Biblioteca Ambrosiana

The Biblioteca Ambrosiana is a historic library in Milan, Italy, also housing the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, the Ambrosian art gallery. Named after Ambrose, the patron saint of Milan, it was founded in 1609 by Cardinal Federico Borromeo, whose agents scoured Western Europe and even Greece and Syria for books and manuscripts. Some major acquisitions of complete libraries were the manuscripts of the Benedictine monastery of Bobbio (1606) and the library of the Paduan Vincenzo Pinelli, whose more than 800 manuscripts filled 70 cases when they were sent to Milan and included the famous Iliad, the Ilias Picta.

Background

During his sojourns in Rome, 1585–95 and 1597–1601, Cardinal Borromeo envisioned developing a library in Milan as one open to scholars and that would serve as a bulwark of Catholic scholarship in the service of the Counter-Reformation against the treatises issuing from Protestant presses.

The library's contents were assembled in the six preceding years by a team of purchasing agents, members of the Cardinal's establishment or ecclesiastical hommes de confiance. These emissaries, who travelled over much of the Mediterranean, were kept under strict financial control from Milan and worked to a master plan devised by the Cardinal. In this scheme, Greek manuscripts, of which there were more than a thousand, held the position of honour that had become normal since the Renaissance, but Oriental languages were given greater prominence than in earlier public collections. There was only one large block purchase; attempts to buy the library of Cardinal Ascanio Colonna in Rome and those of Giacomo Barocci and Pietro Bembo in Venice were unsuccessful, though Lucrezia Borgia's love letters presumably came from the last. Otherwise, the books were acquired singly or in small groups.

An important source of supply was the churches and monasteries of northern Italy to whom the Cardinal-Archbishop was clearly well placed to appeal.