Federico Borromeo

Federico Borromeo founded one of Europe's first public libraries and stayed in Milan through the plague of 1630 when most of the authorities left. He was a cousin of Carlo Borromeo, the reforming archbishop, studied at Bologna and Pavia, and was made a cardinal at twenty-three by Sixtus V; he spent years in Rome in the circle of Philip Neri and Cesare Baronio before being appointed archbishop of Milan in 1595, a post he held for thirty-six years. He opened the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in 1609, buying manuscripts across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, and by his statutes it was open to any reader who could use it, which was then unusual. He attached to it an academy and a picture gallery, the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, giving it his own collection including Caravaggio's basket of fruit and Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus. He wrote on sacred painting, arguing for pictures that instructed rather than displayed the painter. He carried out the visitations and seminary reforms of the Council of Trent through his diocese with a persistence that made him unpopular with the Spanish governors. During the famine of 1628 and the plague that followed in 1630 he organised relief, visited the lazaretto, and refused to leave; his own account of the epidemic is a principal source for it. Alessandro Manzoni made him a character in The Betrothed and drew on that account, which is how most Italians know his name. He died of fever in 1631. He kept a herbarium and a collection of natural curiosities alongside the paintings. The Ambrosiana was the second library in Europe to open its doors to the public, after the Bodleian. He was never canonised, unlike his cousin, and the difference in reputation is largely a difference in what each was asked to do.

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