************************************
              *         THE CITY REBORN          *
              *  How the City Came Back to Life  *
              ************************************

Rome now is one of the grandest cities in the world.  Millions of
pilgrims and tourists come every year to admire, and be awed by,
its treasures of architecture, art, and history.  But is was not
always this way.  By the fourteenth century, the great ancient
city had dwindled to a miserable village.  Perhaps 20,000 people
clung to the ruins despite the ravages of disease and robber
barons.  Popes and cardinals had fled to Avignon in southern
France.  Rome was dwarfed in wealth and power by the great
commercial cities and territorial states farther north, from
Florence to Venice.  In the Renaissance, however, the popes
returned to the See of Saint Peter.  Popes and cardinals
straightened streets, raised bridges across the Tiber, provided
hospitals, fountains, and new churches for the public and
splendid palaces and gardens for themselves.  They drew on all
the riches of Renaissance art and architecture to adorn the urban
fabric, which they saw as a tangible proof of the power and glory
of the church.  And they attracted pilgrims from all of Christian
Europe, whose alms and living expenses made the city rich once
more.  The papal curia--the central administration of the church-
-became one of the most efficient governments in Europe. 
Michelangelo and Raphael, Castiglione and Cellini, Giuliano da
Sangallo and Domenico Fontana lived and worked in Rome. 
Architecture, painting, music, and literature flourished.  Papal
efforts to make Rome the center of a normal Renaissance state,
one which could wield military as well as spiritual power,
eventually failed, but Rome remained a center of creativity in
art and thought until deep into the seventeenth century.


               **********************************
               *      THE VATICAN LIBRARY       *
               *  Books for Popes and Scholars  *
               **********************************

The popes had always had a library, but in the middle of the
fifteenth century they began to collect books in a new way. 
Nicholas V decided to create a public library for "the court of
Rome"--the whole world of clerics and laymen, cardinals and
scholars who inhabited the papal palace and its environs.  He and
Sixtus IV provided the library with a suite of rooms.  These were
splendidly frescoed, lighted by large windows, and furnished with
elaborate wooden benches to which most books were chained.  And,
unlike some modern patrons, the popes of the Renaissance cared
about the books as well as about the buildings that housed them. 
They bought, borrowed, and even stole the beautiful handwritten
books of the time.  The papal library soon became as spectacular
a work of art, in its own way, as the Sistine Chapel or Saint
Peter's.  It grew rapidly; by 1455 it had 1200 books, 400 of them
Greek; by 1481, a handwritten catalogue by the librarian,
Platina, showed 3500 entries--by far the largest collection of
books in the Western world.  And it never stopped growing, thanks
to bequests, purchases, and even, sometimes, military conquests. 

From the start, the library had a special character.  It included
Bibles and works of theology and canon law, but it specialized in
secular works:  above all, the Greek and Latin classics, in the
purest texts that the popes and their agents could find, for the
popes and their servants saw these as the most powerful source of
knowledge and counsel that the world possessed.  The Vatican
Library, in fact, became a center of the revival of classical
culture known as the Renaissance.  Its librarians were often
distinguished scholars.  Historians and philosophers, clerics and
magicians visited the collections and borrowed books from them. 
By 1581, when the French writer Michel de Montaigne visited Rome,
the treasures of the Vatican had become a mandatory stop on any
well-informed traveller's Roman itinerary.  To his delight,
Montaigne was shown ancient Roman and ancient Chinese
manuscripts, the love letters of Henry VIII, and the classics of
history and philosophy (many of which can be seen in this
exhibition).  Then, as now, the Vatican Library was one of the
greatest in the Western world.

The manuscripts and printed books that came to rest in the
Vatican Library tell many stories.  They help to explain the
development of Renaissance thought and art, scholarship and
science, in Rome and elsewhere.  They shed light on the history
of the universal Roman church and on the city in which it
flourished, on the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic
Counter-Reformation--even on the history of Western efforts to
understand and convert the peoples of the non-Western world. 
They describe the new education, art, and music of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries; they show how the curia reached beyond
the bounds of Europe, to the Islamic world and even to China; and
they reveal some of the conflicts that flared up when the
accomplishment of church policy and the pursuit of new knowledge
could not both be carried out.

