Chant, polyphony and Felice Anerio: the Duke of Altemps' choirbook goes online

Folio 1r is a title page written by hand, and it states the book's whole purpose. One enormous word fills the upper part of the page — Diuersorum, its letters ending in flourishes — with Chori beneath it, and then a sentence of explanation in smaller script: Seu Opera varia quæ inter Officia occurrunt, et non inveniuntur, in Antiphonario, that is, various works that turn up among the offices and are found outside the antiphonary. Along the foot of the page the same hand adds Pro Cappella Excellentissimi D. Ducis ab Altæmps: for the chapel of His Excellency the Duke of Altemps.

The book is Ott.lat.3388, and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana has opened it on DigiVatLib. The independent tracker that follows Vatican additions gives the shelfmark in the batch it labels the thirty-ninth week of 2026, with the item's own record dated 2 October 2026, inside the past week. 12

Most of the manuscript is chant: black square notation on red four-line staves, with the occasion named in red rubrics. Folio 2r holds paired settings of Benedicamus Domino and Deo gratias, labelled one after another for a second-class solemnity, for the Blessed Virgin, for double feasts. Folio 5r opens a Commemoratio de Cruce. Folio 36r gives the Annunciation antiphon Ecce completa sunt omnia quæ dicta sunt per angelum de virgine Maria, and folio 40r the canticle Nunc dimittis. The title page frames the volume as a supplement to the antiphonary, gathering the works a chapel's choir needed at offices its main book was not built to carry.

The music changes partway through. Chant gives way to polyphony in white mensural notation, two voice parts to a page, each part opening with a large decorated initial. Folio 16v is headed in small capitals Felicis Anerii Romani — of Felice Anerio, the Roman — and carries two of the voices of a setting of Alma Redemptoris Mater, the Marian antiphon sung at Compline from the first Sunday of Advent until the Presentation in February. 4 Both voices on the page take the text up at Redemptoris mater, one word in from the antiphon's opening. Folio 20r follows with another of the Marian antiphons, Ave Regina caelorum, again across two voices.

Felice Anerio (c. 1560–1614) was a Roman composer of the late Renaissance who spent his life in the city. In April 1594 he was appointed composer to the papal chapel in succession to Palestrina, and he held the post until his death. The Italian national biographical dictionary also records that Anerio worked in the chapel of Duke Giovanni Angelo Altemps — the chapel named on folio 1r of this book. 5

The book reached the Vatican in December 1748, when Pope Benedict XIV bought the Ottoboni family's manuscript collection for the library. It also belongs to a group of six music manuscripts shelved at the tail of the Ottoboniani latini that came from the Altemps library rather than from the Ottoboni family. The six were moved further along the same fond and given new shelfmarks, while the old numbers stayed on the library's list as unlocated from 1851; for more than a century the volumes themselves were believed lost. A study published in 2023 in the Vatican Library's Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae matched the old numbers to the shelfmarks the books carry today — Ott.lat.3386 to 3389, 3393 and 3394 — and this volume, old number 2923 or 2924, is one of the six. 6

The same study recovers an earlier reader of this book. Giuseppe Baini, archivist of the papal chapel and the nineteenth-century biographer of Palestrina, worked through all six in 1828. Of this volume he wrote that it held many pieces of Gregorian chant, three Marian settings ascribed to Felice Anerio — Alma Redemptoris Mater, Ave Regina Caelorum, Salve Regina — anonymous pieces, and Fabrizio Dentice's Miserere, arranged by Michele Pacini and completed by Giovanni Maria Nanino. 6 Nanino (1543/44–1607), a Roman School composer and a tenor in the papal choir from 1577, reappears in the modern bibliography attached to this shelfmark, which lists a book on him alongside the 2023 article on the Altemps chapel. 78

The other volumes in the group are why the set mattered to nineteenth-century editors: they carry masses by Palestrina that were then unpublished, and Karl Proske consulted one of them at the Vatican in 1835. 6 The tracker's record for Ott.lat.3388 adds a further reference, Henry Marriott Bannister's 1913 catalogue of the Vatican's Latin musical manuscripts, which lists the shelfmark as number 850 and notes several pieces in mensural notation. 19

DigiVatLib has published 242 images of the volume: the 111 numbered leaves, the flyleaves and endpapers at each end, the binding, and the millimetre scale photographed beside the book. 10

The viewer zooms down to paper and ink; the catalogue record gives the shelfmark and the bibliography; a published IIIF manifest opens the same files in any image viewer.

Start at folio 1r for the title page, folio 2r for the Benedicamus Domino settings, folio 16v for Anerio's Alma Redemptoris Mater, folio 20r for the Ave Regina caelorum, and folio 36r for the Annunciation antiphon. The scans carry the Vatican Library's watermark and a copyright line along the bottom edge.