated in Rome on April 18, 1592
18. Cappon.102
19. Cappon.104
20. Cappon.105, Frattato Cabalistico
21. Cappon.108
22. Cappon.109
23. Cappon.110
24. Cappon.111
25. Cappon.112
26. Cappon.113
27. Cappon.115
28. Cappon.116
29. Cappon.117
30. Cappon.118
31. Cappon.123
32. Cappon.125
33. Cappon.126
34. Cappon.128
35. Cappon.129
36. Cappon.130
37. Cappon.133
38. Cappon.134
39. Cappon.138
40. Cappon.142
41. Cappon.146
42. Cappon.147
43. Cappon.150
44. Cappon.151
45. Cappon.156
46. Cappon.170
47. Cappon.173
48. Cappon.174
49. Cappon.178
50. Cappon.180
51. Cappon.183
52. Cappon.184
53. Cappon.185
54. Cappon.187
55. Cappon.190
56. Cappon.196
57. Cappon.211
58. Cappon.213
59. Cappon.216
60. Chig.H.IV.135, poetry of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405-1464, elected Pope Pius II in 1458), a figure of the Renaissance
61. Pal.lat.1831, a student's lecture notes taken at the Protestant university of Wittenberg, Germany at the height of the Reformation; this item is new online, as it is not listed among the Heidelberg digitizations to date
62. Pal.lat.1832, like the item above, notes from Reformation lectures by Philip Melanchthon and others
63. Reg.lat.329, contains Aldhelm's Aenigmata
64. Reg.lat.1709, also with a section of Ovid's Fasti [Missing: folios 34-35 which form Rome's part of the Fragmenta Floriacensia (more in BNF, Lat. 6400 B), a key source of the Chronica of Eusebius of Caesarea]
65. Urb.lat.1154, late antique grammar by Probus, Instituta artium
66. Vat.estr.or.19
67. Vat.estr.or.55, contains this extraordinary Christian chronology diagram in Chinese by Carlo di Orazio da Castorano (1673-1755); discussed in detail by Ad Dudink, who notes that the Septuagint chronology, not the Masoretic/Vulgate chronology is being used in it.
      
    In the tracks above, the ancestry descends from Adam to David, then divides into Luke's genealogy in the left loop and Matthew's in the right loop. This design surprised me a lot, as it is fairly similar in its basic layout idea to what the Great Stemma's designer was doing, left to right, back in the fifth century (below):
    
68. Vat.estr.or.81
69. Vat.estr.or.82
70. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.18
71. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.22
72. Vat.estr.or.148, adventures of Jiraiya, according to Mare Nostrum
73. Vat.et.264, hagiographical text from the Ethiopian collection, badly singed, discussed in detail by Alessandro Bausi
74. Vat.gr.752.pt.1
75. Vat.gr.1613, The Menologion of Basil II (Wikipedia)
76. Vat.lat.40, New Testament
77. Vat.lat.92, Peter Lombard, commentary on psalms (printed catalog at Archive.org)
78. Vat.lat.3199, a gift copy of the Commedia sent by Boccaccio to Petrarch
79. Vat.lat.4803, Colocci
80. Vat.lat.6435, Opicinus de Canistris, with cosmographical diagrams
81. Vat.lat.9850, autograph manuscript by Thomas Aquinas: Summa contra Gentiles, Super Boet. De Trin., Super Isaiam
82. Vat.lat.11458, Orations by Cicero, a manuscript from 1417 containing eight recovered Cicero speeches
83. Vat.lat.12895, a book of autograph letters from figures including Cardinal Angelo Mai and Pius IX

As ever, if you can identify any of these further, please add a note in the comments box below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 15.]

Duke's Cookbook

Among the treasures of the library of the dukes of Urbino was a manuscript of the greatest cookbook of Imperial Rome, De re coquinaria ("On the Subject of Cooking"), attributed to a certain Apicius. It contains some 450 recipes, including 138 sauce recipes. The book will be familiar to the many fans of Neill George's Pass the Garum blog as our principal surviving guide to Roman epicureanism.

