TAKE the Vatican Library and a Donegal born priest, add an art historian handy with a knife, throw in a suspicious art dealer, top it all off with a Yale professor, blessed with a remarkable memory, and you have the makings of a fair old yarn. Except that this one is true.
Dominican priest Father Leonard Boyle is the Burtonport, Donegal man at the heart of the story. For 11 years now, he has been the prefetto of the Vatican Library, the guardian of arguably the most valuable collection of books, illuminated manuscripts, documents, letters, prints and etchings anywhere - a collection encompassing 2,000 years of civilisation.
One morning last May at half past seven, Father Boyle received a phone call in the Vatican Library (he lives "over the shop"). On the line was a Prof Marrow from Yale University. He asked Father Boyle if he would mind checking out one of the library s priceless texts, A Treatise on Agricultural Methods, dating from Roman times and which had been part of the private library of the 14th-century, Italian poet, Petrarch.
Without asking his interlocutor why he should so do, Father Boyle immediately set about checking the text in question. Prof Marrow had told Father Boyle to check if certain pages were missing. Sure enough, when Father Boyle found the book down below in the high security vault where the library s most valuable wares are stored, he discovered to his amazement that the pages in question were indeed missing.
And now enters the art-historian, Anthony Melnikas, from Ohio. He is a man well-known both to the Vatican Library and to Father Boyle. His speciality is legal manuscripts of the Middle Ages and as such he has been a regular user of the Vatican Library for the last 30 years, a habit made all the easier because he is married to an Italian and has relatives in Rome.
On July 22nd, 1987, Mr Melnikas, for perhaps the first time in all the years he has used the library, did not ask for a mediaeval legal text but rather for the Petrarch library book. The art historian then proceeded to remove three pages from the text.
There the story stops for fully eight years, until May this year when Mr Melnikas took the pages to an art dealer in Akron, Ohio. The dealer knew a class item when he saw one (one of the pages was subsequently valued at $ 500,000) and, his suspicions aroused, he contacted Prof Marrow in Yale. The professor asked the dealer to fax him photocopies of the pages.
When Prof Marrow saw the pages, they struck a chord in his memory. He ruminated on the subject for fully two days before he remembered the magazine article in which he had seen one of the three pages illustrated. He found the magazine, identified the text and immediately phoned Father Boyle.
The Vatican prefetto admits to slight amusement at one aspect of, this otherwise not-so-funny story. Many scholars, some of them very distinguished, took the Petrarch book out between 1987 and 1995 without noticing the missing pages. Did some learned minds skip the odd page, doing a bit of ancient Roman, fast reading?
Art historian Melnikas admits to having stolen the pages but claims that he did so in order to protect and preserve them. That could prove a difficult claim to sustain. For, if there is one thing Father Boyle and his 80 library staff concentrate on, it is the protection and preservation of all the priceless gems in their care.
You do not mess about with items such as Henry VIII's love letters to Anne Boleyn, Frederick II's illustrated book of falconry (13th century), fourth and fifth-century copies of Virgil's works, a splendid manuscript of Ptolemy's
Geography, an illustrated copy of Dante's Divine Comedy, a 10th-century copy of a classical Roman cookery book by Apicius, drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo, not to mention letters from "minor figures" such as St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther.
As you might expect, items such as the above are not sitting out on open shelves for readers to browse through. No, you have to go down deep into the Vatican underground to a vaulted room with an impressive large lock of the cinematic, steering wheel variety to find them. Furthermore, only a handful of authorised personnel are allowed access to this time-locked, scholastic Holy Grail.
FATHER Boyle is an old friend of The Irish Times and ushers me into the vault with all the casual ease with which he might invite you into the kitchen for a cup of tea. Pulling a bunch of keys out of his pocket, he says: "Now over there, in that corner, we'll find Anne Boleyn's letters . . . In those long-shelved cupboards, we keep papyri and there's even a lovely letter written on gold rice-paper
Japanese on one side, Latin on the other - written to Pope Paul
V sometime between 1612 and 1621, from a Japanese Crown Prince."
Yeah, the Vatican Library is not exactly your ordinary, common or indeed garden library. Father Boyle stresses that the library is much more than just a museum, containing priceless literary treasures. It is, he says, a great humanist library which issues 3,000 reader cards annually to highly specialised academics, very few of whom are researching or studying anything specifically connected to theological/religious/church matters.
In some senses, the modern Vatican Library would appear to live up to its founding principles as stated by Pope Nicholas V (l447-'55) in a now celebrated letter to Enoch of Ascoli in 1451, when he urged him.to ensure that "for the common convenience of the learned we may have a library of all books both in Latin and Greek that is worthy of the dignity of the Pope and the Apostolic See".
For the common convenience of today's learned, the Vatican Library provides one million books (including 8.000 published during the first 50 years after the introduction of the printing press), 150,000 manuscripts, 330.000 Greek, Roman, Mediaeval and Renaissance coins and 100.000
etchings and prints.
Furthermore, for the common convenience of today's computerised man, the Vatican Library may now be consulted (or partly consulted) on the Internet. Yep, you can go surfing the web all the way to a 12th-century, illuminated text that might even have been written by Irish monks. It took 70 people more than two years to put 1.25 million titles on computer. Father Boyle occasionally calls up his own library on the Internet just to see how it looks on the computer screen.
"My favourite text is an Islamic one, an 11th-century novel, beautifully illustrated and when I called it up on the Internet, I was amazed at the quality," he says.
State-of-the-art technology similar to that used by photo-journalists is also used for high definition "transmission" of library texts, olten of the illuminated variety. Requests for such transmissions usually come from libraries, museums or universities and the technology affords the obvious advantage of allowing researchers in any corner of the world, to consult library texts without having to come to Rome.
Father Boyle wryly observes that putting the Vatican Library on Internet has also attracted the attention of thousands who previously knew nothing about it and who might now decide to come and look the place over for themselves. But that is not possible - the Vatican Library is not a public library.
The computerisation process is going ahead apace in an attempt both to make the library more accessible to scholars and to ease the burden on staff who not only service library readers but also run publishing, photographic and restoration departments.
Father Boyle tends to be a modest man and, on a previous meeting, once called himself a "half-trained" librarian. This was a reference to the fact that his academic preparation was not as a librarian but rather as a historian. When he was plucked from Toronto University to the Vatican in 1984, he had been lecturing-for 25 years on the history of Mediaeval Studies and fully intended to go on doing so. Prior to that he had taught for six years at the Angelicum, the Dominican University in Rome, to which he had moved after seven years (1947-`54) of studies at Oxford.
He stresses that his role is that of the administrator or director who concerns himself with issues like fund raising, leaving his specialised staff to get on with their work. True in part, no doubt, but typically modest.
Before I bid my farewells, Father Boyle takes me to the Iibrary bar for a coffee. Like everything else around here, the bar is unusual in that it is situated inside a converted Bramante fountain. Father Boyle makes no claim to having discovered the fountain/bar but he does admit to having overseen improvements. Even scholars, as an Irish pre/etto knows only too well, need sustenance.