The 27th week of the year, this week, is when I learned in 2018 of the passing of Jean-Baptiste Piggin (@jbpiggin), who started the work of tracking the BAV digitizations, and continued it, by hand, for over four years.

This week brought a total of thirty-four manuscripts digitized. Though, as in recent weeks, there are a large number of musical volumes from the 18th and 19th century, the overall distribution of digitizations does not follow recent trends. The two most represented fonds, with eight volumes each, are Barb.lat and Capp.Giulia. Closely following was S.Maria.Magg, with seven, and more distantly Borg.ar and Capp.Sist with three each. The week ends with a single volume from each of Ott.lat, P.I.O, Urb.lat, Vat.ar, and Vat.lat

At the right is f.1r from Urb.lat.109, a 15th C Missal. This is not the first page of the manuscript, but it is the first page of the main text as the preceding ff.Ir-VIv contain a liturgical calendar. This is an interesting codex because the main text appears to be printed on velum, with capitol letters and the illuminations done by hand in the style of a manuscript. Set in two colors (large blocks of red rubrication are seen here), and two typefaces, this would have tested the skill of a 15th C printmaster. Like many volumes it was stamped with an ownership mark when accessioned to the Vatican, and here the bibliothecarius seems to have taken care to center the stamp perfectly in the space left for heraldic ownership.

The Capp.Giulia one is a more uncommon area of the collection, containing entirely musical volumes from the library of the Cappella Giulia, formally called the Reverend Musical Chapel Julia of the Sacrosanct Papal Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican. This is the choir that performs the liturgy in St. Peters when the pope is not in attendance. The name is taken from Pope Julius II, who signed the bull In altissimo militantis Ecclesiæ(see p.28) constituting the choir the day before his death in 1513. In that collection we find Capp.Giulia.V.52, a Mass for 16 voices and Organ composed in the late 17th C by Francesco Beretta. From the very end of that, f.27v to be precise, is the line below, part of the amen at the very end of the mass setting.