Vatican Library

Location and building

The library is located inside the Vatican Palace, and the entrance is through the Belvedere Courtyard. When Pope Sixtus V (1585–1590) commissioned the expansion and the new building of the Vatican Library, he had a three-story wing built right across Bramante's Cortile del Belvedere, thus bisecting it and changing Bramante's work significantly. At the bottom of a grand staircase, a large statue of Hippolytus decorates the La Galea entrance hall.

In the first semi-basement there is a papyrus room and a storage area for manuscripts. The first floor houses the restoration laboratory, and the photographic archives are on the second floor.

The library has 42 kilometres (26 mi) of shelving.

The library closed for renovations on 17 July 2007 and reopened on 20 September 2010. The three-year, 9 million euro renovation involved the complete shut down of the library to install climate controlled rooms.

Architecture and art

In the Sala di Consultazione or main reference room of the Vatican Library looms a statue of St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1910), sculpted by Cesare Aureli. A second version of this statue (c. 1930) stands under the entrance portico of the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum.

Library organization

Catalogue

The collection was originally organized through notebooks used to index the manuscripts. As the collection grew to more than a few thousand, shelf lists were used. The first modern catalogue system was put in place under Father Franz Ehrle between 1927 and 1939, using the Library of Congress card catalogue system. Ehrle also set up the first program to take photographs of important or rare works. The library catalogue was further updated by Rev. Leonard E. Boyle when it was computerized in the early 1990s.

Reading and lending

Historically, during the Renaissance era, most books were not shelved but stored on wooden benches, which had tables attached to them. Each bench was dedicated to a specific topic. The books were chained to these benches, and if a reader took out a book, the chain remained attached to it. Until the early 17th century, academics were also allowed to borrow books. For important books, the pope himself would issue a reminder slip. Privileges to use the library could be withdrawn for breaking the house rules, for instance, by climbing over the tables. Most famously, Pico Della Mirandola lost the right to use the library when he published a book on theology that the Papal curia did not approve of. In the 1760s, a bill issued by Clement XIII heavily restricted access to the library's holdings.

The Vatican Library can be accessed by 200 scholars at a time, and it sees 4,000 to 5,000 scholars a year, mostly academics doing post-graduate research.

Collections

While the Vatican Library has always included Bibles, canon law texts, and theological works, it specialized from the beginning in secular books. Its collection of Greek and Latin classics was at the centre of the revival of classical culture during the Renaissance. The oldest documents in the library date back to the first century.

The library was founded primarily as a manuscript library, a fact reflected in the comparatively high ratio of manuscripts to printed works in its collection. Such printed books as have made their way into the collection are intended solely to facilitate the study of the much larger collection of manuscripts.

The collection also includes 330,000 Greek, Roman, and papal coins and medals.

Every year about 6,000 new books are acquired.

The library was enriched by several bequests and acquisitions over the centuries.

In 1623, in thanks for the adroit political manoeuvres of Pope Gregory XV that had sustained him in his contests with Protestant candidates for the post of Elector, the hereditary Palatine Library of Heidelberg, containing about 3,500 manuscripts, was given to the Holy See by Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria. He had just acquired it as loot in the Thirty Years' War. A token 39 of the Heidelberg manuscripts were sent to Paris in 1797 and were returned to Heidelberg at the Peace of Paris in 1815. A gift of 852 others was made in 1816 by Pope Pius VII to the University of Heidelberg. Aside from these cases, the Palatine Library remains in the Vatican Library to this day.

In 1657, the manuscripts of the Dukes of Urbino were acquired. In 1661, the Greek scholar Leo Allatius was made librarian.

Queen Christina of Sweden's important library (mostly amassed by her generals as loot from Habsburg Prague and German cities during the Thirty Years' War) was purchased on her death in 1689 by Pope Alexander VIII. It represented, for all practical purposes, the entire royal library of Sweden at the time. Had it remained where it was in Stockholm, it would all have been lost in the destruction of the royal palace by fire in 1697.

Among the most famous holdings of the library is the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, the oldest known nearly complete manuscript of the Bible. The Secret History of Procopius was discovered in the library and published in 1623.

Pope Clement XI sent scholars into the Orient to bring back manuscripts and is generally regarded as the founder of the library's Oriental section.

A School of library science is associated with the Vatican Library.

In 1959, the Vatican Film Library was established. This is not to be confused with the Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library, which was established in 1953 at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri.

The library has a large collection of texts related to Hinduism, with the oldest editions dating to 1819.

During the library's restoration between 2007 and 2010, all of the 70,000 volumes in the library were tagged with electronic chips to prevent theft.

