CERIANI, ANTONIO MARIA. — Milanese palaeographer and Orientalist, born at Uboldo (Milan) on 2 May 1828, died in Milan on 2 March 1907. Of humble family, he studied in the Milanese seminaries and was ordained a priest on 5 June 1852. Self-taught, with an iron memory and tenacious will, when in 1855, after several years of teaching literary subjects, he was appointed custodian of the catalogue of the Ambrosian Library, he had already acquired a broad and profound philological culture, which he continued to expand while serving as «doctor» of the same library (from 15 May 1857). On 25 January 1870 he was elected prefect of the library, a position he held until his death.
He was a member of several Italian and foreign scientific institutions, perhaps better known abroad than in Italy, among scholars of Christian and Oriental antiquities. Leading an austere and scholarly life, during his fifty years at the Ambrosian Library he rarely left his post except for a few research journeys. He excelled in Greek and Latin palaeography and in Syriac literature, especially that of a biblical character; he rendered notable service to liturgical studies through the critical edition of the Ambrosian Missal (Milan 1902). His major publications are contained in the six-volume collection: Monumenta sacra et profana, ex codd. praesertim bibliothecae Ambrosianae (Milan 1861–74), which includes the phototype edition of the Ambrosian codices of the Siro-Pēlēthī and Siro-Hexaplaric versions (cf. vols. VI and VII). As early as 1886 he was the first to identify the recension of the Septuagint known as that of Luciano; he published the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, the Assumptio Mosis, and the Paralipomena of Jeremiah. He discovered Books I–III of the history of the Council of Nicaea by Gelasio Cizicheno (cf. Monumenta sacra et profana, I).