CONSERVATION AND POSTERITY

Leonard E Boyle OP

Thirty-five years or so ago, when I first began doing amateur archaeological work at San Clemente, I uncovered a mosaic pavement in the lower church which had been hidden from view for a very long time. However, I was taken to task by one of my Dominican colleagues, a long-time resident of San Clemente. According to him, I should not have uncovered the pavement. I should have left it as it was, unseen, in order to preserve it for posterity. On the spur of the moment I hazarded, "Posterity? But are we not also posterity?" Happily, that pavement, carefully railed off, is still on view today for the present generation of posterity. Happily, too, I have stuck to my conviction that posterity is a bit of a myth - or, rather that the only tangible posterity is the present. I must admit, all the same, that I had not thought much about it again until recently. Ten years ago I came to the after almost twenty-five years of teaching Latin Palaeography at Toronto, and discovered very shortly that there was some problem about allowing students in the School of Palaeography access to manuscripts, on the grounds that the Library had a duty to preserve its holdings for posterity. While I sympathized with this preoccupation, as a teacher of palaeography and a user rather than a preserver of manuscripts, I was more than a little disconcerted . This was all the more so, because I had always presumed that one of the great advantages of having a school of palaeography in the precincts of the Vatican Library was precisely the 2 Leonard Boyle availability of manuscripts to students. When, for example, I was a student at Oxford, it was the fact that all of us could spend much time in the Bodleian Library on manuscript work that really gave life and depth to the course in palaeography which we were taking under N R Ker. At Toronto there was little such possibility, though at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, where I taught, we had three or four manuscripts at our disposal (which, I must add, had been acquired not because of any intrinsic value but precisely in order to expose the students of palaeography in some way to live manuscripts). The fact that palaeography was taught at all at Toronto was a source of mystification if not of amusement to many of my European colleagues who time and again would ask me, "How can you possibly teach palaeography when there is not a library of manuscripts to hand?" The point was made forcefully - too forcefully perhaps - in an interview given to the Gazette du livre in 1983 by Armando Petrucci, when, after a six-week seminar at the Newberry Library in Chicago, he reflected not very favourably on the possibilities for palaeographical studies and studies on book-production in the United States (but not, I hasten to add, in Canada), and concluded that if one were really serious about studying the mediaeval book one should go off to Europe, to some great deposit of manuscripts such as the British Library, the Bibliotheque nationale, the libraries in Florence, the Vatican Library. Now, I find myself, for the first time in my life as a teacher of palaeography, not only with a great library of manuscripts to hand but also with a school of palaeography next door, of which, as I discovered, I was one of the directors. Here surely, if Petrucci meant anything, was an optimal situation for students, and one in fact which I do not think is to be found elsewhere. Yet, if the policy of "preserving for posterity" were to be maintained in their respect, they would be as well off, if not better off, at Toronto or some other such place in North America. All of this, and my experience as an amateur archaeologist, has caused me to reflect, however superficially, on the problem of conservation and on the slogan, and it probably is no more than that, of "preserving for posterity." Conservation and Posterity 3

