Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana

At the heart of Venice, on the Piazzetta San Marco, facing the Doge's Palace, stands one of the most venerable institutions of European learning: the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, otherwise known as the Library of Saint Mark. The Marciana Library, or Library of Saint Mark — commonly referred to in historical documents as the Libreria pubblica di san Marco — is a public library in Venice, Italy. It ranks among the oldest surviving state libraries on the continent, and its renown derives as much from the splendour of its architecture as from the richness of its manuscript holdings.

The present work seeks to retrace the history of this institution not only as a conservatory of the Greek and Latin classics — its primary and established vocation — but also as the repository of a more discreet and lesser-known collection: its Oriental holdings, among which figure Hebrew manuscripts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If the history of the Marciana is above all that of Byzantine humanism transplanted to the West, it is also, in filigree, that of diasporic circulations, of sacred languages, and of Jewish learning which, by the paths of commerce, collecting, and erudition, found refuge on the shores of the lagoon.

Venice, a cosmopolitan port and crossroads of the Mediterranean worlds, sheltered from 1516 the first instituted ghetto in Europe, and was in the sixteenth century the undisputed capital of Hebrew printing thanks to the presses of Daniel Bomberg. It is therefore unsurprising that a Venetian library should have gathered, over the centuries, testimonies of the culture of the Book proper to Judaism. This Great Book endeavours to distinguish rigorously what belongs to the established archive, to transmitted tradition, and to their intersection, so as to do justice to the complexity of an institution born of a bequest and nourished by centuries of accumulation.

The Marciana's birth certificate is precisely dated and documented. A decisive turning point came in 1468 with the donation of the rich and precious library of the Greek cardinal Bessarion. The collection began to arrive in Venice in 1469 and was housed in the Doge's Palace. A cardinal of the Roman Church of Greek origin, Basilios Bessarion had fled Constantinople before the city fell into Ottoman hands, carrying with him the treasure of Hellenic learning. The true beginning of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana came in 1468 with the generous donation by Cardinal Basilios Bessarion of 746 rare Greek and Latin codices to the Venetian Republic.

The choice of Venice as beneficiary was not fortuitous: the Serenissima, by its position as a bridge between East and West, by its political stability and by its flourishing Greek community, appeared as the natural heir of Byzantium. In 1468, the cardinal gave to the Republic of Venice some 750 codices in Greek and Latin along with 250 manuscripts, followed shortly after by a number of printed works, all from his personal collection. It is said that Cardinal Bessarion intended to make these works accessible to the public.

The management of this collection was entrusted to the highest authorities of the State. Governed by the Senate and placed in the keeping of the Procurators of Saint Mark, it gave concrete impetus to the ancient idea of establishing a state library. The project took concrete form only under Doge Andrea Gritti, within the framework of his vast programme for the renewal of the city. This bequest, the humanist intention of a prelate concerned to preserve the threatened Greek heritage, thus constitutes the incontestable documentary foundation of the institution.

For several decades, the collection remained dispersed and provisionally housed, lacking a building worthy of it. It was the urban ambition of Doge Gritti that was to provide it with a setting commensurate with its prestige. The construction of the public Library building — intended to house Bessarion's collection, future acquisitions and the offices (ridotti) of the Procurators of Saint Mark — was entrusted to Jacopo Sansovino, who began work in 1537. After his death in 1570, the project was completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi.

The building was part of a political endeavour as much as an aesthetic one. The library was ultimately constructed during the period of recovery as part of a vast urban renewal programme intended to glorify the Republic through architecture and to assert its international prestige as a centre of wisdom and learning. Its monumental façade converses with the Doge's Palace. The original library building is located on Saint Mark's Square, the former governmental centre of Venice, its long façade facing the Doge's Palace. Built between 1537 and 1588, it is considered the masterpiece of the architect Jacopo Sansovino.

The interior decoration drew upon the greatest masters of Venetian painting. Among the notable artists are Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Battista Franco, Giuseppe Salviati and Andrea Schiavone. The institution's effective coming into service can also be dated: around 1560, the Library of Saint Mark — under the authority of the Reformers of the University of Padua — was in operation. Thus was born, in stone and fresco, the "public temple of wisdom" desired by the Republic.

A living library cannot be reduced to its founding bequest. As early as the late sixteenth century, the Marciana undertook to expand its collections considerably through multiple avenues. Toward the end of the century, the Marciana further increased its holdings by incorporating parts of monastic libraries, including those of San Giovanni di Verdara in Padua and Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice.