Only two manuscripts of this work exist. The other, from Fulda, is at the New York Academy of Medicine and was rebound nine years ago. The Vatican's manuscript, Urb. lat. 1146, has been reproduced by an Italian publisher as a facsimile costing 1,560 euros, but since June 1, it has been possible to read it for free at Digita Vaticana. Here is one of the illuminations, showing a couple of birds destined for the pot:

Unlike a modern cookbook, De re coquinaria skimps on essential information about ingredient quantities and cooking times. It lacks the glossy photographs of calamari balls in beds of salad which we would now consider obligatory in a cookbook. It is easiest to enjoy it in the 1926 translation to English by Joseph Dommers Vehling, which has been lovingly digitized for your tablet computer at Project Gutenberg. Vehling's edition is enriched with line drawings adapted from other Roman sources.

Apicius is refreshingly blunt in his views on food purity: taste was what mattered, not the 21st-century obsession with avoiding adulteration. Ut mel malum bonum facias (spoiled honey made good) is one of his straightforward counsels: How bad honey may be turned into a saleable article is to mix one part of the spoiled honey with two parts of good honey. Quite. Where's the problem?

The other major arrival in the June 1 batch of digitizations is the sole oldest surviving manuscript, Reg. lat. 1024, of the Liber Judiciorum, the code of laws of Visigothic Spain.

When the Goths conquered Spain, they initially barred intermarriage between their own people and their Roman subjects and maintained separate legal systems for the two populations. But in time, the legal systems were merged and the Liber is the resulting synthesis, a masterwork of jurisprudence which was drawn up in about 654 under King Recceswinth.

This copy, which once belonged to Queen Christina of Sweden, was penned in the early 8th century [probably: see comment below] in Urgell, Spain and is number 287 in Ainoa Castro's survey & blog of Visigothic-script manuscripts.

Here is the full list of 58  manuscripts added June 1, raising the posted total to 2,077:

1. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.172
2. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.178
3. Barb.gr.310
4. Barb.gr.549, book of hours, 1480
5. Barb.lat.393
6. Barb.lat.2154.pt.A, Roman antiquities, in the codex that also contains the Chronograph of 354 drawings
7. Barb.or.136
8. Barb.or.149, eight-part cosmological map by Adam Schall von Bell, the first European in the court bureaucracy in Beijing, featured in Rome Reborn
9. Borgh.237
10. Borg.ar.71
11. Cappon.9, psalter
12. Cappon.12, history of Florence
13. Cappon.18
14. Cappon.27.pt.2
15. Cappon.27.pt.3
16. Cappon.28.pt.1, compilation of Italian proverbs including the following: Pena patire per bella parere. Delle femmine quando per apparire belle s'acconciano, e strappano, o, sbarbano i peluzzi, che hanno pel viso, e soffrono dolori in acconciature di testa e simili frascherie. Dicesi anche Per bella parere pena convien' patire. Which translates as, "Suffering pain to look beautiful." This item is now being used as a fundraiser (see below for link)
17. Cappon.30
18. Cappon.31
19. Cappon.33
20. Cappon.34, Istoria del Sacco di Roma
21. Cappon.42
22. Cappon.45
23. Cappon.46
24. Cappon.47
25. Cappon.50, copy (1661) of Del Reggimento e dei Costumi delle Donne by Francesco da Barberino, now featured as a fund-raiser (see below)
26. Cappon.71, Diario: Pietro Aldobrandini
27. Cappon.74
28. Cappon.82
29. Cappon.88, Geomantia di Pietro d'Abano
30. Cappon.121
31. Cappon.122
32. Cappon.124
33. Cappon.135
34. Cappon.136
35. Cappon.137
36. Cappon.141
37. Ott.gr.470
38. Ott.lat.2453.pt.1, includes 16th-century book title pages
39. Ott.lat.2453.pt.2
40. Ott.lat.2867
41. Ott.lat.2977
42. Pal.gr.232
43. Reg.lat.689.pt.1
44. Reg.lat.1024, the Liber Judiciorum, an early-8th-century code of Visigothic law (probably) copied in Urgell, Spain (above)
45. Urb.lat.585, Diurnale Benedictinum: Psalter Romanum, Beuron number 344
46. Urb.lat.899, the wedding events of Costanzo Sforza and Camilla d'Aragona Sforza, 1475: relive a Renaissance wedding! The image below may be of Camilla herself. More details from its Rome Reborn file
47. Urb.lat.1146, De re coquinaria ("On the Subject of Cooking"), a 4th-century cookbook (above)
48. Vat.ebr.274
49. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.13
50. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.15
51. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.17
52. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.19
53. Vat.estr.or.147.pt.20
54. Vat.lat.49, Renaissance bible
55. Vat.lat.55
56. Vat.lat.76
57. Vat.lat.90
58. Vat.lat.93

