A treasure trove of manuscripts
Posted: 25 Nov 2011 | By: Sasha Grishin
Boasting a collection of some 10 million books, 4400 incunabula (publications before 1501) — more than 10% of the world’s holdings — some 60,000 manuscripts and over 250,000 autographs, it is one of a handful of libraries which can tell the history of western civilisation.
The library was founded in 1661 by Frederick William of Brandenburg as Churfürstliche Bibliothek zu Cölln an der Spree and this year is celebrating its 350th anniversary. In 1701, the library was renamed Royal Library at Berlin and retained this name until the end of the First World War and the collapse of the monarchy in Germany in 1918. After that it was renamed the Prussian State Library. During the Second World War it went into hiding and some of the collection was confiscated as war reparations by the Polish state. Only in 1992, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, were most of the collections reunited, although still divided physically between its two sites in the district of Mitte — Unter den Linden 8 and Potsdamer Straße 33.
The exhibition Handwritten: Ten Centuries of Manuscript Treasures from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin is the inaugural show in the National Library of Australia’s new exhibition galleries. It brings together a hundred unusual manuscripts which will chronologically span a millennium.
Some of the treasures in this exhibition will include the Book of Hours of Nicholas von Firmian, from the Netherlands of the fifteenth century, and the exquisite illuminated manuscript of St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Commentaries on the Song of Songs. The text of the latter was of particular interest to Martin Luther. Both of these illuminated manuscripts have been included on the basis of their outstanding aesthetic qualities, rather than for the originality of their texts.
The other sort of manuscript included in this exhibition may be termed the autograph of an artistic genius. There is a very rare handwritten document by Michelangelo Buonarroti to Lionardo de Bartolini (5 June 1519); it is a receipt for a portrait of Our Lady dated 1519. Of course, it is a romantic flight of fancy to be voyeuristically looking at this scribble by this enigmatic genius. There is also the original of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro manuscript and one of only two surviving St John Passion’s by Bach, originally performed in 1724. A curiosity is a battlefield document by Napoleon Bonaparte, a letter to his foreign minister Talleyrand-Perigord (12 October 1806) in which he describes Prussian generals as “grandes imbeciles”, as well as correspondence by Voltaire, Goethe, Heinrich von Laufenberg (1390–1460) and Karl Hartwig Gregor von Meusebach.
Handwritten: Ten Centuries of Manuscript Treasures from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
National Library of Australia
Canberra
26 November 2011–18 March 2012
Click to view image/s from this exhibition:
