Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture.

Credit for founding the Vatican Library belongs to two Renaissance popes, Nicholas V (1447-55) and Sixtus IV (1471-84). Pope Nicholas had the idea of a public library in the Vatican and contributed some one thousand Greek and Latin codices; he intended the library "for the common convenience of the learned." Pope Sixtus added space, embellishments, organization, and many more manuscripts.

Today the Vatican Library can only be called fabulous. It owns almost 2 million books, 75,000 manuscripts - the oldest from the second century A.D.-prints, maps, engravings, coins, etc., etc. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton University historian, says it "remains the richest collection of Western manuscripts and printed books in the world." And already "in its High Renaissance heyday, the library afforded the most advanced facilities in Europe for scholarly work."

Since the 1920s, the Vatican Library has cultivated a productive relationship with the Library of Congress, the latter providing badly needed technical assistance for cataloguing, classification, and the like. Earlier this year, the Vatican Library, in gratitude to its American benefactors, sent a sample of its valuable manuscripts to the Library of Congress for a public exhibition. These intellectual and artistic treasures are simply stunning.

Rome Reborn presents 216 photographic plates of Vatican Library items, breathtaking in their scope of subject matter, all of utmost historical importance, most of striking visual beauty. It is impossible to mention more than a few here; it would seem a reviewer's main task is to urge readers to look at the book itself since seeing will be believing.

Here is a page from a ninth-century parchment of Euclid's Elements in Greek. There, from the inside cover of a Latin codex, is a fifthteenth-century portrait of the Duke of Urbino holding a book - perhaps by the Roman historian Livy - and conversing with the artist, Christoforo Landino. Here is a richly illustrated page from a sixteenth-century codex of Franco-Flemish polyphonic music. And there is a map of China drawn by the seventeenth-century Polish missionary Michael Boym.

As arranged in this large volume, the Vatican Library manuscripts cover the spectrum from archaeology, Egyptology, mathematics, astronomy, geography, botany, and medicine to music, the Eastern churches, and East Asia. Sometimes it seems that every turn of a page will reveal a yet more fascinating item. Pirro Ligorio's 1773 detailed drawing of ancient Rome, which graces the book's dust jacket, gives a hint of what lies inside.

If this volume contained only the exquisitely printed plates, it would make the year's best coffee-table book. But it also contains eight informative, at times elegant, essays that put the manuscripts, maps, etc., into their historical contexts. The authors, all but one American scholars, display both precise erudition and attractive, readable prose. These essays make this coffee-table book an exception in the genre - a combination of the highest standards of writing, printing, and artistic illustrating, a combination that blends like the ingredients of Italian cuisine.

N.M. Swerdlow, a University of Chicago historian of astronomy, draws together the strands of a huge tapesty, the "exact sciences of antiquity: mathematics, astronomy, geography." Here, amid manuscripts of Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Pappus, Ptolemy, and others, we learn - and see - the roots of modern physical science. By the late fifteenth century, Swerdlow writes, "clearly a whole new command of the mathematical sciences has been reached," accompanied by an "acceleration of progress in their recovery." How profoundly sad that the progress preserved in the Vatican Library was unjustly halted - though only temporarily - by the Galileo debacle of the early seventeenth century.

In "Paper Obelisks," Howard L. Goodman of Harvard University charts the incursions of Catholic missionaries, mainly Jesuit, into East Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most famous of these was Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit who went to China in the 1580s and never came back, dying in Peking in 1610. Ricci, a man of numerous talents, "influenced a whole generation of Jesuit missionaries," according to Goodman. A brilliant cartographer, Ricci published maps of Europe, Africa, and Asia, including his so-called mappamundi; we see here Ricci's map as printed ca. 1620 by his successor Guilio Aleni.

Among the most lavishly illustrated manuscripts are the musical ones. Richard Sherr of Smith College focuses on the papal choir, "a distinct institution within the curia" beginning in the fifteenth century. In the next century, the composer Palestrina was briefly a member. The Vatican Library acquired the papal choir's archives in 1871; they comprise "manuscripts and prints documenting the history of sacred music in the Vatican from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century." In this essay the types of music described and illustrated include chant, polyphony, Masses, and others. A particularly interesting engraving (1578) by Etienne Duperac shows in fine detail a papal ceremony in the Sistine Chapel.

The Vatican Library's holdings pay silent tribute to the humanism, with its deep appreciation of ancient cultures, of its two papal founders as well as that of many, though hardly all, succeeding popes. James Hankins, Harvard historian, comments in understatement: "The courtship between papal power and humanistic knowledge was not at first a smooth one." He might have added that this long courtship - never quite a marriage - has had many additional rough spots. If Vatican policies had always exhibited the learning and humanism of its library, its worldly reputation would probably command more admiration today than it does. It would be an exaggeration to claim that the Vatican Library represents the Vatican at its best, but the Vatican Library certainly shows the way.