Digita Vaticana is using Cappon.28.pt.1 and Cappon.50 above for a fundraiser project, so consider donating a few dollars for this worthy cause:

Mss copy (1661) of "Del Reggimento e dei Costumi delle Donne" by Francesco da Barberino. http://t.co/JG38UjExgp pic.twitter.com/DRaodd1Y8S

— Digita Vaticana (@DigitaVaticana) July 8, 2015

If you can add more information about any of these, please use the comments box below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 14.]

Ancient and medieval diagrams

When John E. Murdoch published his Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages in 1984, no one could have foreseen that big picture books on high-quality paper -- reproducing images of the parchment manuscripts by means of under-sized, grey-scale screen-printing -- would soon be obsolete.

Murdoch, a US academic who died in 2010, was an outstanding figure in history-of-science studies. He employed what might be called an anthropological approach, believing that if you immersed yourself in the mind-set of old diagrams, investigating what they showed and how they worked, you would gain insight into the intelligence and research methods of early scientists.

The diagrams above comprise a diagram of the planets in Reg. lat. 123 (top;  Murdoch 249) and a test drawing (probatio) in Pal. lat. 1581 (centre; Murdoch 014) at the BAV.

Today, it would be feasible to publish all Murdoch's 473 images online and in colour at a fraction of the cost of a book project. A new list which I have just begun will connect up Murdoch's out-of-print book with online databases of codices, providing links to high-colour versions of many of the album's grey examples. The list is on my website or I can share it with you on request as an MS Excel file.

Not all the diagrams chosen by Murdoch were abstract. The third image (below, Murdoch 228) is from the Leiden Aratea, a late antique visualization of the stellar constellation Andromeda (copied in France in the ninth-century, now VLQ 79 at Leiden). The printed version in the book illustrates how unsatisfactory black and white screen-printing was to present such images:

Leiden University Library has digitized the Aratea and you can see online (folio 30v) what the book lacks:
 

As Murdoch notes, the artist was not particularly accurate in the positioning of the golden stars. Anatomy had priority over astronomy.

Arabic Treasures

While the bulk of the manuscripts at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) are in Latin, there are also extensive collections in Arabic and other West Asian languages.

Since I do not read Arabic -- apart from having a rusty ability, obtained in journalism work 30 years ago, to transliterate from the script -- I will rely here on notes provided at Rome Reborn, an exhibition of Vatican manuscripts in 1992 at the US Library of Congress in Washington.

One of the great treasures highlighted at that show was the Memoir on Astronomy or Tadhkira fi'ilm al'haya written by Nasir ad-Din at-Tusi, who was among the first of several Arabic-language astronomers who modified Ptolemy's models based on mechanical principles in order to preserve the uniform rotation of spheres.

The Vatican has a 14th-century Arabic manuscript of it, Vat. ar. 319. The Rome Reborn exhibition notes (online at the St. Louis University Library) say that the figure above is his ingenious device for generating rectilinear motion along the diameter of the outer circle from two circular motions. In simple terms: the black dot goes up and down only.

This page, now digitized, to be zoomed in and enjoyed, is 28v. There is some biographical data on the astronomer at Musicologie.org.in French, and an extensive discussion of Tusi's discoveries in Frederick Starr's Lost Enlightenment, published 2013 and partly readable on Google Books.

Should you be wondering why the opening shown at Rome Reborn, fols. 29 recto and 28 verso, seems to be in backwards order, blame a long-ago Vatican librarian. Most of the BAV manuscripts seem to be numbered next-page-to-the-right regardless of language, though most oriental manuscripts are read right to left and turned next page to the left.

