CERIANI, ANTONIO MARIA. - Milanese paleographer and orientalist, b. at Uboldo (Milan) on 2 May 1828, d. at Milan on 2 March 1907. Of humble family, he studied in the Milanese seminaries and was ordained a priest on 5 June 1852. A self-taught man with an iron memory and tenacious will, when in 1855, after some years of teaching literary subjects, he was appointed custodian of the catalogue of the Ambrosian Library, he had already formed a vast and profound philological culture, which he continued to broaden during his office as "doctor" of the same library (from 15 May 1857). On 25 Jan. 1870 he was elected prefect of the library, a post he held until his death.
He was a member of several Italian and foreign scientific institutes, perhaps better known abroad than in Italy, in the circle of scholars of Christian and Oriental antiquities. Of austere and studious life, in fifty years of residence at the Ambrosiana he rarely left his post for some study trip. He excelled in Greek and Latin paleography and in Syriac literature, especially of a biblical character; he earned the gratitude of 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 contains the phototypic edition of the Ambrosian codices of the Syro-Pēlēthī and Syro-Hexapla (cf. vols. VI and VII). He was the first, already in 1886, to identify the recension of the Septuagint known as that of Lucian, to publish the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, the Assumptio Mosis, the Paralipomena of Jeremiah. He discovered book III of the history of the Council of Nicaea by Gelasius of Cyzicus (cf. Monumenta sacra et profana, I).