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               **********************************
               *       THE CITY RECOVERS        *
               *  From Wasteland to Metropolis  *
               **********************************
                     Objects vlib01 - vlib03

These three views of Rome let us follow the city's revival.  In
the first, from the fourteenth century, the city appears
devastated.  Large uninhabited areas stretch across the center,
and only a few neighborhoods--above all, the Borgo, around the
Vatican, and Trastevere--are thickly settled.  By the sixteenth
century, the population has begun to recover; it went from around
20,000 at its lowest point, to over 100,000 by the time that the
armies of the emperor Charles V sacked the city in 1527.  New
palaces in the city and country estates spreading up the
surrounding hills reflect the growth of prosperity and the
efforts of cardinals, ambassadors, and others to make the city
splendid once again.


=================================================================

                          Image of Rome
                             1330-40

This plan of Rome from the fourteenth-century "Satyrica historia"
of Paolino of Venice, offers a comprehensive view of the city. 
It shows dense settlement in the Borgo and Trastevere near Saint
Peter's, but isolated buildings elsewhere, especially in the
southern part of the city.  Though the view is schematic, it is
far from arbitrary or inaccurate.  One can easily find Saint
Peter's, the Capitoline, the Pantheon (in the center), and many
other landmarks and also see how deserted much of the ancient
city was.

Vat. lat. 1960                                     fol. 270 verso
vlib01                                                     INT.12

=================================================================

                    Ugo Pinard, Plan of Rome
        from A. Lafrery, Speculum Romanae magnificentiae
                              1555

This fine printed plan gives a sense of the growth of the city in
the Renaissance, as central districts of Rome filled out again as
popes, cardinals, and pilgrims spent lavishly.  Streets were
straightened.  Bridges were laid across the Tiber.  Dignitaries
built fine palaces in the city center and gardens and villas on
the hills.

Stamp. Barb. X I 13 A
vlib02                                                     INT.59

=================================================================

                 Antonio Tempesta, View of Rome
                              1593

In the 1580s, Sixtus V, a cantankerous and determined pope, tried
to clear the Roman streets of their thousands of prostitutes. 
Though he failed at that, he succeeded in reorganizing streets
and plazas.  The Piazza del Popolo, where long straight streets
converge and an obelisk provides a focus for marching pilgrims,
is only one of the centers that he created for the public
ceremonies so important in Counter-Reformation Rome.

Riserva S. 79
vlib03                                                     INT.57

NOTE:  This is a 12-part map, represented by the image files
vlib03a-vlib03l (i.e. vlib03A-vlib03L).  The sections are not in
any particular order and three are missing at this time.  Here is
a small map indicating which part of the map each image file
corresponds to.  Hopefully the missing sections will be added
shortly.

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|         |         |         |         |         |         |
|    k    |    l    |         |         |    g    |    h    |
|         |         |         |         |         |         |
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|         |         |         |         |         |         |
|    a    |    e    |    f    |    d    |    b    |         |
|         |         |         |         |         |         |
-------------------------------------------------------------

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=================================================================

                        Cicero, Orations
                            In Latin
                        Fifteenth century

Gaspare di Sant'Angelo's manuscript of Cicero portrays the Roman
orator and his audience in contemporary dress before a gilt
background.  The image itself is framed in interlacing white
vines or branches, one of the most common ornamental devices of
the Italian illuminated manuscript of the Renaissance.  The text
was written by Petrus of Middelburg.

Vat. lat. 1742                              fols. 2 verso-3 recto
vlib04                                                     INT.03

=================================================================

                     Henry VIII of England, 
    Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum
                            In Latin
                              1521

Henry VIII, a monarch with a fine classical education, supposedly
wrote--or at least signed--this defense of the seven sacraments
of the Catholic Church against Martin Luther.  He did add, in his
own hand, the couplet seen here, in which he presents the book to
Pope Leo X.  The manuscript was shown to famous visitors to the
Vatican Library as early as the sixteenth century.