Vat. ar. 319 has been online for some time, and is not one of the newest batch, but it makes a suitable introduction to the May 26 uploads at Digita Vaticana comprising 14 manuscripts, all non-Latin. With their publication on the portal, the front-page total rises to 2,022. (Since reduced to 2,019, seemingly by withdrawing Ott.gr.326 and by consolidating duplicates.)

1. Barb.or.104, poem Timurmaneh by Persian poet Hatifi (died 1522)
2. Borg.ebr.11
3. Vat.ar.1411
4. Vat.ar.1551
5. Vat.ar.1614
6. Vat.pers.12
7. Vat.pers.76
8. Vat.pers.155
9. Vat.turc.214
10. Vat.turc.316
11. Vat.turc.420
12. Vat.turc.430, contains a story of the "Muslim" Jesus (also known as Prophet Isa) according to a Turkish tradition. For a translation to English (large PDF!), see a 2011 article by Delio V. Proverbio.
13. Vat.turc.432
14. Vat.turc.433

If you can further identify any of these, please add a comment below. [This is Piggin's Unofficial List 13.]

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.]

Past the 2,000 mark

This week, Digita Vaticana, the project to bring the 83,000 manuscripts at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) in Rome to the internet as digital facsimiles, passed the 2,000 mark, an important milestone in democratizing a key collection that is part of the collective memory of western culture.

The digitizing project posted 22 more codices, maps and drawings on May 21, 2015 to bring the posted total on its index page to 2,008.

In reality, the effective total of BAV digitizations to date is much higher, because the Bibliotheca Palatina Digital, a German scholarly project in Heidelberg, has digitized and issued online at least 1,770 additional manuscripts from Rome which are not counted in the BAV's tally.

The Palatine Library of Heidelberg was taken to Rome from Germany as war booty in 1623 and while the German-language and most of the Greek manuscripts were ultimately returned, the Pal. Lat. series remains in Rome. The German project aims to rebuild the pre-1623 Heidelberg Library virtually, that is as a web portal which contains complete digital images of every book that was once in the German university library and is still in existence.

It would appear that 247 of the codices in the Pal. Lat. collection are simultaneously visible on both Digita Vaticana and in Heidelberg. For the rest, the German site offers the sole access.

A third organization, the Polonsky Foundation, is actively working alongside Digita Vaticana and Heidelberg, digitizing Greek and Hebrew material from the BAV. 

All the partnership projects currently running are listed on the BAV page here. Establishing a more accurate total of BAV digitizations to date is not entirely easy because the different lists do not match up.

Estimates can however be proposed, based on the three main projects.

Polonsky's published list of nearly 250 Greek digitizations conducted so far is less complete than the tally published by the BAV. For example, on May 9, Polonsky's Oxford office failed to list Barb. gr. 6 as digitized. I have not checked how current its list of the 35 Hebrew digitizations is, but we will assume the Polonsky Foundation has about 285 works to its credit.

Heidelberg's Pal. lat. numbers top out at 2,026. One can never be quite sure that one has not overseen possible gaps in its series, though a browse suggests that this is a complete sequence. So we will use that number for Heidelberg.

We must subtract from the Digita Vaticana subtotal those items that overlap with Heidelberg's collection. We will also break out those items which are the work of the Polonsky team. We thus arrive at the following sum: 

Heidelberg (estimate)	2,026
Polonsky (estimate)	285
Digita Vaticana own efforts (calculated)	1,476
Total BAV items online	3,787

This raises a curious aspect to which I adverted in a earlier post (in which I was harshly critical of the BAV, and am now pleased to say that I was proved wrong.) From the very beginning, Heidelberg has been far ahead in the race to digitize the BAV's stocks. Close scrutiny shows that Rome's home-grown project with NTT Data as its main sponsor still lags behind the Heidelberg achievement. Digita Vaticana is somewhat less glorious than might appear at first glance.

Reader Jens Finke has suggested I list some of the Heidelberg manuscripts on my blog, and I will consider doing this in future as time allows.

This is, by the way, my 19th post dealing with Digita Vaticana. To see the previous posts, tap the DigitaVaticana label in the concept cloud at right. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for more news.