The first part of the trip took the lab team to the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, with which the CSMC has recently agreed to collaborate for the next three years. There they examined a globe by the Italian cartographer Vincenzo Maria Coronelli from the 17th century. Coronelli, who founded the Accademia degli Argonauti, which is considered the oldest geographical society in the world, contributed significantly to improving geographical accuracy of maps and globes at a time when they were becoming important tools for trade, war, and navigation. His enormous terrestrial and celestial globes were prestige objects for princes and scholars and made him famous. In the Marciana Library, Grzegorz Nehring and Olivier Bonnerot not only examined one of these globes but also a gilded Byzantine book cover and a 16th-century Japanese scroll. All of these objects are on display in the library’s exhibition area, making our lab team a living part of the exhibition while they were there.
In addition, Katerina Grigoriadou and Bonnerot examined more than a dozen manuscripts by the famous 15th-century Greek calligrapher Iohannes Rhosos at the same location for two weeks. The material science analysis of the inks used by him is the subject of Grigoriadou’s doctoral project of at the CSMC.
Another stop on the trip was the Biblioteca Capitolare in Verona, where Nehring and Ivan Shevchuk were involved in the final stages of the ‘Palimpsests in Danger’ project. The project is an international collaboration of experts in modern imaging techniques who want to make the writing on palimpsests legible again, which were severely damaged by chemicals in the 19th century. Researchers from the CSMC had already travelled to Verona in late 2023 and early 2024 to try out a range of methods for restoring the texts and to develop them further together with the other project partners. They achieved considerable success. The ‘Palimpsests in Danger Project’ is organised by the UCLA Library, the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL), and the Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona. The CSMC, the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester, the Center for Imaging Science of Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Department of Physics of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun are project partners. Results of the project will be made available on the UCLA Library Digital Collections website.
In early January, Nehring, Sebastian Bosch, and Claudia Colini returned to the Biblioteca Marciana to investigate one of the most famous world maps ever made: the Fra Mauro Map. Despite its cultural and historical significance, the map has never been subjected to a detailed materials science examination. The team from the Mobile Lab now wants to understand the map’s production process by analysing the colours and inks used on it. Much more on this topic will follow shortly.
The whole winter campaign could not have been possible without the immense help of project partners from the host institutions, Dr Silvia Pugliese from Marciana and Dr Timoty Leonardi from Biblioteca Capitolare.