The ancient manuscript is now available online.
A scribe and three artists made a decorated manuscript of the Aeneid by Vergil in about 400. Now, almost 1,600 years later, Vatican has made a digital copy of the surviving fragments of the original work. The ancient manuscript known as the Vergilius Vaticanus that contains one of the world’s most ancient examples of Latin poetry is available online for free.
It is a part of years-long project launched by Digita Vaticana, a non-profit organisation affiliated with the Vatican Library. The project’s aim is to digitise all manuscripts in the library. The Vatican Library, which was founded in 1451, stores about 80,000 manuscripts and ancients texts, including drawings and notes by such great historical figures as Michelangelo or Galileo. The organisation sets an ambitious aim of converting these 40 million pages into 45 quadrillions bytes.
Besides the Aeneid, the Vergilius Vaticanus includes extracts from Vergil’s another poem Georgics about agriculture and human-nature tensions. The manuscript consists of 76 surviving pages with 50 illustrations, some of which are severely damaged. The Vergilius Vaticanus is the only surviving fragment of the full manuscript, which initially included Vergil’s all canonical works, like all manuscripts of those times. The full manuscript originally had about 440 pages with 280 illustrations.
The Vergilius Vaticanus, which is considered to be a great example of the ancient Roman calligraphy, was written by one scribe, who used rustic letters. Illustrations were made by three artists. The manuscript is one of only three illuminated manuscripts of classic literature. Granulated gold, applied with a brush, highlights meticulously coloured images of famous scenes from the poem.
Digita Vaticana is going to collaborate with Japanese IT firm NTT DATA to digitise the Vergilius Vaticanus and 3,000 other manuscripts. They use a special scanner that doesn’t damage pages of ancient manuscripts. The technology allows scanning pages without fully opening the book binding.
According to Digita Vaticana, scanning all 80,000 pages of ancient manuscripts will take about 15 years and cost around 50 million euros. Funds will be collected through donations. The organisation is ready to offer printed reproductions of the Vergilius Vaticanus to the first 200 donors who will give at least 500 euros.
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