X-Nico

unusual facts about Vatican Library


Johannes Vingboons

After her death these atlases came into the possession of Pope Alexander VIII, and now rest in the library of the Vatican.


Codex Vaticanus Ottobonianus Latinus 1829

Later the codex was lost: it was probably housed in the Vatican Library for a very long time, hidden under a false catalogue number, until it was rediscovered in 1896 by William Gardner Hale.

Felec of Cornwall

The church at Phillack near Hayle is dedicated to Saint Felec (as he appears in a 10th-century Vatican codex).

Landolfus Sagax

The manuscript from the Palatine Library at Heidelberg (Pal. lat. 909) preserved in the Vatican Library is written in Beneventan script and shows evidence of having been committed to parchment under the supervision of Landulf himself.

Rossi Codex

The current manuscript is divided into two sections, one in the Vatican Library and another, smaller section in the Northern Italian town of Ostiglia.


see also

Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa

The manuscript was discovered in the Barberini archives of the Vatican Library in 1929 by Dr Charles Upson Clark, who edited it for the series Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in English (1942) and Spanish, (1944).

Niccolò Alamanni

An article by art historian Noah Charney about the Vatican Library and its famous manuscript, Historia Arcana by Procopius.

Palatine Anthology

In 1623, after the Thirty Years' War, it was sent with the rest of the Palatine Library to Rome as a present from Maximilian I of Bavaria to Pope Gregory XV and it was kept in the Vatican Library.

Poetry of Catullus

Some of this material comes from the X manuscript because it is also present in G. The R manuscript, lost through an error in cataloguing, was dramatically rediscovered in a dusty corner of the Vatican Library by the American scholar William Gardner Hale in 1896.

Shem Tov ben Abraham ibn Gaon

De Rossi (Parma MS. No. 68, 8) declares the author's name to be doubtful, since the manuscript is anonymous; but Assemani (Catalogue of Hebrew MSS. in the Vatican Library, No. 235) concludes that its author was Shem-Ṭob of Soria.

Zanobi Acciaioli

He learned Greek and Hebrew towards the latter part of his life, and was appointed in 1518 prefect of the Vatican Library.