Vat. lat. 3731                                      fol. 87 verso
vlib05                                                     INT.30

=================================================================

          Henry VIII of England, Letter to Anne Boleyn
                            In French
                      England, before 1533

The Vatican Library also acquired Henry's loving letters, in both
English and French, to Anne Boleyn.  The letters, though undated,
predate their marriage early in 1533 and presumably come from the
period, toward the end of Henry's marriage to Catherine of
Aragon, when he made Anne Boleyn pregnant and tried
unsuccessfully to induce the Vatican to grant him a divorce from 
Catherine.  In 1536 Anne herself would be executed, on a dubious
charge of adultery.

Vat. lat. 3731A                                      fol. 7 recto
vlib06                                                     INT.31

=================================================================

                          Urbino Bible
                            In Latin
                             1476-78

This spectacular two-volume Bible was produced for the papal
mercenary and duke of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro, by the
Florentine book dealer Vespasiano da Bisticci.  The scribe was
Ugo Comminelli of Mezieres; but the illuminations, by David and
Dominico Ghirlandaio and others, make this book one of the finest
works of art of the fifteenth century.  Shown here is a miniature
of the Apocalypse.

Urb. lat. 2                                        fol. 304 verso
vlib07                                                     INT.32

=================================================================

              Galileo Galilei, Sunspot observations
                           3 May 1612

Galileo helped to create a new science partly because of his
extraordinary skills as an observer, which enabled him to create
and use the first telescope.  These drawings represent sunspots--
whose existence proved that the sun was not the perfect,
unchanging body that traditional Aristotelian cosmology
considered it to be.  Galileo's work received strong support for
a long time from Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII,
though his "Dialogues on Two World Systems" and Copernican views
would eventually be condemned by Rome.

Barb. lat. 6479                                     fol. 18 recto
vlib08                                                     INT.33

=================================================================

                          Homer, Iliad
                       In Latin and Greek
                              1477

Johannes Rossos wrote the Greek text and Bartolomeo San Vito the
Latin of this codex of Homer's "Iliad" and a companion version of
the "Odyssey."  The illustrations, by a north Italian artist,
draw on the archaeological scholarship of Paduan antiquaries to
represent the Greek and Trojan heroes in convincingly rendered
ancient armor and costumes (though the ship and tents in the
middle of the Latin page are clearly modern).  Here we see the
priest Chryses, rendered as an ancient pagan, spurned by
Agamemnon and avenged by the god Apollo, who shoots down the
Greeks.  Sadly, time or funds ran out, and most later images in
the series are either merely sketched in or entirely omitted. 
The illustrations shown summarize Book I of the Iliad.

Vat. gr. 1626                               fols. 1 verso-2 recto
vlib09                                                     INT.54

=================================================================

                    Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini,
          Alternate Design for the Piazza di San Pietro
                       Seventeenth century

The architects of baroque Rome created some of the most dramatic
spaces of Western Europe.  The piazza before Saint Peter's was
one of the most contentious, as well as the most successful, of
these.  Scholars as well as architects argued over the shape it
should take, whether or not it needed formal openings, and many
other issues.  But the result was perhaps Bernini's most famous
creation.  These drawings show some of his struggles with the
many problems posed by the site.

Chig. P. VII 9                                      fol. 23 recto
vlib10                                                     INT.13

=================================================================

                         Papal blessing
        from A. Lafrery, Speculum Romanae magnificentiae
                              1555

The greatest Roman building project was, of course, the new
church of Saint Peter, the great dome of which symbolizes the
papacy to this day.  This engraving shows the great church still
under construction, the dome unfinished, and gives a good sense
of the scale and duration of the undertaking.

Cicognara XII 541                                  fol. iii verso
vlib11                                                     INT.53

=================================================================

                   Petrarch, Bucolicum carmen
                            In Latin
                             1357-62

The great Italian poet Petrarch notes here that he wrote this
manuscript of his Latin bucolic poem, modeled on that of Virgil,
"with his own hand"--manu propria.  In an age of manuscripts,
intellectuals often served as their own scribes, and many of them
took pleasure in writing a fine hand.

