The source gives, the lordship takes — an allegory of scholarly work on the spines of the Vatican Library

Since 1853/54 the spines of Vatican manuscripts have carried the gold-tooled coat of arms of the cardinal librarian Angelo Mai. Catalogues and binding studies record it without interpretation. Taking Vat. gr. 747 as its case, the essay shows that the heraldic elements are composed into a face: the shield gives forehead and chin, cords and tassels fall as locks beneath the hat, stars form the eyes, the chevron the folds from nose to mouth, rose and bee the mouth. Where the nose would be sits an African head. Read as an allegory, the face answers the question of what scholarly work is: many heads carry their knowledge into a common brain, and the hat of the institution covers it. The institution preserves what has been gathered and inscribes its own name on it. From this the essay derives its yardstick, the question of where a thought comes from, and follows it from the catena through plagiarism and pseudepigraphy to copyright and to the language models whose makers pass off common thinking as superintelligence. The second question concerns the head at the centre: why was it not seen? The manuscript and the texts Mai recovered are shot through with African origins. The essay reconstructs how exegesis, papal bulls, the slave trade, race theory and cartography taught the eye to expect Africans at the margin, and how a psychiatric term declared the face in the image a deception. The stamp was made in the same years in which anthropology measured human difference at the nose. Methodologically, the essay reads image and text at two viewing distances and draws on heraldry, art history, biblical philology, research on perception, phonetics and voice science, law and the history of science. The order of the stamp, many heads below and one name above, recurs in the present-day business of research, in publishing and peer review, in the profile picture and the CV, and it ends in the single face on the screen that speaks to all and sees all. For Germany the essay shows the gap between the ideas that originate there and the ownership that lies elsewhere. The title puts the relation between origin and appropriation into a formula: the source gives, the lordship takes.