The Vatican Library and Its Collections: from Nicholas V to the Barberini

The Vatican Apostolic Library is one of the oldest libraries in the world still in use. Popes had owned books for centuries, but the modern collection was born in the mid-fifteenth century with Nicholas V, a humanist and passionate collector who gathered hundreds of Greek and Latin manuscripts with the aim of making them available to scholars. A few decades later the library received a formal legal foundation.

From Sixtus IV to Sixtus V

On 15 June 1475 Sixtus IV, with the bull Ad decorem militantis Ecclesiae, formally established the library, assigned it stable revenues and appointed the humanist Bartolomeo Platina as librarian. The scene is recorded in a famous fresco by Melozzo da Forlì, now in the Vatican Pinacoteca, in which Platina kneels before the pope surrounded by his nephews.

By the end of the sixteenth century the collection had grown so much that it needed a new home. Sixtus V had Domenico Fontana build a wing crossing the Belvedere courtyard; the great Sistine Hall, decorated with frescoes, was completed within a few years, around 1589. Since then the library has been enlarged several times, adding stacks, conservation workshops and reading rooms.

The Great Collections

The Vatican's wealth depends largely on the collections that flowed into it, each with its own history and shelfmark. In 1623 it received the Palatine Library of Heidelberg, given to Gregory XV by Maximilian of Bavaria after the capture of the city during the Thirty Years' War; part of the German-language manuscripts returned to Heidelberg in 1816.

Other celebrated groups followed: the library of the Dukes of Urbino, acquired in 1657, with the illuminated codices gathered by Federico da Montefeltro; the manuscripts of Queen Christina of Sweden, which arrived at the end of the seventeenth century; the Barberini library, acquired in 1902, and the Chigi library in 1923. Each collection preserves traces of the interests and tastes of its former owners.

Astrology, Magic and Science in the Codices

Among tens of thousands of manuscripts, the Vatican also holds texts fundamental to the history of the occult sciences: Greek and Byzantine astrological treatises, Latin translations of Arabic works on astronomy and image magic, medieval commentaries and collections of prognostications. Many of these codices were described between the late nineteenth and the twentieth century in the great catalogue of Greek astrological manuscripts.

The presence of such works in a papal library should not surprise. For centuries astrology was considered part of scientific knowledge, and several popes and cardinals consulted trusted astrologers. The very books the Index restricted for the faithful could be kept and studied by those with the authority or licence to do so, and their preservation ensured their survival.

Today the Vatican Library is distinct from the Vatican Apostolic Archive, which keeps the governing documents of the Holy See, and it is open to qualified scholars. A vast digitisation programme has made thousands of manuscripts available online, allowing anyone to leaf through codices that for centuries were accessible only to a very few readers.