Actually, I think it better to begin from the past, since what is really meant by "preserving for posterity" is not "preserving what we have in the present for posterity" but "preserving for posterity what the present has inherited from the past." What we have today from the past is often the result of fortuitous transmission. Yes, there were libraries in cathedral centres and monasteries and royal houses of various periods, say of the Middle Ages, and a few, all too few, of these have come down to us more or less intact. But in the days before collectors and collections, these libraries generally were put together for the use of monks and scholars, not for prestige or display - nor indeed with an eye on "posterity" in the distant sense. If, as in the case of Cassiodorus, there were sporadic attempts to collect, this was not necessarily in terms of the future: it was largely in terms of recovering from the past for the sake of the present. It is unnecessary here to speak of losses from the past. They are well known. Wars and rebellions and changes of religion have taken their toll. One instance will suffice. After the dissolution of the monasteries in England, many local families acquired manuscripts either because these were available for the taking or might come in useful one day. Thus in the 1640s, during the Puritan period in England, a local Anglican clergyman called Stump had a goodly collection of manuscripts from the great abbey of Malmesbury. His sons were soldiers, and used the leaves of these manuscripts to scour their guns. He himself, when he brewed a barrel of special ale, was accustomed to plug the bung-hole with a manuscript sheet. Nothing, he used to say, did it so well. I suppose that nothing survives from those Malmesbury manuscripts, once in the hands of the Stump family. But other manuscripts, put to not dissimilar uses, luckily have survived, and from even a more distant past. I am thinking particularly of the Lateran Livy, now in the Vatican Library (Vat. lat. 10696) - of those seven pieces of parchment forming a leaf and a half in uncial script of the fourth or fifth century, which were found almost a hundred years ago at San Giovanni in Laterano in a cypress box made to the order 4 Leonard Boyle of Pope Leo Ill (795-816), where they were crumpled up to act as "envelopes" to preserve relics from the Holy Land. This is fortuitous preservation indeed. But it is preservation, and must be respected as such. Hence, as I see it, the first duty of conservation is to respect the past that has given us whatever we are now occupied with preserving. By this I mean that the origin and provenance of a given item must be faithfully recognized and recorded. However accidental the transmission, or however much it may amuse or amaze us, we have to thank it for what we have. The Livy from the Sancta Sanctorum at S. Giovanni should be known as such, even when inserted, as in the Vatican Library, in a continuing series such as Vaticani latini. This is not simply a question of recording the names of benefactors. It is a question of how the present and the future have been enriched from the past. There are some seventy thousand literary manuscripts, as distinct from about eighty thousand archival volumes, in the Vatican Library. The main holdings have been respected - Barberini, Chigi, Ottoboni, Palatini, Reginenes, Urbinates, etc. - but the Vaticani latini series conceals a goodly number - at least 100 - of lesser provenances, and perhaps does not do full justice to that past which has transmitted them to us today. Obviously it would be impossible to treat each one of these as a fondo, but there should be some way under the Vaticani latini umbrella of at least keeping the fondi intact, and not, as has happened on occasion, breaking them up, or mingling items from one fondo with another. As a general rule, collections should not be tampered with, no matter how recent their past or how haphazard their content. That a given item has at all survived may be entirely due to its chance inclusion in a collection. The Getty Museum in Malibu, California, has a magnificent programme in conservation and is indeed a leading exponent of the art in many subjects. It has also made some noteworthy purchases of manuscript collections, such as the entire Ludwig collection of illuminated manuscripts from Aachen which it acquired in 1983, just after a fine three-volume catalogue of the collection had been published. Without Mr and Mrs Ludwig, many of these manuscripts might not have survived to the present or the future. Yet, because some of these Conservation and Posterity 5 manuscripts, mostly of the ninth and tenth centuries, are not in fact illuminated, they have been put on the market by the Getty Museum, as not being worthy of preservation there with the others of the Ludwig collection. Perhaps standard accounts of conservation should now be amended to allow for a chapter entitled "Selling as Conservation?" Selling manuscripts is not necessarily evil. It all depends on how necessary it is and how trivial or misplaced the reasons. But if a sale is justifiable, one should at least act responsibly. In this day and age, when conservation is a sacred word, and much invoked in library circles, especially in North America, it is jarring to find that since 1962 the Houghton Library at Harvard has been donating or selling off, in bits and pieces the Iranian masterpiece Shah-Nameh {Book of Kings), a sixteenth-century manuscript of 759 folios, including 258 folios with miniatures, the latest sale being that of fourteen folios at Christie's in London a short while ago. Should we now add a further chapter "Break up to Conserve?" Conservation then must begin from a responsible attitude to what has been handed on from the past. At its lowest level, this may simply mean ensuring that it is not damaged or broken up or is not allowed to deteriorate in its present home. It covers something as elementary as making sure that the exlibris or stamp of your library does not interfere with or obscure the text or illustrations in a manuscript, as has happened so often in manuscipts in the Vatican Library and elsewhere. At a higher level, this concern may extend to restoration or repair. But at neither level may one invoke "preservation for posterity" as the main or overriding principle, if by posterity one means future generations, to the exclusion or limiting of the present. In relation to the past all is posterity, and the present generation is as much posterity as a future. It is really care for the past in the present that we should be concerned about, not care for the past in view of the future. At either level, responsibility to the past is demanding. If the question is simply one of ensuring that the ravages of the past do not continue in the present, then responsible custody or trusteeship must at least take the form of ensuring proper living conditions for the manuscripts: that 6 Leonard Boyle they are not exposed to the weather, abrupt changes of temperature, inept handling by staff or readers. There is, therefore, much attention today when building new libraries or giving manuscripts a new home, to climate control, fire safeguards, and air conditioning. But at this material level, all is not as simple and straightforward as it looks. One has to be aware of what, in a recent British report, is called "the Sick Building Syndrome" (SBS), which, it says, is a phenomenon of twentieth-century buildings with sealed skins and mechanical services. Hermetically sealed buildings of glass and concrete are not porous like traditional building materials. SBS is caused almost exclusively by poor ventilation and uneven lighting, especially where there are no windows to let in natural light and provide some flow of natural air. Artificial ventilation is seductive, but hardly provides an optimal environment without a good fresh air content, perhaps as much as twenty percent. Halogen and fluorescent lighting may seem wonderful but they flicker and fade and rarely spread light evenly: Needless to say, air conditioning needs constant and, above all, professional maintenance, especially of the filters. But if it is really to be effective, simple screen filters are not enough. It requires absolute filters of, unfortunately, the very expensive type used for hospital operating rooms, computer mainframes, and nuclear power stations. A steady temperature, above all, is the goal, but this will hardly be achieved if, as at the Vatican Library in its new underground deposit of manuscripts, no provision is made for a twenty-four hour electricity supply, and the system is only active when the library is open, thus causing a considerable shift in temperature every twelve hours (or, at weekends and on holidays, longer). But granted that the manuscripts in a library are responsibly housed, and therefore protected from further deterioration in this generation of posterity there remains the problem of responsibility to each individual manuscript. Does one leave it as it is, or should one attempt to restore it, whether internally or externally? At a time when the Vatican Library was gradually becoming more accessible to the international community of scholars, after the reforms of Pope Leo Ill in 1880-1881, this Conservation and Posterity 7

