Biblioteca Angelica

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Entrance to the library in Piazza Sant'Agostino

The Biblioteca Angelica is located in Rome on Piazza Sant'Agostino, right next to the Church of Sant'Agostino , near Piazza Navona . It bears the name of its founder Angelo Rocca (1546–1620), head of the Vatican printing works under Pope Sixtus V and titular bishop of Tagaste in Numidia , who made his private book collection of 20,000 volumes available. It is a publicly accessible research library with the collection focuses on beautiful literature and literary history, church history, especially Augustine and the history of the Augustinian orders, Reformation, Counter-Reformation and controversial theology.

History and function

The library was founded in 1604 and opened to the general public on October 23, 1614 as one of the first libraries. The first librarian until 1620 was Fulgenzio Gallucci , later Prior General of the Order and Bishop of Boiano . The oldest holdings go back to the Augustinians , who collected numerous writings on the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation and operated the library. In 1661 the library received the prints from the possession of Lukas Holste , in 1761 the Augustinian General Vasquez acquired the library of Cardinal Domenico Passionei for 30,000 scudi . The Angelica has been keeping the library of the Accademia letteraria dell'Arcadia since 1940 , which has also been based there ever since.

The library has been controlled by the state since the conquest of Rome by the troops of the Kingdom of Italy, and since 1975 it has been under the Italian Ministry of Culture ( Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali ).

Stocks

Francesca da Rimini in Ms. 1102, 14th century

Today the library comprises around 200,000 library units in various languages, more than 100,000 belong to the old Fondo Antico collection . There are also 600 current magazines. The importance of the Angelica is based on the collections of manuscripts, incunabula and early prints.

The 2,664 manuscripts include eleven Arabic codices . One of the most famous manuscripts is the Codex Angelicus , a Greek Bible manuscript from the 9th century. Four centuries later, the copy of De balneis Puteolanis ( Ang. Lat. 1474 ) came into being in the library via the Passionei Collection. Ms. 1102 , an illuminated Dante manuscript from the end of the 14th century, probably originated in Bologna in the library as well through Passionei . Ms. 10 is the Liber memorialis of Remiremont , one begun in the 9th century Memorial Book and to use against 1,200 in Remiremont and updated. The codex has been traceable in the Angelica since the middle of the 18th century, its whereabouts and its way to Rome cannot be reconstructed.

The library owns 1,112 incunabula and a large number of early prints, 18,000 of which are from the 16th century alone. The workshop of Arnold Pannartz and Konrad Sweynheym in the Benedictine monastery of Santa Scolastica in Subiaco is represented with two copies : Ciceros De oratore from 1465 and De civitate Dei des Aurelius Augustinus from 1467. There was also a German at the first printed edition of Dante's Divina Commedia in Foligno in 1472 involved: Johannes Numeister . The copy of the Angelica is one of the few complete ones.

literature

  • Giulia Bologna : Manoscritti e miniature. Il libro prima di Gutenberg . Milano 1988, p. 180
  • Alfredo Serrai : Angelo Rocca fondatore della prima biblioteca pubblica europea (nel quarto centenario della Biblioteca Angelica) , Edizioni Sylvestre Bonnard, Milano 2005, ISBN 88-86842-95-3
  • Chiara Faia: Libri mandati a ligare ... Conti e spese della Biblioteca Angelica; uno studio del Libro dell'esito (1620-1701) . Vecchiarelli, Manziana (Roma) 2008, ISBN 978-88-8247-235-1 .

Web links

Commons : Biblioteca Angelica  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Virtual exhibition: Angelo Rocca: erudito e bibliofilo . On the person of Carlos Alonso: Angelo Rocca, polígrafo, bibliófilo y fundador de la Biblioteca Angélica de Roma (1545-1620) , in: Analecta Augustiniana vol. 69 (2006) pp. 9–32
  2. ↑ See Fabian manual
  3. ↑ Bologna, Manoscritti e miniature p. 180 names this date . The pages of the library, the ministry and the senate only mention the year 1604 for the foundation.
  4. ^ Direttori della Biblioteca Angelica di Roma at AIB
  5. ^ The number after Bologna. The library page mentions "around 3000 volumes". A detailed description of the old parts of the manuscript collection, also before and after Rocca, is available from Manus online
  6. ^ Manus online thereafter the most famous codex in the library; Library info page
  7. ↑ Rarità bibliografiche ; Entry at Manus online.
  8. ^ MGH Libri mem. 1.1, pp. XI-XVI ; Library information page with a picture
  9. ↑ Rarità bibliografiche of the library; one of the 17 surviving copies
  10. ↑ Information under the Rarità bibliografiche . It is possible that the printing was only completed after the two Germans had moved to Rome in Subiaco by local monks who had acquired the necessary knowledge from Sweynheym and Pannartz; alternatively, this is considered to be the last work that Sweynheym and Pannartz realized in Subiaco has been.
  11. ↑ Information under the Rarità bibliografiche

Coordinates: 41 ° 54 ′ 2.5 ″  N , 12 ° 28 ′ 28.2 ″  E