Guida ai Fondi Manoscritti, Numismatici, a Stampa della Biblioteca Vaticana. Vol. I: Dipartimento Manoscritti; Vol. II: Dipartimento Stampati—Dipartimento del Gabinetto Numismatico—Ufficio della Prefettura; Archivio ed. by Francesco D’Aiuto and Paolo Vian (review)

With 500 years of history, a Renaissance palazzo for its home, more than 100,000 manuscripts, nearly 2 million printed books—not to mention coins, medals, papyri, inscribed palm leaves, parchments, photographs, and prints among various other products of human ingenuity (including statues, carved ivory, and digital resources)—the Vatican Library is one of the world’s great wonders. To this unique institution these two stout volumes (more than 1500 pages), edited by Francesco D’Aiuto and Paolo Vian for the library’s Studi e Testi series, are intended to provide a friendly, versatile introductory guide, but in fact they present readers with a great deal more. As reference books, they furnish a treasure-house of information about every corner of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and its holdings, organized, like the library itself, into three broad categories (manuscripts, printed books, and coins). Each of these contains a host of smaller “Fondi” (individual collections), some extending back into the Middle Ages (like the Cappella Giulia fondo of sacred music), some of them recent legacies (the papers of Pope Paul VI), with an impressive core composed of personal and institutional libraries created in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (the aristocratic collections of the Barberini and Chigi families and the Vatican’s own fondo, the basic collection created in the fifteenth century by Pope Sixtus IV and still open for new acquisitions after all these centuries). There is even a collection of miniatures, Libri minuscoli—books that possess only one common characteristic: extreme tininess. This fondo started, apparently, about 1926. In addition, the Guide also includes a description of the holdings connected with the prefect’s office and the library’s own archive, thus affording a complete introduction to this marvelous world in itself, a world of study that invites conversations among people from every part of the globe and allows living studiosi to forge close relationships with those who have gone before them.

Despite its divine “apostolic” mandate (stated in its founding charter in 1476), the Vatican Library has always been made up of people, from the first borrowers who wrote their names into a pair of bound registers still preserved among the Manuscripti Vaticani Latini to the team of researchers who have compiled this new Guide’s exacting entries on the library’s current holdings (given the size of their task, the bibliography is accurate up to 2009). The contributors are all scholars employed by the library, their expertise strengthened by years of familiarity with the collections, years of familiarity with one another, and unparalleled access to the vast corridors and the six stories of stacks where the books and other treasures are stored. Although the Guide does not pretend to be a history of the library as a whole (for that, the editors refer to an earlier volume in the Studi e Testi series, the excellent La Bibliothèque Vaticane de Sixte IV à Pie XI by the late Jeanne Bignami Odier, from 1973), it provides individual histories of the individual Fondi and the people who amassed and cared for these diverse assemblages of books and objects for the most diverse of reasons. Often the Guide’s short essays present groundbreaking research in themselves, as in the case of Adalbert Roth’s introduction to the Cappella Giulia Fondo, where he uses musical manuscripts to substantiate the claim that initially Pope Julius II (reigned 1503–13) intended only to restore St. Peter’s Basilica, not to replace it—a controversial point among art historians, but a much less controversial point from the evidence provided by the Cappella Sistina manuscripts...