Ambrosiana Library on Microfilm

This week, the MI welcomed Don Prudlo, assistant professor of history at Jacksonville State University, for a short visit to our Ambrosiana Library microfilm collection. Don was awarded one of our Ambrosiana stipends, a $500 cash award to subsidize research visits to the collection. (Details on the award are available at: http://www.nd.edu/~medinst/funding/funding.html#ambrosiana.)

The ND Ambrosiana collection is a wonderful scholarly resource. Based on an agreement between Giovanni Battista Montini, then the cardinal-archbishop of Milan (later Pope Paul VI), and Fr. Theodore M. Hesburgh, then University president, Notre Dame's Medieval Institute holds microfilms and photographic copies of nearly all of the Latin and vernacular materials and many of those in Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic housed in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.

The Frank M. Folsom Microfilm and Photographic Collection consists of positive and negative microfilms of over 10,000 Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts belonging to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, together with about 50,000 photographs of miniatures, illuminated initials, and Old Master drawings supplemented by some 15,000 color slides.

In addition to the microfilm collection, ND Art History Prof. Robert Randolf Coleman is producing an inventory-catalogue of the Ambrosiana's collection of some 12,000 drawings by European artists who were active from the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries. The project database, which includes scanned images of the drawings, may be searched free-of-charge at http://www.italnet.nd.edu/ambrosiana/eng/index.html.