A Millennium of Studying the Vatican Vergil

FROM COPY TO FACSIMILE: A MILLENNIUM OF STUDYING THE VATICAN VERGIL DAVID H. WRIGHT BOOKS do have their fate. When it was produced in Rome sometime around A.D. 400, presumably for a wealthy pagan aristocrat of the old school, the manuscript we know as the Vatican Vergil (Vat. lat. 3225) was a nice book for a gentleman's library, but not an extraordinary artistic accomplishment. It consisted of about 440 folios of fine parchment, but included some leaves with minor defects.^ The pages were about 24 cm. high and 21 cm. wide (the height of this Jouryial but one inch wider), much smaller than the slightl\ later classical books we know as the Codex Romanus of Vergil (about 35 by 33-5 cm.) or the Codex Augusteus of Vergil (about 42 by 35 cm.), two very pretentious coffee-table books. The text was written by a good scribe in a fluent version of Rustic capitals, the script expected for such a book, but it was not free of errors and careless omissions. It was illustrated with about 280 framed paintings inserted in the text at the appropriate places, a modest undertaking by comparison with the slightly later Greek Christian manuscript known as the Cotton Genesis, which had about 360 illustrations for only one book of the Bible. As fate would have it, the Vatican Vergil survived while many comparable books vanished without a trace. Ever since the ninth century, this book, successively reduced to a small fraction of its original extent, has been admired and studied by artists and scholars as the most impressive surviving example of an illustrated classical literary text. That study included writing some corrections in the text and annotations in the margins, and also copying the illustrations for various purposes. Accordingly, an examination of those copies and their purposes offers a uniquely rich case study in the transmission of classical art and the early development of art historical scholarship. Various small corrections in the text show that the Vatican Vergil was repeatedly studied by alert readers during the first two centuries of its existence. Indeed, it was handled so much that a number of passages needed to be retraced where the ink flaked off the smooth flesh side of the parchment, and nearly all the labels in the illustrations were also retraced. This seems to have been done around the sixth century, to judge from the script of the small corrections associated with the retracing. Presumably the book was then still in private hands, the property of someone who still took an active interest in studving and preserving classical poetry and art, reflecting, perhaps, the attitude of Cass^odorus But since the last such corrections can be no later than the seventh century 12 X N1 i 1C M5 S V t it O-N' 0 N W V a M <.N. ON COiCAV XT U < • Fig. I. Vatican Vergil, f. 45V: Aeneas and Achates approach the Sybil in front of the Temple of Apollo (Aeneid, VI, U. 45-6). By courtesy of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana it seems that at the beginning of the Dark Ages the book was ignored. We can only speculate on what happened next, but it is likely that Charlemagne obtained it and took it to his court at Aachen, and that after his death in 814, when his library was divided up/ it went to Tours. 13 -44,; f,, 2 Vivian Bible (Paris, B. N. lat. i), f. 386v: The conversion, healing and preaching of St Paul. 'Phot. Bibl. Nat. Paris' 14 By around 840 the Vatican Vergil was certainly at Tours, where it was studied, corrected, and repaired. One leaf had been lost and the missing text was then copied at the bottom of the preceding page, though nothing could be done to replace the illustration that had also been lost. A few important corrections were still needed, such as the missing line inserted in good imitation Rustic capitals on f. ior (fig. 11), and many smaller corrections were added by at least three Carolingian scribes.^ But much more interesting in historical perspective, and much more fruitful for the development of European art, was the way the artists at Tours studied the Vatican Vergil. One of them used a stylus to trace the outlines of Aeneas, Achates, and the Sibyl in the illustration on f. 45V (fig. i). Then he redrew the copy he made in this way of Aeneas and Achates, at slightly larger size, making the gestures a little more urgent, and used them to represent two of the Jews listening to St Paul preaching in the Synagogue in the great Bible he was then preparing at the command of Charles the Bald (fig. 2), which was finished probably in 846. Of course an artist of that period depended on an iconographic model, and would never have thought of drawing from life, but it is particularly suggestive that