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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. The most valuable codex obtained in this way was perhaps the sixth-century papyrus Josephus from Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, and the greatest coup, the acquisition of part of Bobbio's ancient library in exchange for 'more useful' modern books. Bobbio had been founded in the early seventh century by a party of Irish monks under St Columban, and still owned the only substantial group of Italian pre-Caroline manuscripts outside Verona Cathedral.

Cardinal Federigo chose a suitable envoy, Gian Giacomo Valeri, of an old Milanese family, Canon of Santa Maria della Scala and an antiquarian collector on his own account. Negotiations were opened in 1605 and had immediate success. The following year, about seventy-four manuscripts reached the Ambrosiana, among them at least two written in Ireland (one at Bangor in County Down), and several palimpsests, one of the submerged texts being of three lost orations of Cicero.

Antonio Olgiati, the Cardinal's librarian and first Prefect of the Ambrosiana, was sent on a buying mission to south Germany, the southern Netherlands and France. Francesco Bernardino Ferrari, later Olgiati's successor as Prefect, made a similar journey to Spain. An Ambrosian Doctor, Antonio Salmazia, spent a year from 1607 to 1608 in Corfu hunting for Greek manuscripts. Harassed by delays in the transfer of funds and by the Corfiotes' hostility, tantalised by travellers' tales from the mainland of 'a very numerous and good library which once belonged to an Emperor in Constantinople' or of a Gospels with the words of Christ written in gold and those of 'the Jewish hordes' in black, he nevertheless succeeded in buying 113 manuscripts by weight (one Corfiote pound weight of manuscript cost five Milanese lire). A group of Greek manuscripts was purchased in Venice from the titular archbishop of Philadelphia, and others were received in a consignment from Chios, and discovered in the monasteries of Abruzzo. Hebrew manuscripts and some rare printed books were obtained from the Jewish communities of Bologna and other Italian towns by Domenico Gerosolimitano, a converted rabbi in the Cardinal's service.

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