was a problem that greatly exercised Franz Ehrle, the German Jesuit and scholar of renown, from the days when he took over the direction of the Library as in 1885. He was more than familiar with the Library and its problems by then. He had been actively engaged in running the Library as a committee member since 1890, a year in which he had published a great first volume on the papal library in the fourteenth century. As he saw it, in an article published in early 1898, he and every other custodian of manuscripts had the difficult duty of making them available to the present generation while conserving them for a future. But many of these manuscripts often turned out to be in a perilous condition, and caused nightmares to responsible custodians, some of whom were tempted simply to hush up the unpleasant discovery. For Ehrle, this was irresponsible. Although remedies were not readily available, or where available were misunderstood or mistrusted, he was convinced that the whole matter should be publicly aired at an international level. What was at stake was not the patrimony of any one library, but a patrimony common to all. What was needed was a common effort to discover why some manuscripts visibly were deteriorating where others were not, and why, for example, some inks played havoc with parchment and paper where others did not. Within two months of his appointment as Prefect, Ehrle set about investigating how best to protect the manuscripts on view in the Salone Sistine of the library from dust. Four months later, when a binder retired from the Library, he got in touch with, and then engaged in the binder's place, a restorer in his mid-thirties named Carlo Marre. Marre, who is never named by Ehrle in his various published reports, remained in the service of the Library for some eight years, and is the real hero of the beginnings of the Restoration Department in the Vatican Library. With Ehrle, to whom he was "a man of rare intelligence and experience," pressing him on, Marre experimented with gelatine as a protective coating, introduced "with rare ingenuity," as Ehrle says, transparent silk gauze, picked up tips on coating from photographic studios in , and generally devised 8 Leonard Boyle techniques which have endured in the Department ever since. To test what he had learned of problems and possible solutions during Marre's first year with the Library (1896- 1897), Ehrle set out, in the summer of 1897, to visit libraries in Milan, Paris, London, Oxford, Berlin, and Vienna. What he saw in these libraries (and he was especially horrified at the state of the Plautus in the Ambrosiana at Milan) convinced him that the time had come for an international effort. Since, as he reported proudly to the Library council on his return, "tutte sono addietro a quanta si fa in questa Vaticana," 1 and none of these libraries had anyone of the quality of Marre, it was up to the Vatican to take the lead. Accordingly, he set about organizing an international conference at St Gall in Switzerland (a second choice to the Ambrosiana) to confront the situation. He had mooted the idea of such a conference in his article of early 1898, and had been backed at once by the Prussian Minister of Education, by de Vries of Leiden and, a shade hesitantly, by the great Leopold Delisle at Paris. Now he wrote directly to various libraries in Europe inviting them to attend, or, where an indirect or diplomatic approach was called for, through the Secretariat of State of the Vatican. The conference at St Gall met from September 30 to October 1, 1898, and was attended by seventeen delegates, including Fr Ehrle. Twelve countries or territories were present, including librarians or delegates from Oxford (Nicholson), Heidelberg (Zangemeister), Bavaria (von Laubmann), Bruxelles (Van den Gheyn), Paris (Omont), Budapest (Fejerpataky), Leiden (De Vries), Berlin (Lippmann, Wilmanns, Mommsen), Dresden (Posse), St Gall (Fah), Basie (C Bernouilli), Bern (J Bernouilli), Zurich (Escher), Stuttgart (Winterlin). All, with the exception of Oxford and the Swiss libraries, were representing their countries or territories officially. The governments of Denmark, Russia, and Sweden declined the invitation, as did the University of Cambridge