when he wanted to enrich what may have been a rather modest bibhcal composition depicting the life of St Paul, he chose to study the fine ancient Vergil his monastery happened to own. It seems not to have bothered him that the Roman spear and military cloak of Aeneas were not appropriate for St Paul's audience in the Synagogue. He was attracted by the intrinsic qualities of coherent expressive action in the figures and deep spatial composition in the paintings, and so he borrowed motifs for their stylistic qualities, ignoring their actual subjects. Indeed, the Tours artists developed much of their distinctive style, perhaps the most accomplished narrative painting of Carolingian times, by studying the Vatican Vergil. The book was probably nearly complete when they had it, but we have less than a fifth of it today; no other specific copying can now be identified, but the more general dependence, especially in landscape elements, is obvious to any student of Carolingian art. Tours was almost totally destroyed by Vikings in 853. Our Vergil survived but seems to have been ignored in the next centuries, for there is only one minor late Carolingian annotation in it, perhaps of the eleventh century. Even by that time a book written in Rustic capitals without word division would have been considered extremely difficult to read;* I know of only one such book with extensive corrections added in the twelfth century, and that is the Codex Romanus of Vergil, which then was in Saint-Denis, in the time of the great Abbot Suger.'^ After a long period of neglect, probably reduced to about half its original extent, the Vatican Vergil surfaced at the beginning of the fifteenth century in the hands of an early French humanist. He studied it carefully, made a few small corrections and some notes in the margins of how much was then missing." He also studied the illustrations closely, adding a few labels, and drawing discreetly in light brown ink a few outlines to make the damaged illustrations more legible. Thus in the scene of Watering the Flocks (fig. 6) he added part of the outline of the central animal and the left herdsman, but he did no more than what he considered essential. This was respectful antiquarian study of a precious 15 Fig. J. \ atican Vergil, f. 27r: The City of Pergamea {Aenetd, III, 11. 135-42). By courtesy of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana relic from antiquity, suggesting what we would consider a proper modern attitude. But he worked at a time when artists were too dependent on the conventions of the Gothic style to have any understanding for such paintings and so it should not surprise us that we know of no copies of the illustrations from that period. The next owners of the Vatican Vergil were much less scrupulous. Several apparently Italian hands wrote brief comments in the margins and even on top of the badly damaged first illustration, but these were so thoroughly erased, probably during a rebinding at the \'atican Library in the middle of the seventeenth century, that nothing of much interest can be read. The entry vtodo sic to the right of the sun in the scene of Watering the Flocks is one example. In 1582, Fulvio Orsini, who had bought the Vatican Vergil three years earlier, claimed that it had belonged to the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano (r. 1422-1503), but there is no independent confirmation for this, and we know enough about Pontano for it to be surprising we have not heard of his owning such a rare and splendid book.' Since the Vatican Vergil suffered extensive losses after the French humanist annotated it, and is now only a collection of scattered fragments of the original book, perhaps it is just as well we do not know whom to blame. 16 Fig. 4. Vatican Vergil, f. 28r: The Penates appear to Aeneas in his sleep {Aeneid, III, 11. 147-53). By courtesy of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana In retrospect we might wish that the Vatican Vergil could have been known to the Medici and their artists and scholars in Florence, but it must seem divinely ordained that it should be closely studied by Raphael and his circle in Rome beginning around 1514. Raphael himself borrowed motifs from it for his composition // morbetto, best known today from an engraving of it by Marcantonio Raimondi (fig. 5).^ The subject comes from Book III of the Aeneid, where Aeneas tells how during his wanderings after fleeing Troy he had established the city of Pergamea only to watch it devastated by drought and pestilence. Then in a dream the Penates, the household gods, appeared to him to tell him his fate was to journey on to Italy to found his new city.

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