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Reviewed by:
  • Bibliotheca graeca manuscripta cardinalis Dominici Grimani (1461-1523)
  • Margaret L. King
Aubrey Diller, Leendert G. Westerink, and Henry D. Saffrey . Bibliotheca graeca manuscripta cardinalis Dominici Grimani (1461-1523). Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Collana di Studi 1. Venice: Edizioni della Laguna, 2003. xii + 212 pp. + 5 color and 2 b/w pls. append. illus. bibl. €25. ISBN: 88-8345-150-3.

This splendid little book is about the library of Greek books of the Venetian Cardinal Domenico Grimani — a library that you may not enter, subscribe to, borrow from, or locate on a map, for it is gone. What is left is its cumulative reconstruction by generations of scholars — British, Flemish, French, Spanish, and Italian — and most recently those who authored this book (of whom two predeceased its publication). Multiple deaths, and yet a resurrection, in the true spirit of the Renaissance.

And why should we visit this ghostly library? Because clearly, without the persiflage of theoretical comment or revisionist argument, it offers a portrait of a [End Page 1305] man, and the portrait of an age. Grimani was a Venetian patrician and a prince of the church. Born to an eminent noble family — his father, outliving the charge of treasonous dereliction of duty in battle, was Doge of Venice from 1521 to 1523 — and rose (by age thirty-two) to the cardinalate, the highest office of the Catholic church short of the papacy, and the one that most enriched its holder.

The span of Grimani's career, as coauthor Saffrey points out, includes the discovery of the Americas, the invasion of Italy, the execution of Savonarola, the 1500 Jubilee, the Lateran Council, the excommunication of Martin Luther — and of his consciousness of these great events he must have known at close hand, he has left not a whisper. What remains are the traces of his love of antiquity, immortalized in the memory of the objects that adorned his palaces and the books assembled in his library.

A member of the respublica litterarum that, we might easily infer, meant more to him than the republic of Venice or the ecclesiastical state, Grimani was involved with the leading thinkers and major currents of the day. Among those dedicating books to him were the philosophers Elia del Medigo, Agostino Nifo, Pietro Pomponazzi, and Nicoletto Vernia, as well as the humanists Girolamo Donato and Marcantonio Sabellico (both Venetian), and Battista Mantovano and Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola — and, most notably, Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus left, in addition to his dedicatory letter to Grimani of his paraphrase of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, a precious 1509 letter describing his visit to Grimani's library at the cardinal's palace in Rome and the gracious welcome by that dignitary, who offered the Dutch humanist his patronage.

The library in Rome whose volumes Erasmus sought to consult consisted of as many as 15,000 works, enormous for that age, consisting of mostly manuscript but also printed books, composed in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Armenian, and Slavic languages. Many of these he acquired in 1498 by purchase of the exquisite collection of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (who had died in 1494) — according to one panegyrist, raising the cash to do so by selling off his fine silver. To this core he added others, accumulating the vast collection that he then willed to posterity.

Grimani carefully arranged for the disposition of his library shortly before his death. In 1523 he designated all the Greek volumes and many of the others to be deposited in the Augustinian monastery of Sant'Antonio di Castello in Venice, providing not only the books but an endowed fund for their preservation. The balance he bequeathed to his nephew, Cardinal Marino Grimani.

Grimani's books remained at Sant'Antonio — not perpetually, as he intended, but for more than 150 years. During that time local scholars and visiting bibliophiles consulted, copied, and inventoried the collection. Strapped for funds, the monks surreptitiously sold off some of the volumes — to buyers everywhere, among them the German financier Jacob Fugger. Those thus improperly dispersed are the only ones that survive. The Grimani library perished by fire in 1687. The monastery that had once housed it was destroyed...

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