Vat. lat. 3358                                      fol. 49 recto
vlib12                                                     INT.29

=================================================================

            Aldo Manuzio, Rules of the Modern Academy
                            In Greek
                            ca. 1500

Printers as well as scribes preserved the classics by combining
scholarship and artistry.  Aldus Manutius, an erudite scholar as
well as an elegant printer who published many first editions of
Greek texts, described on this unique printed sheet what was
perhaps more a dream than a reality.  He calls for those
concerned with preparing and correcting editions of the Greek
classics in his shop in Venice (many of whom were Greek emigres)
to speak only classical Greek.  Those who fail to do so must pay
fines, and when these have sufficiently accumulated, they are to
be used to pay for a "symposium"--a lavish common meal (the rule
states that it must be better than the food given printers, which
was legendarily meager).  The Renaissance ideal of the publishing
house as a center of learning emerges vividly.

Stamp. Barb. AAA IV 13 (1)                     inside front cover
vlib13                                                     INT.55

=================================================================

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               ***********************************
               *      A LIBRARY TAKES SHAPE      *
               *  Books, Benches, and Borrowers  *
               ***********************************
                     Objects vlib14 - vlib19

The Vatican Library developed rapidly.  These documents let us
watch it grow.  The catalogues show how the thousands of
manuscripts were organized and stored.  Most were not shelved,
but chained to what were called "benches,"--actually tables with
benches attached to them.  Each of these was dedicated to a
particular subject.  Readers working in the library had to study
the books in place.  But it also operated a circulating system. 
Readers could sign books out, but they also had to take the
chains that had held them to the table (a forceful reminder to
bring them back); and the pope himself might write a recall
notice if important texts were kept away too long.  One could
also lose one's privilege for climbing over the tables instead of
walking around them or for other offenses.  Pico della Mirandola,
the brilliant 23-year-old philosopher who wrote a famous "Oration
on the Dignity of Man," lost his privileges when his dissident
theology shocked the papal curia.

=================================================================

                    Inventory of the Library
                              1518

This inventory drawn up by L. Parmenio clearly shows the
cataloging method used in the early years of the library.  Books
were grouped by subject on "banchi," or benches, to which they
were chained.  Unlike modern card files, such inventories were
difficult to add to since new books could be listed only at the
end of each section, not in order.

Vat. lat. 3955                              fols. 1 verso-2 recto
vlib14                                                     INT.21

=================================================================

                    Second register of loans
                        Fifteenth century

For some time the Vatican let its library books circulate. 
Borrowers entered their names and the titles of the books they
took out in registers like this one, and the librarian crossed
out the entry when the books came back.  The borrower had to take
the chain as well as the book, no doubt to remind him the book
was not his.  In this case, the brilliant philosopher Pico della
Mirandola takes out--and returns--the works of Roger Bacon.

Vat. lat. 3966                                     fol. 43 recto.
vlib15                                                     INT.22

=================================================================

                   Parchment from "tavoletta"
                        Sixteenth century

At each "banco," lists like this guided the reader to the exact
item he needed.

Reg. lat. 1899                                      fol. 29 recto
vlib16                                                     INT.23

=================================================================

    Charles Borromeo, Receipt for the Return of Twelve Books
                              1565

Even saints had to return their library books.

Vat. lat. 6379                                      fol. 44 recto
vlib17                                                     INT.24

=================================================================

               Index of the library under Paul III
                        Sixteenth century

This index, a very extensive one, was used in the library until
1620--powerful evidence for the continuity of the basic
procedures developed in the fifteenth century.  But as the
Counter-Reformation took hold, censorship began to affect the
library as well as outside publishers.  Some of the pages of this
index record books--such as Lorenzo Valla's attack on the
Donation of Constantine--being removed after they were listed on
the "Index of Forbidden Books."

