Rare restoration work starts in Bologna on five precious minIate codices

An important and rare restoration, conservation, digitization and enhancement project is starting in Bologna, involving five illuminated liturgical manuscripts belonging to the heritage of the International Museum and Library of Music. The initiative will start in the next few days to be completed by June 2021, making use of the fundamental support of theInstitute for Artistic, Cultural and Natural Heritage of the Emilia-Romagna Region (IBACN), which will also lend its collaboration in all phases of design, implementation and valorization of the overall intervention of restoration and digital conversion of the volumes.

The conservation intervention is framed as an ideal continuation of a larger project conducted in the years 2003-2005 on the collection of liturgicals owned by the Museum of Music and the Archiginnasio Library, promoted by IBACN itself in collaboration with the Municipality of Bologna and with the support of the Ministry for Cultural and Artistic Heritage as part of the Italian Digital Library project. On that occasion, the preventive activity of monitoring and mapping involved the section of liturgical manuscripts, of which twenty-two were the subject of cataloguing and digitization and, for about ten specimens, of conservative restoration.

During a recent reconnaissance of the state of conservation of the rest of the collection, carried out by the direction of the Museum of Music and the head of the Preservation and Restoration sector of IBACN, five illuminated choir books of large dimensions (about 59 x 41 cm on average) were identified, judged to be extraordinary in terms of historical-artistic value, rich in miniatures, partly parchment, coming from Bolognese ecclesiastical institutions, which were in need of urgent conservation restoration, agreed upon in agreement with the competent Superintendency. These are two Dominican antiphonaries dating back to the 13th-14th centuries, compiled for the Dominican women’s monastery of Santa Maria Maddalena di Val di Pietra [Lit. 1 and Lit. 2], an Olivetan psalter-innary from San Michele in Bosco [Lit. 3], a Dominican gradual-kyrial from the women’s Dominican monastery of Sant’Agnese [Lit. 4] made in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, and a 16th-century Dominican gradual-compiled for a Dominican religious community probably from Bologna [Lit. 5].

The project will proceed in gradual stages overseen by a technical-scientific working group composed, for IBACN, of Antonella Salvi (head of Conservation and Restoration of the Regional Cultural Heritage) and, for the Istituzione Bologna Musei, of Jenny Servino (head of the Museum of Music), who will ensure that the procedures are carried out in compliance with the regulations set forth in the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape and in accordance with the prescriptions of the Archival and Bibliographic Superintendence for Emilia-Romagna. It will begin with a cognitive study of the bindings and covers conducted by Maria Letizia Sebastiani (director ICRCPAL - Central Institute for the Restoration and Conservation of the Archival and Library Heritage), preliminary to the identification of suitable intervention methods for the classes of materials. The conservation restoration work will be carried out by Massimiliano Pandolfi, a restorer specializing in book heritage and technical director of the company Il Laboratorio S.r.l. in Florence. It will then proceed with the digital reproduction that will ensure a wider use by scholars, researchers and enthusiasts from all over the world, thanks to the possibility of examining, not only on site but also remotely through the web, ancient documents that require special attention and, above all, limited handling. Finally, it is planned to create special containers in which the manuscripts will be conditioned, in the maintenance of suitable environmental parameters to ensure the best preservation and transmission over time.

The working group will work in agreement with the officer in charge of the competent Superintendence through regular contacts, meetings and inspections both during and upon completion of the work, with the aim of identifying the optimal methodologies and the best technical-scientific solutions for the realization of the intervention and to verify the proper execution of the conservation and digitization interventions.

Then there will be several communication and dissemination events open to public participation, proposed by the Museum of Music during and at the conclusion of the restoration work on the volumes, with the aim of promoting their knowledge and raising public awareness on the crucial issue of heritage conservation. And again, a volume will be published on the two nuclei of liturgical manuscripts preserved at the Museum of Music and the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, which will collect the results of a critical investigation conducted by Cesarino Ruini (former professor of History of Music at the University of Bologna) and musicologists Stefania Roncroffi, for the manuscripts, and Milena Basili, for the fragments. The documentary evidence, investigated from the functional and morphological point of view of musical language and technique, will be analyzed in the context of the birth and development of musical writing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as well as the evolution of genres and compositional forms in the cultural, social and political spheres.

The corpus of liturgical books, consisting of more than a hundred manuscript and printed books dating from the 10th to 15th centuries, including the five manuscripts that will soon be restored, constitutes part of Father Giovanni Battista Martini’s (1706 - 1784) music bibliographical collection, recognized as among the most prestigious in the world. We owe to the vast erudition and irrepressible desire for knowledge of the Bolognese historiographer, composer and theorist, one of the most eminent and admired personalities of 18th-century European music, the formation of an enormously valuable book collection, the result of very careful research and critical examination of the sources. His extremely rich library collection, which reached, at the time, more than 17,000 volumes, now numbers more than 100,000 printed musical documents from the 16th to the 18th centuries, precious manuscripts, a unique collection of autographs, and more than 12,000 opera librettos. All this constitutes the most remarkable legacy of the Franciscan scholar who is said to have provided the foundation for the original nucleus of Bologna’s music library. Having grown significantly over the course of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the extraordinary library collection is preserved in the prestigious Palazzo Sanguinetti where the Museum of Music was opened in 2004.

The collection of liturgical manuscripts in particular stands out for its relevance from both a bibliographical and art-historical point of view, also by virtue of the heterogeneity of the types collected: missals, hymnals, graduals, cantorial, vesperal, ritual and processional. Some take the form of collections of fragments bearing musical notation of different provenance and date and in many cases have decorated letterheads, others are on parchment, and still others bear typical red-black Gothic characters. The liturgicals all were first cataloged by Gaetano Gaspari in the “Catalogue of the Library of the Liceo Musicale of Bologna,” containing the library’s works up to 1905. This bibliographical tool, which can also be consulted online, is still the main key to access pre-20th-century materials.

Pictured: Codex Lit. 3, Olivetan Psalter-Innary (16th century; membranous, 565 x 435 mm). Provenance: Bologna, San Michele in Bosco

Rare restoration work starts in Bologna on five precious minIate codices

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