To these religious contributions were added the archives of the Venetian state apparatus. Manuscripts, printed books, and documentary collections previously held in the offices of the Venetian magistracies — among them the Council of Ten and the Senate — were also absorbed into the Library. An additional room in the Procuratie was consequently allocated to house the expanded holdings.

This movement of accumulation explains the institution's present-day physiognomy. Specializing in the classics and Venetian history, it preserves 13,117 manuscripts, 2,887 incunabula, 24,060 cinquecentine, and approximately one million books later than the sixteenth century. It was within this vast manuscript ensemble, long dominated by Greek and Latin codices, that Oriental pieces — Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew — gradually found a place, the fruit of late acquisitions, gifts from scholars, and the mercantile circulation proper to a port open onto the Mediterranean and the Levant.

This is where the history of the Marciana intersects with that of the Jewish diasporas. The reference notice concerning the institution mentions the existence of a collection of Oriental manuscripts including Hebrew manuscripts dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This information, conveyed by the institutional documentation, fits within a coherent historical context that makes it highly plausible, even if the details of the call numbers and provenances fall within the scope of specialized cataloguing research.

From the sixteenth century onward, Venice was a major center of written Jewish culture. The ghetto, established in 1516, housed a Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Levantine population whose intellectual life was intense; the city's presses produced the Hebrew editions that became authoritative throughout the Jewish world, beginning with the Rabbinic Bible and Bomberg's Talmud. The presence, in a Venetian state library, of Hebrew manuscripts is thus explained as much by this local anchoring as by the taste of collectors and orientalists of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, an era when European scholarship took a growing interest in the Semitic languages.

The late dating—eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—of these Hebrew manuscripts deserves to be emphasized. It distinguishes this collection from the great medieval Hebrew collections preserved elsewhere (at the Bodleian in Oxford, the Vatican Library, or the Palatina in Parma), and suggests rather recent copies, liturgical books, amulets, contracts, kabbalistic compilations, or texts of ritual tradition acquired in the modern era. In the absence of a critical catalogue accessible here, caution is warranted: the documentary tradition affirms the existence of the collection; the precise archive—codicological descriptions, scribes, places of copying—remains to be compared against the manuscript inventories of the Marciana and the works of specialists in the Italian Hebrew collection. It is precisely this tension between what the notice conveys and what the archive will have to establish that places this chapter at the intersection of Memory and History.

The fall of the Republic of Venice in 1797, under the blows of Bonaparte, marked a profound upheaval for its institutions. The Marciana, until then a direct emanation of the Venetian State and its Procurators, had to adapt to successive regimes — French domination, Austrian administration, then integration into the Kingdom of Italy. It was during this period of reorganization that the library underwent transfers of premises and a new influx of collections from religious establishments suppressed by the Napoleonic reforms.

The suppression of the Republic's convents and monasteries, in the wake of the revolutionary secularizations, indeed led to the dispersal of centuries-old libraries, part of which came to enrich the public collections. This process, attested for many Italian libraries, extended on a larger scale the movement of absorption already begun in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the Marciana officially acquired its status as a national library — the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana — confirming its vocation as a repository of State.

This shift from the service of the Serenissima to the service of the Italian nation explains the modern designation of the institution and the composite nature of its collections. It was probably thanks to these reorganizations, seizures, and donations that Oriental and Hebrew manuscripts, once held by private individuals, scholars, or suppressed establishments, completed their journey to the shelves of the Marciana, discreet witnesses to a plural Venetian history.

The history of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana is that of an institutional palimpsest. Born of the humanist gesture of a Greek cardinal saving the heritage of Byzantium, endowed by the Republic with a palace to the glory of Sansovino, enriched over the centuries by the absorption of monastic libraries and state archives, it has become one of the great conservatories of knowledge in Mediterranean Europe. The established figures — more than thirteen thousand manuscripts, nearly three thousand incunabula — convey the scale of a patient accumulation.

Within this ensemble, the Oriental collections and the Hebrew manuscripts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occupy a modest but eloquent place. They remind us that Venice was not only the city of the doges and the Hellenist humanists, but also a crossroads where the sacred languages of the East met, and notably that of a Jewish community which made the lagoon one of the world's capitals of the Hebrew book. That these manuscripts found refuge in the very library of the Republic speaks volumes about the porousness of the Venetian worlds.

It now falls to scholarship to pursue the inquiry where the documentary tradition stops: to describe this Hebrew collection piece by piece, to establish its provenances, to identify its scribes and patrons. It is at this price that transmitted Memory will become established History, and that the Marciana will fully reveal this Oriental and diasporic part of its immense heritage.