Vat. lat. 3967                                      fol. 49 verso
vlib18                                                     INT.25

=================================================================

                      Thucydides, Histories
                              1452

Lorenzo Valla translated the Greek historian Thucydides for
Nicholas V.  His final note, shown here, attests that this copy
was deposited in the Vatican in 1452 to serve as a master against
which all others could be corrected.  Already, in the middle of
the fifteenth century, the library was conceived of as a public
collection of scholarly books.  Both Lorenzo Valla and the
scribe, Iohannes Lamperti de Rodenberg, signed this splendid
copy.  The margins of the text contain numerous corrections and
explanatory notes by Valla.

Vat. lat. 1801                                     fol. 184 recto
vlib19                                                    INT.100

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            *****************************************
            *      IN THE MARGINS OF THE PAST       *
            *  Manuscripts as Historical Documents  *
            *****************************************
                     Objects vlib20 - vlib24

Any great library offers many different kinds of historical
experience.  The Vatican is especially rich in Greek and Latin
manuscripts--the hand-written copies that preserved the classics
of the ancient world.  In the margins of many of these texts one
can meet medieval and Renaissance readers, trying to correct,
understand, and sometimes argue with their texts--a conversation
between ancient writers and modern readers that has gone on for
millennia, and shows every sign of continuing.  Other manuscripts
let the visitor watch brilliant writers, original thinkers, and
great political figures at work, making discoveries, revising
their work, or simply writing a love letter.  In each case, the
original documents let the modern viewer taste the varied flavors
of the past with a directness and vividness that no modern
history can match.

=================================================================

                        Historia Augusta
                            In Latin
                          Ninth century

The "Historia Augusta" is an amusing collection of lives of the
Roman emperors written in the fourth century A.D.  The texts
purport to be the work of six distinct historians, but were
composed, according to most modern scholars, by a single forger. 
They describe many curious details of court life and provide
apparent quotations from original documents, which interested
many medieval and Renaissance scholars.  One of the many
remarkable qualities of the Vatican's manuscripts is the richness
of the marginal notes in which generations of scholars discussed
and evaluated their content.  In the section displayed here,
Petrarch calls attention in a marginal note to one of the quoted
documents.

Pal. lat. 899                           fols. 209 verso-210 recto
vlib20                                                     INT.09

=================================================================

       Virgil, Georgics and Bucolics (The Palatine Virgil)
                            In Latin
                     Fifth or sixth century

This spectacular manuscript, written in Italy in a large rustic
hand, may have been completed before the fall of the Roman
empire, and thus is physically as well as intellectually part of
the classical heritage preserved in the Vatican (to which it came
as booty after Catholic armies sacked the Protestant stronghold
at Heidelberg in 1623).  It may have been preserved for some time
at the Carolingian court, a vital center for classical studies in
the early Middle Ages, and certainly it was studied and copied
actively by Carolingian scholars.  It came to rest at Lorsch by
sometime in the ninth century.

Pal. lat. 1631                                      fol. 15 verso
vlib21                                                     INT.10

=================================================================

               Giovanni Tortelli, De orthographia
                            In Latin
                            ca. 1450

Pope Nicholas V, the real founder of the Vatican Library, also
supported many scholarly enterprises.  This fine presentation
copy of Tortelli's critical Latin lexicon praises the pope
lavishly, not only for his learning but also for his patronage of
scholars, his support of translations from the Greek, and his
project to create a great library, which Tortelli describes as 
"the most splendid that has ever existed."

Vat. lat. 5229                                       fol. 1 recto
vlib22                                                     INT.14

=================================================================

        Bartolomeo Platina, Lives of Jesus and the Popes
                            In Latin
                            ca. 1474

Bartolomeo Platina, librarian under Sixtus IV, compiled this set
of sometimes quite critical biographies of the popes.  This
presentation copy of Platina's work contains corrections in his
hand and a splendid miniature, shown here, of his and the
library's patron, Sixtus IV.  The scribe was Bartolomeo San Vito.