1 "all the libraries are far behind the Vatican Library in this matter." Conservation and Posterity 9

2 ("atteso lo scarso numero dei suoi manoscritti" ) and at the last moment the British Museum was unable to find anyone free to go. As for Italy, as Ehrle himself wrote in 1899 "la partecipazione de//'ltalia zelantemente promossa da ambe le parti, non pote purtroppo avere effetto cagione di politiche difficolta. " 3 Ehrle's position paper, on which largely I am drawing and which had been published before the conference in German, French, and Italian, was taken as read by the delegates. It was direct and challenging. It told of his own efforts at the Vatican Library, how he had set up a laboratory with one trusted restorer (Marre), and how he had made a strict rule that no method or procedure could be applied which Ehrle himself had not tested. Gradually, he goes on, the principal causes of deterioration were identified and some remedies were tried out. His first concern had been palimpsests, chiefly those which had been treated with chemical reagents in the past, and some Greek and Latin manuscripts such as the Codex Marchalianus (Vat. gr. 2125). In these the chief cause of deterioration was not so much the reagent itself as its interaction with certain types of ink, whereas in ordinary parchment manuscripts, his second concern, the sole cause was the ink itself. In both cases, some sort of neutralization of the acids in the reagents or in the inks seemed to be the answer. But a direct attack such as this was too risky, or even a simple washing away of the reagents in the case of the palimpsests. After consultation with various experts in chemistry and in art restoration, he had decided on an indirect approach: taking the manuscripts apart and, while keeping the sheets in their proper order, place them in separate folders (as one may see today in the case of the

2 "given the small number of manuscripts possessed by the library."