Manuscripts

Notable manuscripts in the library include:

Manuscripts relating to Christianity

• Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209, one of the oldest extant Bibles in the Greek language
• Barberini Gospels
• Gelasian Sacramentary, one of the oldest books on Christian liturgy
• Joshua Roll
• Lorsch Gospels, an illuminated gospel book written and illustrated from 778 to 820, which is spread across various museums. The carved ivory rear cover and the Gospels of Luke and John are kept in the Vatican Library
• Menologion of Basil II
• Vatican Croatian Prayer Book
• Three fragments of the Old Saxon Genesis and one fragment of Heliand comprise the Palatinus Latinus 1447
• Libri Carolini

Classic Greek and Latin texts

• Vergilius Vaticanus
• Vergilius Romanus
• Vergilius Augusteus, four leaves are at the Vatican Library, with three leaves at Berlin State Library
• Codex Vaticanus Ottobonianus Latinus 1829, an important 14th-century manuscript of Catullus' poems
• Codex Vaticanus Latinus 3868, a 9th-century facsimile of Terence's comedies
• Parts of Euclid's Elements, most notably Book I, Proposition 47, one of the oldest Greek texts on the Pythagorean theorem

Medieval Greek and Latin texts

• Codex Vaticano Rossi 215, fragments of the Rossi Codex
• Vaticanus Graecus 1001, the original manuscript of the Secret History
• De arte venandi cum avibus, a Latin treatise on falconry in the format of a two-column parchment codex of 111 folios written in the 1240s

Others

• Codex Borgia, an extensive Mesoamerican manuscript that depicts mythology and foundational rituals in the hieroglyphic texts and iconography made of animal skins
• Codex Vat. Arabo 368, the sole manuscript of the Hadith Bayad wa Riyad, an Arabic love story
• Codex Vaticanus 3738, the Codex Ríos, an accordion folded Italian translation of a Spanish colonial-era manuscript, with copies of the Aztec paintings from the original Codex Telleriano-Remensis, believed to be written by the Dominican friar Ríos in 1566
• Borgiani Siriaci 175, a manuscript scroll of the Diwan Abatur, a Mandaean text

Qurans

The library contains over 100 Quran manuscripts from various collections, catalogued by the Italian Jewish linguist Giorgio Levi Della Vida: Vaticani arabi 73; Borgiani arabi 25; Barberiniani orientali 11; Rossiani 2. The largest manuscript in the library, Vat. Ar. 1484, measures 540x420mm. The smallest, Vat. Ar. 924, is a circle of 45mm diameter preserved in an octagonal case.

Digitization projects

In 2012, plans were announced to digitize, in collaboration with the Bodleian Library, a million pages of material from the Vatican Library.

On 20 March 2014, the Holy See announced that NTT Data Corporation and the library had concluded an agreement to digitize approximately 3,000 of the library's manuscripts within four years. NTT is donating the equipment and technicians, estimated to be worth 18 million euros. It noted that there is the possibility of subsequently digitizing another 79,000 of the library's holdings. These will be high-definition images available on the library's Internet site. Storage for the holdings will be on a three petabyte server provided by EMC. It is expected that the initial phase will take four years.

DigiVatLib is the name of the Vatican Library's digital library service. It provides free access to the Vatican Library's digitized collections of manuscripts and incunabula.

The scanning of documents is impacted by the material used to produce the texts. Books using gold and silver in the illuminations require special scanning equipment. Digital copies are being served using the CIFS protocol, from network-attached storage hardware by Dell EMC.

Gallery of holdings

Related libraries

Vatican Apostolic Archive

The Vatican Apostolic Archive, located in Vatican City, is the central archive for all of the acts promulgated by the Holy See, as well as the state papers, correspondence, papal account books, and many other documents which the church has accumulated over the centuries. In the 17th century, under the orders of Pope Paul V, the Archives were separated from the Vatican Library, where scholars had some very limited access to them, and remained absolutely closed to outsiders until 1881, when Pope Leo XIII opened them to researchers, more than a thousand of whom now examine its documents each year.

Vatican Film Library

The Vatican Film Library in St. Louis, Missouri is the only collection, outside the Vatican itself, of microfilms of more than 37,000 works from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Vatican Library in Europe. It is located in the Pius XII Library on the campus of Saint Louis University. The library was created by Lowrie J. Daly (1914–2000), with funding from the Knights of Columbus. The goal was to make Vatican and other documents more available to researchers in North America.

Microfilming of Vatican manuscripts began in 1951 and, according to the library's website, was the largest microfilming project that had been undertaken up to that date. The library opened in 1953, and moved to the St. Louis University campus, in the Pius XII Memorial Library, in 1959. The first librarian was Charles J. Ermatinger, who served until 2000. As of 2007, the library has microfilmed versions of over 37,000 manuscripts, with material in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and Ethiopic, as well as several more common Western European languages. There are reproductions of many works from the Biblioteca Palatina and Biblioteca Cicognara at the Vatican, as well as Papal letter registers from the Archivio Segreto Vaticano (Vatican Secret Archives) from the 9th to 16th centuries, in the series Registra Vaticana and Registra Supplicationium.

Staff

The nominal head of the library has often over the centuries been made a cardinal and hence given the title Cardinal Librarian. The effective directors, often distinguished scholars, were in an earlier period called "Custodians. After the reopening of the library in 1883, Pope Leo XIII changed the title to Prefect.

The library currently has some 80 staff who work in five departments: manuscripts and archival collections, printed books/drawings, acquisitions/cataloguing, coin collections/museums and restoration/photography.

List of librarians

(P) Indicates time spent as pro-librarian, that is, acting librarian, often a librarian who is not a cardinal.