Vat. lat. 2044                              fols. 2 verso-3 recto
vlib23                                                     INT.15

=================================================================

    Giovanni Michele Nagonio, Prognostichon Hierosolymitanum
                            In Latin
                              1507

Giovanni Nagonio, a papal functionary who wrote celebratory
verses like these for many European monarchs, here celebrates the
triumphal entry of Julius II into Rome after his victory over the
Bolognese.  Combining Roman and papal imagery, the miniature
shows Julius next to his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere,
who wears golden armor.  The Bolognese appear, presumably, as the
gloomy barbarians in chains who accompany his float.  On the
facing page one sees a self-satisfied pontiff, ringed by short
celebratory texts.  Nagonio's poems, which fill the rest of the
book, reach a self-parodic level of flattery.

Vat. lat. 1682                              fols. 8 verso-9 recto
vlib24                                                     INT.16

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=================================================================

              Pirro Ligorio, Anteiquae urbis imago
                          Lossi reprint
                              1773

This immense print shows the ancient city not, as Pietro del
Massaio had, as a bare stage decorated by the great ruins and
buildings that survived into modern times (see Vat. lat. 5699
(arch21)), but as a living community, its public spaces, columns,
and colonnades separated by block on block of private residences,
which Ligorio recreated from his knowledge of ancient reliefs.

Stamp. geogr. I 169
vlib25                                                      TG.50

NOTE:  This is a 12-part map, represented by the image files
vlib25a-vlib25l (i.e. vlib25A-vlib25L).  The sections are not in
any particular order and one is missing at this time.  Here is a
small map indicating which part of the map each image file
corresponds to.  Hopefully the missing section will be added
shortly.

          -----------------------------------------
          |         |         |         |         |
          |    c    |    f    |    b    |    d    |
          |         |         |         |         |
          -----------------------------------------
          |         |         |         |         |
          |         |    e    |    l    |    i    |
          |         |         |         |         |
          -----------------------------------------
          |         |         |         |         |
          |    a    |    g    |    k    |    j    |
          |         |         |         |         |
          -----------------------------------------

=================================================================

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             ***************************************
             *      Alternate Exhibit Objects      *
             *  (to be used if there is a problem  *
             *   with one of the primary objects)  *
             ***************************************
                     Objects vlib26 - vlib27


                        Plautus, Comedies
                            In Latin
                          Ninth century

This fine Carolingian manuscript of the Roman comic poet Plautus,
like many others of the Latin classics, was brought to Italy by
the bookhunter Poggio Bracciolini, who entered notes in it and
copied it, as did Niccolo Niccoli.  The latter's copy in turn
gave rise to many other manuscripts which were studied, imitated,
and performed in Rome and elsewhere.  The revival of secular
drama in Renaissance Europe largely stems from the discovery of
this work.  As for this manuscript, Nicholas of Cusa brought it
to Rome, where it passed through the library of Cardinal Giordano
Orsini into that of the Chapter of Saint Peter's, who gave it to
Pope Leo X.

Vat. lat. 3870                              fols. 1 verso-2 recto
vlib26                                                     INT.08

=================================================================

                Giorgio Ghisi, The Last Judgment

This print of Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" conveys both
something of the artist's power (described by his contemporaries
as "terribilita") and something of the new religious mood of the
1530s, as the Catholic Reformation began to mutate into the new,
militant Counter-Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century.

Stampe V 15, no. 24
vlib27                                                     INT.70

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               **********************************
               *  Objects Omitted from Exhibit  *
               **********************************
                     Objects vlib28 - vlib34


       Lodovico Lazzarelli, De gentilium deorum imaginibus
                            In Latin
                           After 1471

Lodovico Lazzarelli, one of the many late fifteenth-century
Italian intellectuals who were fascinated by the wisdom they
thought to lie concealed in the myths of Greek (and Egyptian)
pagans, here describes the cosmos, the planets and the arts in a
lovely illuminated manuscript prepared for Federigo da
Montefeltro.  On display is the devouring image of Saturn, the
melancholy planet feared by such astrologers as the Florentine
Marsilio Ficino.  The earth appears surrounded by angels, and
Lazzarelli clearly sees no contradiction between his Christian
faith and his fascination with ancient wisdom.