3 "The participation of Italy, though zealously promoted on both sides, was unable to be put into effect for political reasons." 10 Leonard Boyle

Codex Vaticanus - Codex 8 - of the Bible); this had the merit at least of staying deterioration by bleeding or contamination. He was not at all happy with the technique, which he had seen at Vienna, of placing parchment sheets or papyri between glass, but in default of any better option, he was willing to allow it. After all of this, he had investigated the possibilities of various transparent varnishes for use on parchment and, inevitably, had chosen gelatine, which when combined with formic acid became impervious to changes of temperature. Furthermore, many experts whom he had consulted on his travels had assured him of its durability and resistance to change. The problem of the restoration of paper manuscripts, his third concern in his paper, was, he said, less difficult. He recommended highly transparent silk gauze, while rejecting plain transparent paper, then, unfortunately, much in use, and which had been applied disastrously in the Vatican Library in the previous twenty or thirty years to paper manuscripts of the sixteenth century written in black Italian vitriol ink. Ehrle had the offending transparent paper replaced in some such manuscripts, but, unfortunately, many still remain today with page after page sheathed in yellowish, cloudy transparent paper. The debate on these points at the conference was heightened by the fact that Ehrle, to make things more concrete, had with him folios from the Codex Marchalianus, the Vergilius Vaticanus, the Vergilius Romanus, the palimpsests of Fronto, the De republica of Cicero, Strabo, and Sallust, and some paper manuscripts. There were some good interventions on the importance, for example, of making photographs of folios before attempting to restore them, so as to have a proper record of their condition, and on the necessity to make a thorough chemical study of inks. Four resolutions were drafted unanimously, notably to nominate a permanent committee of three (Ehrle, De Vries, Zangemeister), one of whose tasks would be to attempt to persuade governments to provide money for research in the area of conservation. What became of the committee I do not know, but it seems to have been dormant by 1903 when the government of Saxony inquired of the Vatican Library if Conservation and Posterity 11 it would be willing to convoke and be host to a second congress "per la conservazione e ii restauro dei codici. " 4 Ehrle's reply was simply that the Library did not have a sufficiently large laboratory to accommodate such a conference. In fact Ehrle was much preoccupied with the un­ satisfactory and indeed insecure location of the laboratory at precisely this time. It was located on a top story of the library above the Museo lapidario, in a cramped place half way up the stairs leading from the Museo to the Prefect's apartment. A fire on the evening of November 1 of that same year ( 1903) brought matters to a head. Marre, who apparently had a bed and a small kitchen in the laboratory, was resting when the fire broke out, possibly in the kitchen. Ehrle, who was upstairs in his apartment, became aware of the fire only when some Vatican firemen began to hammer on his door, and had to make a frantic dash down the stairs to the laboratory to rescue folios of the Vatican Vergil and the Verona Gaius, then being restored. Some months afterwards Marre left for Turin, and the Castellani brothers, whom he had trained, carried on his work, first in the old workshop, then in a more suitable and better-equipped room under the Sala delle Nozze Aldobrandine, off the Sala degli lndirizzi. It was not until 1920 however, when the strength of the laboratory was increased from three to five with the absorption of the Vatican Archives workshop, that the department became known as "Restauro." In 1923 it had six on its staff between restorers and binders. By 1931 the staff had increased to ten, which is also its complement today. In 1936 the laboratory moved to its present location, just two years before Alfonso Gallo, who had been inspired by its work, set up the lstituto di Pataologia del Libro in Rome. I do not know if Franz Ehrle, who became a Cardinal in 1922 and died in 1934 aged eighty-nine, cuts the large f igure in the annals of manuscript restoration that he does in the history of mediaeval universities and of . A recent article in Italian that presents a cursory survey of the

4 "for the conservation and restoration of codices." 12 Leonard Boyle history of conservation manages not to mention him, and jumps blithely from the nineteenth century to 1938. But he at least had great courage, and rattled the consciences of manuscript librarians all over Europe. As he himself said at the end of his article - or rather manifesto - of 1898, "the prevailing liberal access to manuscripts can only be justified if to it is joined an equal concern for the conservation of what we have from the past. One must attempt to achieve an equilibrium between use and conservation. Anything else would be a grave injustice with respect to future generations."