Today, however, the picture of the Vatican Library as forbidding and inaccessible is largely a myth. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a succession of brilliant directors—Father Franz Ehrle (1895–1913; he became a cardinal), Monsignor Achille Ratti (1913–22, formerly librarian of the Ambrosian, and later Pope Pius XI), Monsignor Giovanni Mercati (1922–36, another future cardinal), and Monsignor Anselmo Albareda (1936–62, ditto)—transformed the library into one of the world’s most progressive and efficient libraries, notwithstanding those covered shoulders.