Urb. lat. 717                                       fol. 13 recto
vlib28                                                     INT.17

=================================================================

                  Giorgio Ghisi, Delphic sibyl
                   (Image of Sistine Ceiling)

The synthesis between pagan and Christian revelations took on
visible form in the Sistine Chapel.  Michelangelo's ceiling
showed not only Hebrew prophets but pagan prophetesses, the
sibyls, such as the one illustrated here.  Many curial
intellectuals--notably the influential Giles of Viterbo--believed
that the sibyls had prophesied the coming of Christ.  This print
is one of a great many made by artists who hoped to convey
something of the power of the Sistine ceiling.

Stampe V 15, no. 23
vlib29                                                     INT.60

=================================================================

            Agostino Steucho, De perenni philosophia
                            In Latin
                            ca. 1540

Agostino Steucho, a Vatican librarian in the mid-sixteenth
century, presented Pope Paul III with this copy of his elaborate
treatise "On the Perennial Philosophy."  He argued, on the basis
of copious evidence exhaustively examined, that the best Greek
philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, the ancient Chaldean sages,
and the sibyls had all concurred in teaching the central
importance of piety and worship.  He illustrated this "perennial
philosophy" with what he described as "flowers picked from all of
philosophy that give off the scent of divinity" and presented
this handsome copy of his text to a pope whose concern for the
buildings and libraries of Rome he warmly praised.

Vat. lat. 6377                            fols. 17 verso-18 recto
vlib30                                                     INT.18

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     Guglielmo Sirleto, Revision of the "Breviarum Romanum"
                            In Latin
                     Late sixteenth century

The liturgical calendar, the breviary, and the liturgy all needed
to be pruned and reformed.  Guglielmo Sirleto, Vatican librarian,
worked on all these projects.  He marked up a printed edition of
the Roman breviary, introducing radical cuts and changes into
long-standard texts.  Here he expunges a passage about why Saint
Jerome failed to become pope and calls for the addition of
material about his library.

Vat. lat. 6283                                     fol. 156 recto
vlib31                                                     INT.20

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                         Sixtine Vulgate
                            In Latin
             Rome:  Typographia Apostolica Vaticana
                              1590

Protestants claimed that the Vulgate, or Latin translation of the
Bible, often misrepresented the original Hebrew and Greek.  A
committee was appointed to revised it.  When Pope Sixtus V
characteristically became impatient with the slow progress, he
produced an edition by fiat in 1590, choosing variant readings as
brusquely as he straightened the streets of the city.  The text
rapidly proved an embarrassment and after his death was
suppressed, but annotated copies like this one, which belonged to
Father (later Cardinal) Toledo, S.J., survive.  Two years later,
the Sixto-Clementine revision did become the Catholic standard.

Vat. lat. 9509                                     fol. VII recto
vlib32                                                     INT.71

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                   Byzantine theological texts

This volume of anti-western Byzantine theological texts should
contain 329 written leaves, but it now ends at leaf 220.  A
collation note on the back of page 220, shown here, states "Sunt
in hoc volumine folia scripta 329, videlicet folia scripta
cccxxviiii."  According to Mercati, the later part of the text
was burned by the librarian Sirleto.

Vat. gr. 837                                       fol. 220 recto
vlib33                                                     INT.26

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   G. Guerra, Procession of 1587 to Mark the Erection of the 
            Cross at the Top of the Vatican Obelisk.
                            Engraving

One of Sixtus's most ambitious projects was to move the enormous
Vatican obelisk to its present position in front of Saint
Peter's.  Though  Michelangelo refused this task ("What if it
breaks?" he asked), Domenico Fontana carried it out.  The formal
procession that accompanied the erection, exorcism, and
rededication of the Vatican obelisk in 1587 is commemorated here.

Stamp. Barb. O VIII 40, plate B
vlib34                                                     INT.58

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kde 02/93