Art: FILM FOR POSTERITY

THE greatest depository of religious and secular manuscripts and manuscript art is the Vatican Library in Rome; its archives of some 566,000 books and documents, dating from as far back as 2,000 B.C., form an irreplaceable record. But if the library were destroyed, the substance and art of its contents would not be lost. Eight years ago the Jesuit fathers of Missouri’s Roman Catholic St. Louis University got permission to microfilm some 30,000 key Vatican Library manuscripts. Backed financially by the Knights of Columbus, they have now recorded a staggering 11 million pages from such works as St. Thomas Aquinas’ original manuscript, Summa Contra Gentiles, and the famed 4th century Codex Vaticanus copy of the Bible (TIME, April 30, 1951).

But St. Louis has more than prosaic microfilm. Father Lowrie J. Daly, associate professor of history, who first proposed the ambitious project, was so struck by the overpowering beauty of many of the works selected that he decided to make 4.000 additional 2-in. by 2-in. color slides to supplement the 35-mm. microfilm collection.

In picking and choosing, Father Daly had a feast no plain collector could ever dream of equaling. Spread out before him were sacred and profane works never, or rarely, exhibited. Items: a 9th century copy of Terence’s comedies, with illustrations showing actors in the authentic costumes of ancient Rome; Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s 13th century manual on falconry; an illustrated sth century copy of Vergil. He also saw many Bibles —but none that surpasses in beauty the work commissioned by Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1444-82), and one of the keenest bibliophiles of the” Renaissance.

The Urbino Bible (see color pages) was meant to outdo in magnificence any previous manuscript. To comply with the duke’s wishes, a noted Florentine bookseller commissioned one Ugo Comilli to copy the text on milk-white vellum of calf or sheepskin ; three artists whose names have been lost illuminated key pages. The finished product passed into the safekeeping of the Vatican Library in the mid-17th century, was last displayed in 1950 on the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Vatican Library, and is currently kept in a massive oak cabinet in the Vatican’s special storage rooms.

In St. Louis University’s new $4,500,000 Pius XII General Library, to be completed early next year, the color slides of the Urbino Bible, along with films of all the other photographed works will be on ready tap for scholars. St. Louis University has now become a center for manuscript research previously possible only at the Vatican. To make sure that the film stands as good a chance of survival as the originals, the negatives will be kept in a special fireproof, burglarproof vault, under strict temperature and humidity controls. That the film will never become the sole record of the Vatican’s great treasures is the prayer of the Jesuit fathers.