Vatican Palimpsests Digital Recovery of Erased Identities [by A. Németh]

STUDYING PALIMPSESTS IN THE VATICAN

Earliest discoveries of palimpsests

In the Vatican Library, palimpsests have been studied since 1772, when Paul Jakob Bruns, German theologian and literary scholar, and his Italian colleague, Vito Maria Giovenazzi managed to transcribe a Livian palimpsest fragment he found under a Biblical text he was studying as the scriptio superior of Pal. lat. 24.

Titi Livii_Bruns_frontespizio1 (2).jpg
The first edition of the Livy fragment
nemeth_Fig_1_Stamp.De.Luca.III.464_Tav.1_BN_small.jpg
Engraved plate of Pal. lat. 24, f. 78v
Pal.lat.24_0322_fa_0073r-78v.[01.xx.0000]_m.jpg
Pal. lat. 24, ff. 73r + 78v
Bruns_Titi Livii_p. XVII1 (4).jpg
Transcription of Pal. lat. 24, ff. 73r + 78v

Pal. lat. 24, ff. 73r + 78v 

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Surprisingly, despite hundreds of years of research before his discovery, Vatican palimpsests were still left unnoticed –although they were often quite visible. When studying the Vatican manuscripts of Isidore of Seville in the last years of the eighteenth century, Faustino Arévaldo identified Isidore’s text underneath the upper text of Vat. lat. 650, and as the upper text of Vat. lat. 5763 with erased fragments of the Vulgate as a lower text.

Vat. lat. 5763, f. 15r 

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Before Angelo Mai's arrival to the Vatican Library, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, a Danish-German scholar and politician, began to study the Livian (inf. 8) and Ciceronian (inf. 9 and inf. 10) fragments of Pal. lat. 24 in 1819. He was the first to use chemical reagents (hydrosulphureum potassae) at the Vatican Library, with the permission of Cardinal Librarian Ercole Consalvi and Francesco Baldi, prefect of the Library and predecessor of Angelo Mai.

Pal.lat.24_frontespizio_Neibuhr.jpg
Pal.lat.24_0329_fa_0074r-77v.[01.xx.0000]_m (1).jpg
Pal. lat. 24, ff. 77v + 74r
Pal.lat.24_Niebuhr1__2_.jpg
Transcription of Pal. lat. 24, ff. 77v + 74r

Pal. lat. 24, ff. 77v + 74r 

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